“We got a job to protect the American people,” President Bush said this afternoon in his blink-and-you-missed-it two-minute statement on the indictment of Scooter Libby. Bush's problem is that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had just spent an hour saying essentially the same thing, and Fitzgerald's was much the more credible case.
For Fitzgerald said that his job, too, had been essentially that of protecting national security. By outing Valerie Plame and then lying about it, the prosecutor argued, Libby hadn't merely endangered Plame but the entire CIA and the nation it spies for. Fitzgerald came off as an ultra-linear straight-shooter who rigorously avoided any discussion of issues beyond those set forth in the indictment -- with one crucial exception. “At a time when we need more human intelligence,” he said, “just the notion that someone's identity could be compromised lightly … compromises our ability to recruit” new agents. The people who work in intelligence, he continued, “need to know that we will not cast aside their anonymity lightly.”
No, Fitzgerald said, this wasn't about the merits of the war, and whether the administration lied to coerce us into it and suppressed information that undermined its case. It wasn't about the propriety, legality, or wisdom of intimidating critics. But it was, he said, about protecting national security.
Fitzgerald is hardly the first to allege that high-ranking figures in the White House were capricious in their concern for national security; Richard Clarke has made that case most convincingly. But Fitzgerald's is the strongest case precisely because he is utterly plausible in denying he has a political agenda, precisely because his concern, like Joe Friday's, is “just the facts.” Indeed, in his Friday press conference, Fitzgerald came off as nothing so much as a real smart Irish cop, a guy off the streets who won't be intimidated by the suits in the suites -- even if those suites abut the Oval Office. Dick Powell could play him, in much the manner that Dick Powell played Phillip Marlowe.
The White House had already concluded that they couldn't go after Fitzgerald. They may well pound on the fact that the prosecutor didn't come in with an indictment for the underlying crime, but Fitzgerald addressed that so effectively in his press conference that it may prove a difficult line of argument. In his account, Libby came off as a lousy and serial liar, and to believe Libby, one would apparently have to disbelieve not just the testimony of Judy Miller, Matt Cooper, and Tim Russert, but also a slew of White House employees with whom, contrary to Libby's testimony, he discussed Plame. If the case goes to trial (Libby could always cop a plea), such administration stalwarts as Ari Fleischer will be called to contradict his story. It's not clear if either Fitzgerald or Lewis' attorneys will call Dick Cheney to the stand, but that, of course, could be the ultimate moment of truth, or deception. The vice president might be put in the position of choosing between Libby's account or everyone else's. That would be highly interesting.
If the Republicans elect to press the absence-of-an-underlying-crime line, of course, they open themselves to devastating attack for their reversal of position on the Monica Lewinsky case. If they really want to debate the relative severity of getting a blowjob in the Oval Office against that of outing a CIA agent, as the president himself once said, bring ‘em on.
But it's Fitzgerald's measured and quiet assertion of what this case is ultimately about -- preserving national security -- that should upset the administration most. National security (and more specifically, the war on terrorism) is the only topic on which Bush still has some credibility, the last remaining subject area on which Republicans still outpoll Democrats. What Patrick Fitzgerald has alleged today is that one of the highest-ranking administration operatives put the interest of faction over that of nation, and its defense. Libby's unindicted underlying crime bespeaks the zealotry, arrogance, and thuggery that defines this president and his henchmen. Fitzgerald doesn't have to, and won't, provide any such characterization, of course. The facts he now seeks to prove in court speak for themselves. And they effectively if partially strip from Bush his last bona fide: that he's the national-security president.
With no discernible political agenda, Patrick Fitzgerald has just hit the White House where it hurts most. Karl Rove will keep his job, but the rehabilitation of his already diminished boss is likely to exceed even his powers.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
