Justice from the Alice-in-Wonderland School of Law
By Wesley Pruden - The Washington Times - Monday, June 19, 2017 Fair is fair, but special prosecutors work to their own fairness code, that it’s important to be fairer to some than to others. Sometimes you don’t have to be fair at all.
Special prosecutors study at the Lewis Carroll School of Law, tutored in Wonderland by the wise old Professor Alice, where they are taught the Washington legal principle of “verdict now, evidence later.”
These railroad jobs are not necessarily the special prosecutor’s fault. Hiring a special prosecutor, much like honest citizens sending off to Cheyenne for a hired gun to get rid of the crooked sheriff, is done with a very specific goal in mind. The special prosecutor is expected to nail the target, usually a president. His reputation is tainted if he can’t do the job (though he does get to keep his nice fee).
Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor hired to bring back the scalp of Bill Clinton (if not necessarily his incriminating underwear), was not originally hired to pursue Monica Lewinsky, though that’s where the pursuit led, and Mr. Starr’s reputation suffered when the impeachment hit a dead end and Bubba survived yet another adventure. Mr. Starr’s midlife crisis led him to change careers and he left the law and went on to preside as president over the disgrace of Baylor University and a football factory gone bad.
Sometimes a special prosecutor gets his quarry and his own reputation still suffers. There are rules, not always observed. Patrick Fitzgerald was hired to put Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, in the federal pokey for his imagined role in the unmasking of a CIA agent, which is for good reason a federal felony. It turned out later that Mr. Libby was not the man who identified Valerie Plame, who was actually known by one and all in certain Washington social circles as a celebrity CIA agent. That distinction belonged to one Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state, and Prosecutor Fitzgerald knew it was Mr. Armitage, and proceeded against the Scooter, anyway.
By using fake evidence to intimidate Mr. Libby, the prosecutor could hope to get the evidence to bag the vice president. That’s how the law sometimes works in Washington, which is no place for an old man, or a naive young one, either.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/19/special-prosecutors-follow-their-own-rules/
