Somehow it seems wrong that someone named Scooter should be on trial for obstruction of justice. For one thing, “Scooter” just isn’t the right name for a powerful man, or even a grown man. Scooter is a second grade kid up the street or a redneck who has friends named Spider and Bubba. And how did a nickname like that follow a man all the way to the office of Chief of Staff for the Vice President of the United States. Why didn’t he tell people to stop calling him that? What if he’d been nicknamed Stinky in grammar school?
“Scooter” is also such a friendly-sounding name. It’s hard to imagine a guy named Scooter firing anyone, or yelling at subordinates, or calling high-ranking CIA officials out of important meetings to find out silly details about who arranged for a certain former ambassador to go on a hush-hush boondoggle to Niger. Nevertheless, in the second Bush administration, a guy named Scooter made it to one of the top jobs, and appears to have handled it in a pretty hard-nosed way. Whatever you think about the merits of the case against him, it’s clear that he worked very hard to keep people focused on the ideas the administration favored, and if that meant making off-the-record insinuations about people who disagreed, well, Washington is a tough town. If you can’t stand the heat, etc.
So, when a certain former diplomat wrote in the New York Times that a then-popular story about a certain Iraqi dictator sniffing around Niger for yellowcake uranium was contrived and fanciful and that he had reported as much to a certain American administration well before its well-meaning but sadly misinformed Secretary of State delivered an urgent-sounding but nearly completely inaccurate address to the United Nations, it was Scooter who doggedly sought and obtained information with which to discredit the diplomat by planting adverse-sounding information with friendly reporters on condition of anonymity. The diplomat, Joe Wilson, was married to an attractive CIA employee named Valerie Plame. Exactly what Ms. Plame did for the CIA is now in question, but she claims to have been a covert agent of some sort until her cover was blown by newspaper stories planted by Bush administration sources seeking to suggest that there was something nepotistic about the way Wilson got the Niger assignment.
There are several things about this story that bear discussion, not the least being the crime with which Scooter is charged. He’s not charged with “outing” Ms. Plame, but rather obstructing justice by either lying about dates on which he learned facts about her. The Special Prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, says Scooter did this on purpose, and Scooter says he just forgot. He had a lot of other stuff going on that week. So—since Fitzgerald can’t nab him on the crime he thinks Scooter really committed, he charged him with lying to the police, more or less.
This is a trend in American jurisprudence over the last twenty years that’s silly. Kenneth Starr used this trick extensively on people that worked or had sex with Bill Clinton, and it’s just as stupid when used on republicans with silly nicknames as it was on democrats with cigars. If you want to charge somebody with a crime, do it. Otherwise leave them alone. The investigators’ goal now is not to develop evidence that a crime was committed, but to trip up a witness, then force him or her to talk on pain of imprisonment. Following that path allowed Kenneth Starr to start an investigation at a small bank in Little Rock and end up, $47 million later, proving that Monica Lewinsky fellated Bill Clinton. Not our country’s finest hour, but it wasn’t worth $47 million and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Clintons’ involvement in the Whitewater development, which is what he was hired to investigate. Were it not for the trick of tripping up witnesses and threatening to charge them for their mistakes, he wouldn’t even have gotten that.
Note that this trick can be used even when nature of the lie doesn’t matter at all. If Monica Lewinsky had lied about how many traffic tickets she had rather than what parts of the president’s person she had placed in her mouth, the obstruction threat still works. If you forgot but they think you were lying you could be looking at the same charge Scooter is.
It’s not just mean, though. It also makes the prosecutor’s job easier than it ought to be. If the prosecutor thinks Scooter broke the law by outing Ms. Plame, he should try Scooter on that charge and take his lumps, win or lose. Charging him with obstruction allows Mr. Fitzgerald to put Scooter on trail anyway even though he doesn’t have the evidence of the real crime. It’s the reaction of a spoiled child, not of an organized and fair government.
The argument on the other side is that Al Capone spent seven years in Alcatraz not for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre but for tax evasion. He had been dodging and bribing his way out of jail for years, then the federal prosecutor put Capone’s accountant Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik on the stand, who testified about all the money Capone made in his various endeavors and that he paid no tax on it. The argument is that Al Capone was a bad man and when they couldn’t put him away for murder and bootlegging only an inventive federal prosecutor got him in jail where he belongs. Having Capone off the streets was a good thing, so what does it matter how he got there?
But it does matter. The government should go about its business in a straightforward way, not trick us into jail.
My favorite example of tricking people into jail is Tennessee’s narcotics tax. Tennessee (and a lot of other states) at one time had laws saying that all owners of illegal drugs had to go down to city hall and buy illegal narcotics tax stamps and affix the stamps to their illegal drugs. Failure to do so was a felony, just as possessing the narcotics was. No one was surprised that not a single stamp was sold, since as soon as you bought one a warrant for your arrest would have been issued. The state just found it far easier to prove that narcotics users had failed to buy their stamp than that they’d possessed drugs with the intent to re-sell them.
So—I think prosecutors should be required to go about their investigations in a more straightforward way. If it was against the law for Scooter to have outed Valerie Plame and he did so, he should have been tried for that. Otherwise, they should leave him alone. Much as I dislike about this administration, I don’t think Scooter should be on trial for this crime.
The second thing the whole mess shows to me is just how badly the Bush people wanted to go to war. Joe Wilson is a retired ambassador, a career foreign service officer who was posted to various missions in Africa and Iraq during the first Bush administration. He was apparently very highly thought of in Bush I’s day, and his experience made him uniquely well qualified to go to Niger to investigate the stories about Hussein attempting to buy yellowcake uranium to make one of those nuclear devices the administration was so sure he had. Wilson’s conclusion, borne out by subsequent events, was that the documents that this story was based on were almost certainly forged and that there was no other evidence to support the story. You can’t just buy yellowcake at the local 7-11, and Wilson concluded that there was no evidence that Hussein’s people had approached any Nigerians who actually had any about buying it. He reported this to the administration well before Secretary Powell made his speech to the United Nations, yet Mr. Powell’s speech still relied on the bogus Niger story.
The bottom line is that they had evidence that their story was inaccurate, and they ignored it, despite the fact that Joe Wilson is exactly the sort of guy they should have trusted. He’d worked for the first father, and had exactly the kind of experience you’d ask for to go on exactly that type of errand. He was one of their guys, and he was well-qualified.
Not only did they not listen to him, though, they turned on him in a pretty spiteful way for having the nerve to point out the error. One appropriate response might have been “Oops, sorry, it looks like we were wrong but we really believed it at the time, we’ll institute procedures to make sure this kind of thing never happens again” but they don’t seem to have considered doing that for a minute. Instead, they start digging up dirt on Wilson to try to make him look bad. And he was one of their guys.
So. It certainly looks like they were determined to go to war with Iraq, for reasons I still can’t fathom, and that they were unwilling to look at any evidence that cast doubt on that conclusion, that they interpreted all of the facts they could find as being consistent with that position (remember the aluminum tubes, mobile anthrax breweries, and aerial photos of nuclear labs?) and allowed no dissent. Why? What was so important about starting a war?
And these are the guys who are in charge of our government.
Best of luck to Scooter. I hope he beats the charge. In this respect his chances are pretty good, by the way. Of the 21 Special Prosecutors appointed since the special prosecutor act was adopted, only seven have obtained convictions. So hang in there, Scooter.
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