Peter Mulhern thinks that the president should fire Patrick Fitzgerald:

The President has ample grounds for such action. Fitzgerald repeatedly lied, both in court and out, about the nature of his investigation in a successful effort to convince the jury that Libby had something to hide. Worse yet he pursued a criminal investigation when he had no reason even to suspect that any crime had been committed. This is the core of horrible prosecutorial abuse. In this situation there can be no legally sufficient conviction for perjury or false statements.

He may be right on the merits, but if he were to do what’s recommended here, it would set off a political firestorm that would make the Tokyo bombing look like a fall bonfire. Because he’s let people undermine him, and continue to do so without consequence, ever since he came into office, the president is now in a no-win position.

[Update in the afternoon]

Tom Maguire (who has been the go-to guy for all things Libbygate from the beginning) writes about Fitzi’s Dishonor.

Now that the trial is over, Bob Novak has a clarifying piece in the WaPo:

Democrats had been slow to react to my column of July 14, 2003, which reported that former diplomat Joseph Wilson’s mission to Niger was suggested by his CIA employee wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. By September, when the Justice Department began investigating the CIA leak, Democrats smelled another Iran-contra affair or Watergate. They were wrong.

The Libby trial uncovered no plot hatched in the White House. The worst news Tuesday for firebrand Democrats was that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was going back to his “day job” (as U.S. attorney in Chicago). With no underlying crime even claimed, the only question was whether Libby had consciously and purposefully lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned of Mrs. Wilson’s identity.

Fitzmas was a fizzle.

Mark Steyn:

…an anti-war deputy secretary of an anti-war department leaking to an anti-war reporter the name of an anti-war analyst who got her anti-war husband a job with an anti-war agency is supposedly an elaborate

…on the Maher-Coulter embroglio. But even though it’s from Iowahawk, it probably won’t be.

(Note, not a family-friendly link…)

Apparently I have to continue to correct the record, over and over and over.

This time it’s Vic Rubenfeld:

Frankly, I have to put a lot of blame for this on the Republicans, for using this tactic to impeach Bill Clinton. Having sex isn’t a crime, but he was impeached for lying about it.

Well, maybe if you were familiar with what actually happened, you wouldn’t have to do that.

Bill Clinton was not impeached for “lying about sex.” He was impeached for perjury, subornation of perjury from others, witness intimidation, and obstruction of justice, in the service of preventing a young woman from getting a fair trial in a civil law suit under a law that he signed with his own pen, but thought shouldn’t apply to King William. And he did this after having taken an oath to see that the laws of the land were faithfully executed.

Those aren’t my opinions. They’re black-letter facts. If you people are going to continue to whine about Clinton’s impeachment, at least get the history correct. Of course, this kind of spinning nonsense and mischaracterization of the president’s behavior was occurring in the media at the time, 24/7, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that people are still at it.

The nutroots may be celebrating their long-awaited “Fitzmas” tonight, but it’s pretty weak tea compared to their fantasies of “Rove being frog marched out of the White House.” And they can’t take much comfort from Fitzgerald’s comment that the investigation is essentially over. Also, people should be reminded that Joe Wilson is still a liar, regardless of Scooter Libby’s fate:

Wilson’s assertions — both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information — were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address…

…The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson’s bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.

In the end, the only crime was Libby’s alleged perjury. Well, and the fact that the media for so long promulgated and continued to provide oxygen to the loony left conspiracy theory that this was “retribution” against Wilson by the White House.

I agree with (former federal prosecutor) Andy McCarthy:

I don’t think there ever should have been an investigation in the first place. The Justice Department should quickly have realized that the facts here did not warrant a prosecution under its standards for the espionage act or the agent identity protection act. DOJ, under intense political pressure from Democrats and the anti-Bush media, did not close the investigation and kicked it to an independent prosecutor, but the most culpable person in this mess is Wilson, and I wish no one had been charged if there was no legal way of charging him. The administration had every good reason to refute Wilson

France continues downhill, in terms of civil liberties:

The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday on the night of March 3, 1991. The officers

“Grim” has some thoughts.

Which is the extreme position: to think that people should be able to put substances into their own body without government interference, or that people should be imprisoned for ingesting smoke from burning leaves?

Is it really “extreme” to think one religion inferior to another? I’m not a member of either one, but if one religion really does preach peace and turning the other cheek, and another believes that all non-adherents to it should die, who really doesn’t believe that the former is superior to the latter? This kind of loony moral relativism is what I find extreme, and not in a good way.

In any event, like Glenn Reynolds, I consider myself an extremist, but an eclectic one. And like Barry Goldwater, I don’t think that’s necessarily a vice.

This was one of the first stupid political decisions that the Clinton White House made, in their ongoing interest of manufacturing a false image, and it’s reverberated right down to Hillary’s campaign. It seems particularly true in this case, because there doesn’t seem to have been a crime. Bill Dedman has read Hillary’s thesis, and it comes off as pretty weak tea to me. Pretty anti-climactic, after all the fevered speculation during the nineties, which (like many Clinton imbroglios) was fed by the secrecy.

[Via La Dynamist]

This was one of the first stupid political decisions that the Clinton White House made, in their ongoing interest of manufacturing a false image, and it’s reverberated right down to Hillary’s campaign. It seems particularly true in this case, because there doesn’t seem to have been a crime. Bill Dedman has read Hillary’s thesis, and it comes off as pretty weak tea to me. Pretty anti-climactic, after all the fevered speculation during the nineties, which (like many Clinton imbroglios) was fed by the secrecy.

[Via La Dynamist]