It is being said that Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney chosen to lead the investigation into the WilsonGate affair when Ashcroft recused himself, will be tenacious in pursuit of the truth. I have some serious doubts, but first let's go to the story. Here is some of what people who should know are saying, in an article in today's The New York Times:
CHICAGO, Dec. 30 — For some who had still wondered whether Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney here, would really be as aggressive as had been rumored when he arrived a few years ago from New York, the answer came this month.
Mr. Fitzgerald announced that he was prosecuting former Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, in a scandal that had been swirling around long before Mr. Fitzgerald got here and that many people thought would never touch the most powerful politicians in Illinois. But there Mr. Fitzgerald was, a week before Christmas, ticking off the details of a 91-page indictment against Mr. Ryan, seemingly from memory.
That, even Mr. Fitzgerald's former opponents in the courtroom say, is classic Fitzgerald: dogged, dispassionate and endlessly prepared.
"He doesn't let anything go," said George Santangelo, who represented John Gambino, identified by the authorities as a crime family captain, in a case prosecuted by Mr. Fitzgerald. "We duked it out for about three years, and it was quite a duking session. Let me put it to you this way: If John Ashcroft wanted any favors on this one, he went to the wrong guy. This guy is tough."
After Attorney General Ashcroft chose to recuse himself from an investigation into who gave the name of a Central Intelligence Agency officer to a newspaper columnist, Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed on Tuesday to lead the investigation. Announcing the assignment in Washington, James B. Comey Jr., the United States deputy attorney general and a friend and former colleague of Mr. Fitzgerald, described him as "Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree and a sense of humor."
Kenneth M. Karas, a co-chief of the terrorism unit in the United States attorney's office in Manhattan who worked with Mr. Fitzgerald for many years, put it this way: "His brain is like a mainframe computer." ...
All well and good, both his friends, colleagues and even former adversaries are trumpeting that Mr. Fitzgerald is indeed the man to dig until it hurts in search for the leaker from within the very administration for which he works. A sterling resume, however, seldom reveals the kind of courage necessary to bite the hand from which its subject feeds. I am not alone in that thought.
But Frederick H. Cohn, a lawyer who represented a defendant against Mr. Fitzgerald in the embassy bombings case, wondered whether anyone who worked within the Justice Department could truly divorce himself from the subtle pressures that might come along in a case like this.
"He is a bulldog," Mr. Cohn said. "If anybody from inside the Justice Department has to do it, he'll be as good as anybody. That said, it would be my feeling that it should have been someone from outside."
