I thought you knew how this administration worked. He hasn't really screwed up anything yet, and therefore, is ineligible under Bush standards. NOW, if he were to pistol whip Judy Miller or sodomize Rove while in custody, baby you could order the medal tomorrow!

Bush will give the medal instead to Ken Starr.

Great choice re: Patrick Fitzgerald for the Freedom Medal. I think it should be pinned on his breast by Jack Abramoff.

When the indictments are in hand, I'll second the nomination.

I second your nomination. He would be the first person to be worth the MOF in the past five years.

Except for possible indirect leaks to Murray Waas (suspected route: FBI) Fitzgerald has been tight as a drum. I've never seen one of these investigations with so few leaks.

I like Fitzgerald too, and this article provided insight into the way he conducts business.

The Prosecutor: The Mystery Man
Patrick Fitzgerald has sent a reporter to jail and pulled back the curtain on top staffers' press chats. Does he have a case?

By Jonathan Darman and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

July 25 issue - Growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the 1970s, Patrick Fitzgerald was so determined to attend the prestigious Regis High School that even a rejection letter couldn't keep him away. When his carefully prepared application was denied, Fitzgerald dialed up Regis's director of admissions and protested that there must have been some mistake. Sure enough, the school had mixed up his entrance exam with that of another Patrick Fitzgerald of Brooklyn who got lower marks. The right Patrick Fitzgerald entered Regis that fall.

Now, Washington is wondering if it's gotten Patrick Fitzgerald wrong, too. For nearly two years, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leak investigation has been the city's mystery man, pursuing a murky investigation whose only targets seemed to be members of the press. But as new details emerge about White House efforts to discredit Iraq-war critic Joe Wilson and his CIA agent wife, Washington insiders are seeing Fitzgerald in a new light. Maybe his hard-nosed investigation will do more than just punish reporters. Maybe Fitzgerald's leak investigation will actually uncover who leaked.

To Fitzgerald's friends, the reassessment is long overdue. They point to his record as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (he brought charges against figures ranging from the Gambino crime family to the Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman to Osama bin Laden) as proof that he is pursuing the greater good. Mary Jo White, the former U.S. attorney who was Fitzgerald's boss in the Southern District, recommended him for his current assignment as U.S. attorney in Chicago. His strength, she says, lies in how he "exercises his power with a real recognition of how awesome it is... He has a strong sense of the nuance."

That doesn't mean he's afraid to step on some toes, especially when they belong to members of the media. Associates say Fitzgerald is wary of reporters, dating back to his days trying terrorist cases. Concerned about protecting national security, he'd go to extraordinary lengths to keep sensitive material secret, only to see it published by meddling journalists. A particularly annoying offender, coincidentally, was Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter. Fitzgerald sent her to jail earlier this month for failing to comply with a court order to testify before the grand jury about conversations she had with sources on a matter about which she never wrote a story. In an earlier, unrelated clash, Fitzgerald had accused Miller of compromising a probe into Islamic charities by phoning one of the groups just before a government crackdown. Launching a leak investigation, he tried to get ahold of Miller's phone records and those of a colleague at the Times. The Times claimed its reporters were following standard practice and that there was no evidence they compromised a federal investigation. A federal judge quashed Fitzgerald's subpoenas.

Fitzgerald is intentionally keeping reporters and everyone else guessing as to what's really going on in his head. Last week, NEWSWEEK has learned, after Time's Matthew Cooper provided grand-jury testimony on his July 11, 2003, conversation with Karl Rove, Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, placed a call to Fitzgerald to make sure he didn't need anything more from Rove in light of Cooper's claims. Fitzgerald didn't bite: "We'll get back to you," the prosecutor replied curtly and quickly got off the line.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Agree with SDemetri.

Let's see some meaningful indictments first. That's plural.....and up the food chain. If Fitz can do this and connect the dots so Joe Six-Pack may actually get outraged, then he deserves the PLATINUM MEDAL OF FREEDOM, as well as SAINTHOOD. Let's hope and pray...................

I read recently that the most effective opposition is not coming from the Democrats but from the criminal justice system. Patrick Fitzgerald deserves the medal but I say he'd make an outstanding Attorney General.

i can't wait for the swiftboating of fitzgerald when (i'm optimistic) he comes down with the indictments, the law and order party won't be able to deal with facts, and truth, and responsibility, and accountability

Will you still feel that way about Fitzgerald when he inevitably does not indict anyone from the White House?

even this bunch isn't craven enough to try swiftboating fitzgerald when that's precisely what they're being investigated for with wilson and plame - particularly if fitzgerald actually has the goods on them... then again, the cravenness of rove&co has continuously fallen below even my basest expectations...

back to the point, yes, it would be wonderful to see the mof awarded to someone who was actually advancing the substance of what the u.s. stands for (or says it stands for)...

Sorry to appear so sceptical, but like the Butler and Hutton enquiries in the UK, the non-partisan 911 Commision in the US, and many more such examples, my feeling is that all this is hype. Patrick Fitzgerald will give the Bush malAdministration exactly what it wants - a whitewash with fingers pointing at the lowest levels of this criminal gang (as in the case of Abu Ghraib) to people such as in the Iran Contra Scandal pointing to Oliver North, who will take the fall on behalf of the higher ups and then be given the Presidential pardon.

Considering how Porter Goss, a Cheney puppet, is already protecting his inefficient bums in the CIA crowd, please don't hold your breath on this investigation into the outing of a CIA undercover operative, Valerie Plame, investigation!

wait a second Steve, wait a bloody second! Can we see some tangible results before we start measuring Fitzy for a medal? Come on......just slow down.

A little off topic:
George Bush seems to value loyalty above all else from his team. Karl Rove apparently LIED to Bush.
http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1007nj3.htm
What I want to know is, how does George feel about being lied to by a trusted advisor? And have there been any consequences to Karl's status in the admin? Will there be? I think Bill Kristol said the other day that some of these recent political errors from the Bush admin may be the result of a distracted Rove spending too much time covering his ass in the Plame case. Could it also be that Karl's now less influential within the admin?

On the other hand, maybe it's all just to give the President plausible deniability. Karl did not lie to Bush, George knew what was going on, and they just say Karl didn't tell the President. Karl or Libby or whomever takes the dive, and a greatful President breaks out the pardon wand. *bamf* You are clear!

I don't know about the Medal of Freedom, but he's better qualified for US Supreme Court justice than the current nominee...except for his gender, race, and independence, I guess.

Some hypothesis that "The Constitution Voids Presidential Pardons For Criminal Convictions Or Indictments Flowing From "Cases of Impeachment" Where The Senate Has Voted To Convict."

I believe Rove attempts to give Bush plausible deniability by saying he lied to Bush about his role. Rove struggles now and flounders a bit; their hopes are that the June meetings remain obscured until after the grand jury concluded. Some current press leaks seem to warn the next ring of co-conspirators, "Batten down the hatches." We're one step closer to the man behind the curtain.

I'm hopeful Fitzgerald is upstanding and more supportive of the United States of America than for the neocon cabal.

What does it take for a bipartisan effort to impeach this president and unravel the greater conspiracy against this country? I'm curious to see how long Republicans can stay on board defending Bush and the crimes and cover-ups of this administration...

OT. Feingold is appealing for a lot of reasons. If the netroots play a role in choosing the nominee, antiwar credentials will be important.
http://tinyurl.com/bdx5y

ROBERT KUTTNER
Feingold leads way on Iraq war
By Robert Kuttner | October 8, 2005

"PRESIDENT BUSH, faced with plummeting support for the war in Iraq, keeps turning to an old standby. In another high-profile speech on Thursday, Bush warned Americans to be terrified of terror, and tried once again to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda and the attacks of 9/11.

The public isn't buying it. A large majority -- 64 to 32 in CBS polls -- opposes Bush's conduct of the war.

Yet the opposition party has been mostly missing in action. Democratic pollsters and political advisers seem to believe that with Bush failing as a war president Democrats should stay out of the way and let him sink.

There is an obsessive worry that Democrats, above all, cannot risk looking weak on defense. If the war keeps going badly and Democrats are seen as opposing it, one strategist told me, they risk getting the blame.

Senior foreign policy Democrats, such as Senators Joseph Biden, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, have been willing to criticize Bush's decision to take the country to war on false pretenses, as well as his conduct of the war. But they have not offered a serious discussion of how to get us out.

This mentality is the opposite of leadership. The failure of the opposition party to offer a coherent alternative is one reason why support for the Democrats has not been rising as support for Bush sinks. It is why Democrats have become the butt of Jay Leno jokes as not standing for anything.

One Democrat who has offered another course -- and he must be feeling very lonely -- is Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. He has urged the United States to make a commitment to get all combat troops out of Iraq by the end of 2006. As Feingold says, we need a coherent alternative to either ''stay the course" or ''cut and run." That alternative is phased withdrawal.

Feingold told a Los Angeles audience in late August: ''The president and others say that if we leave, it will just be chaos in Iraq. Well, right now when you come to Iraq, you can't even drive from the airport to the Green Zone" Even inside the supposedly secure Green Zone, Feingold recounted, he was given a helmet and flak jacket.

He added: ''The president says if we leave Iraq on some kind of a timetable, our enemies will know that we are weak. I would say that without a plan to finish, our enemies will know that we have fallen into a trap." Feingold further observed that by calling for a timetable for withdrawal, he had broken what had become a disabling ''taboo."

Critics of the war should be seriously exploring how a phased withdrawal would actually work. If the United States agreed to pull out, what role might NATO and the UN play? What could be expected of other states in the region?

Among many Democratic policy intellectuals unwilling to embrace a timetable for full withdrawal, the second-best is seen as a large reduction of troop levels. The idea is to pull back troops from forward positions where they are exposed to attack, and keep a smaller force garrisoned in Baghdad and other bases.

In principle, this is clever politics -- some troops could come home, and casualties might be reduced. The problem is that the countryside would essentially be ceded to insurgents, who would loudly proclaim their victory over the Great Satan. Iraq would actually be pushed closer to civil war. There would be just enough American troops to continue to be a lightning rod for armed insurgency, but far too few to pacify the place. A full withdrawal would make much more sense.

The dithering Democrats may find that public opinion has passed them by. In the most recent CBS news poll, American adults, by a large margin of 59 to 36, want the United States out of Iraq as soon as possible, even if the country is not stabilized. Among Democrats, the margin rises to 73 to 24, or 3 to 1.

Feingold is no radical. He gets elected in a swing state as a man of integrity and independence. He teamed up with Republican John McCain on campaign finance reform. He voted in favor of John Roberts for chief justice.

If the war is still going on in 2008, an antiwar candidate such as Feingold would be an odds-on favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination over bigger names disabled by their own fatal caution."

To be even more off topic:

Is there anybody looking into Bolton's lying to the Senate?

I think we'll be delightfully surprised when Fitzgerald finishes his work. The penalty for revealing the name of a covert agent is different if it occurs during a time of war, which this was, because of our presence in Afghanistan.

Hopefully, when he does win the MOF, it will be awarded by a different President.

I think the fact that Fitzgerald does not leak, speaks volumes for his integrity.

Why did Bolton visit Miller in Jail? Maybe there is an indictment with his name on it.

help stop this country from becoming a fundamentalist theocracy aiding and abetting a kleptocratic war profiteering police state that continues to remove civil liberties from americans on the premise of fighting a never ending war on a transitive adverb

ø¤º°°º¤ø¤º°°º¤ø¤º°°º¤ø¤º°°º¤ø¤º°°º¤ø

democrat/independant/3rd party in '06

Why did Bolton visit Miller in jail?

After Cooper's testimony, Rove and Libby were outed, so they had to agree that Libby would be the "leaker of record". But, just because Rove and Libby were Cooper's sources, this does not mean that Bolton wasn't Novak's source and the first of Miller's.

This was why they had to pretend they didn't have a waiver until they could limit the range of questions to Libby. The question has been how rove and libby knew of plame's status, and thus could cliam unintended consedquences. But bolton knew and he is who created the State Department memo which contained the into. This was given to Powell and the WH, and who knows who else from there?

I think with Congressman Hinchey's request to Fitzgerald that he increase the scope of his investigation to include the origins of the Niger forgeries, we could have quite a list of co-conspirators, including Jeff Gannon, John Bolton and Busholini himself.

Wouldn't it be something if we are witnessing the ultimate CIA dirty trick?

what a wicked and delightful thought...

RE: BOLTON VISIT TO SMITH

Non issue. If related to Plame outing, why would meeting occur in such a "fishbowl" setting? Seems more of a DISTRACTIVE PLOY to throw bloggers off the trail. Visit probably conceived by Libby or Rove.

>I read recently that the most effective >opposition is not coming from the Democrats but >from the criminal justice system. Patrick >Fitzgerald deserves the medal but I say he'd >make an outstanding Attorney General.
>
>Posted by Helena at October 8, 2005 09:24 PM

I think it was Oliver Stone in his commentary to Nixon who said that--for all the Deep Throat revalations and Woodward/Bernstein hounddogging, the outcome in Watergate was a foregone conclusion from the start because the perpetrators got caught and arrested. The legal system has a lot of inertia to it, so it takes some time for things to really start working, but it's nigh on impossible to stop the wrecking ball when it's in full swing.

We may be witnessing a press-less Watergate now. The press is (rightly) embarassed by its own role in this fiasco, and there do not appear to be any missing 20-something white females in the mix, so the press coverage has really been minimal. It will be interesting to see how that changes if/when indictments are passed around.