Andy, the “I know Pat Fitzgerald” line doesn’t hold. I mean, I know Scooter Libby well and think very highly of him, but I don’t really think that is pertinent. I am familiar with the indictment and I know that he was charged solely with offenses relating to misleading federal investigators. And I still say the indictment is weak. Maybe that’s because of things I know about myself. I mean, if you find it implausible that a man who spends 16 hours a day on 200 different issues did not have a crystal-clear recollection of the order of events and the nature of conversations he had months earlier, then I would like to introduce you to my brain. I know zillions of factoids that I can summon up at a moment’s notice. But my wife informs me on a regular basis that we had conversations about which I have no memory whatsoever. She’s right, I’m wrong and that is the way the mind can and does work.

Libby will have his day in court, and as I said, for all I know, Fitzgerald has stuff we haven’t seen that will blow him out of the water. But Andy, though you suggest it’s somehow Libby’s backers who are giving a false picture of the Fitzgerald indictment, your beef lies with your friend Pat. It was Fitzgerald’s choice to frame the indictment not in terms of what public officials should do when they are interviewed by the FBI, but rather in terms of the intelligence crime for which Fitzgerald could not summon an indictment.

”In July 2003,” Fitzgerald said, “the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community. Valerie Wilson’s friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life. The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It’s important that a CIA officer’s identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation’s security.”

That was how Fitzgerald began his press conference. He is the person who used the terminology of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 as the reason for the indictment of Scooter Libby. To say now that he was just trying to make it clear nobody should lie to a federal investigator just doesn’t get it right.