Patrick Fitzgerald Restores Faith in Justice

In March 2005, a month after Alberto Gonzales became U.S. attorney general, Justice Department staffers sent to the White House a chart ranking all 93 U.S. attorneys in terms of their allegiance to President George W. Bush and his administration.

On that chart, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for Northern Illinois, was ranked somewhere in the middle, below those federal prosecutors who exhibited loyalty to the administration but above the "weak U.S. attorneys who . . . chafed against administration initiatives."

Two U.S. attorneys who got the same ranking as Fitzgerald later were fired in a White House political purge of nine federal prosecutors. Fitzgerald, who was serving a dual role at the time as special counsel into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, was insulated from the firings.

That proved to be a bad break for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was sentenced to 2 1Ú2 years in prison for his role in outing Plame, and for then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with Fitzgerald's single-minded pursuit of the truth.

On Tuesday, it also became a bad break for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whom Fitzgerald charged with conspiracy and corruption for acts that reek of sleaze and stupidity.

That Fitzgerald survived the Bush administration's attempts to politicize the Justice Department turned out to be a break for the people of Illinois, who now have yet another golden opportunity to clean up the state's culture of corruption.

It is also a break for the Justice Department's 113,000 employees: Fitzgerald and his assistants and investigators put a little polish back on Lady Justice and her scales, which had been badly tarnished by people that one of Gonzales' flunkies called "loyal Bushies."

Newspaper reporters and prosecutors don't always see eye-to-eye, perhaps because both professions can attract obsessive people with chips on their shoulders.

As Fitzgerald said to reporters Tuesday, "I will say this: As you guys know, you guys are in the information business of getting it and publishing it, and we're in the information business of getting it and using it."

Some journalists thought Fitzgerald went too far when he jailed Miller and threatened to jail other reporters who refused to cooperate in the Plame investigation. Fitzgerald didn't care. In the end, a judge makes those decisions.

Nor does Fitzgerald seem to care very much about politics. In New York, where he prosecuted mobsters and terrorists before President Bush appointed to him to the job in Chicago in 2001, he was registered as in "Independent" until he found out that in New York, "Independent" is the name of a political party. Now no one knows his politics.

He put a Republican governor, George Ryan, in prison and now aims to do the same with a Democratic governor. He's received publicity and attention that any politician would kill for. He has been mentioned as a possible successor to Robert S. Mueller when the head of the FBI retires and even as a possible attorney general. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, wants him to remain as U.S. attorney in Chicago, and senators from the president's party generally get their way.

If Fitzgerald truly wants to clean up Illinois, he'd run for governor in 2010. We don't care if he's a Republican or a Democrat, a Whig or a Vegetarian. We'd just like to watch the panic in Springfield.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH.

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