Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Fitzgerald's Fumble

With former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich being found guilty of 1 out of 24 counts, a lot of people are focusing on one juror as the reason the jury was deadlocked. However, one person seems to be escaping what I feel is well-deserved scrutiny.

US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

The Blagojevich trial is the second high profile case Fitzgerald has botched, the first being the investigation into who "outed" Valerie Plame. Even after it came out that Richard Armitage "outed" Plame, not Robert Novak or Scooter Libby, Fitzgerald went ahead with the prosecution of Libby and won a conviction over an immaterial point, and only after the jury was stacked and admitted they didn't have any real reason to convict Libby, aside from a desire to see someone take the fall for it.

And now, he earned a similar meaningless conviction against Blagojevich.

At some point, shouldn't we be expecting a federal prosecutor to, oh I don't know, win a meaningful conviction every so often? I know he's a government employee, but damn! Even they have some performance standards.

Fitzgerald's handling of the two big cases on his recent resume shows he's not capable. He seems to love the sound of his own voice, making statements that backfire on him on a regular basis and make him look foolish. Just like Joe Biden, only with the power to prosecute you...badly.

If we were serious about cutting government waste, I'd say a good place to start would be to fire Fitzgerald.

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