Reply #32: I think so. Have a look at this: [View All]

[Zorbuddha]

The Prosecutor Never Rests
Whether Probing a Leak or Trying Terrorists, Patrick Fitzgerald Is Relentless
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 2, 2005; Page C01

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The Untouchable

Fitzgerald frequently makes crime-fighting headlines in Chicago, where he took over the U.S. attorney's office just 10 days before 9/11. What's surprising is that he got the job at all. A New Yorker born and bred, Fitzgerald knew hardly a soul in Chicago, which was precisely the idea. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (no relation) was looking for an outsider to battle the state's notoriously corrupt political apparatus.

The recently retired Illinois Republican tells a story about back in Al Capone's day, when Col. Robert McCormick, the imperious publisher of the Chicago Tribune, called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and demanded that he send someone to Chicago who could not be bought.

Hoover sent the untouchable Eliot Ness.

Now, as then, the U.S. attorney's job has the gloss of patronage. The late Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley used to say the U.S. attorney in Chicago is one of the three most important people in the state, and Peter Fitzgerald said he wanted "someone who couldn't be influenced either to prosecute someone unfairly or protect someone from being prosecuted unjustly."

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President Richard Nixon kept an enemies list and waged an epic fight over the publication of the Pentagon Papers, settling only when the Supreme Court backed the right of The Washington Post and New York Times to publish. Not a few presidents have tried, usually fruitlessly, to identify leakers and punish the reporters all too glad to publish those leaks.

But Fitzgerald has ignored the old saw about arguing with someone who buys ink by the barrel. In both the Plame case and an unrelated terrorism investigation, he is trying to force Times reporters to reveal their confidential sources, a quinella not attempted in modern memory.

"In all his cases, Pat keeps the blinders on and goes forward to where the facts lead him," says David Kelley, the acting U.S. attorney in New York and former head of the Justice Department's 9/11 Task Force. "He is not influenced by anything except by those things that ought to influence him. I wouldn't call it zeal. I would call it courage."

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"I thought, 'He is the original Untouchable,' " Peter Fitzgerald says. "You could just see it in his eyes that he was a straight shooter. There were no levers that anyone had over him. He had no desire to become a partner in a private law firm. He has no interest in electoral politics. He wanted to be a prosecutor."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55560-2005Feb1?language=printer