1 Boring Old Man

The thing we’ve all loved about Patrick Fitzgerald is how absolutely straight he has played every hand. We even accepted our disappointment with his indicting only Libby, when we wanted him to indict most of Pennsylvania Avenue. In the trial, he lined up his witnesses in order. He asked only the essential questions. In his cross-examinations, he walked softly, but carried a powerful stick, like when he sent Hannah stumbling down a garden path into the briar patch. It was only in his closing argument, the one that brought us to our feet even if we weren’t there and could only hear it through the lightning key clicks of the firedoglake live-blog, where he told us what he thought. And what he thought was very clear. Libby was lying to cover the centrality of his boss, Dick Cheney, in this whole orchestrated attack on Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie. What you could hear, sometimes in his words, and sometimes in the background, is that Patrick Fitzgerald knew what the Office of the Vice President had done, and that he knew why they did it.

Comes now this letter from Henry Waxman, carefully worded, that says, "inform the Committee about your views and the insights you obtained." It’s not "What did you prove?" It’s "What do you think?" So they’re asking him to step out of his persona, and become something else – something he actually is – a ranking expert on the C.I.A. Leak case. They’re asking him to bring the case he couldn’t take into the courtroom into halls of a Congressional hearing.

I doubt that he’ll do it – at least not in the freewheeling way this letter requests. Like with the indictments, he’s a very careful guy. But if they can find a way for him to testify that fits his straight and narrow code of being a Federal Prosecutor, this game may move along at a rapidly accelerated pace.