Stupid Prosecutor Tricks

From The New York Sun:

In a startling move, a special prosecutor investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity retreated yesterday from an assertion that news outlets and critics of the administration seized on as evidence that President Bush and Vice President Cheney deliberately distorted a crucial intelligence summary on Iraq.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, claimed in a court filing last week that a former White House aide facing criminal charges for obstructing the probe, I. Lewis Libby, said he was told by Mr. Cheney to inform a New York Times reporter that one of the key judgments of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was that the country was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium.

While the intelligence report indeed alleged that Iraq was aggressively seeking nuclear materials, that finding was not among the key judgments contained in the document's early pages. The allegation that Mr. Cheney told Mr. Libby to misstate that fact to the Times journalist, Judith Miller, was noted prominently in some news accounts and contributed to an uproar that threw the White House into a tailspin last week.

However, in a letter yesterday, Mr. Fitzgerald advised the judge overseeing the case, Reggie Walton, that the government's April 5 filing was inaccurate. "We are writing to correct a sentence," Mr. Fitzgerald's letter begins. He told the judge an error occurred in the following statement: "Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

The prosecutor said the government brief should have said, "Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, some of the key judgments of the NIE, and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

The only thing surprising about this is that it came before, rather than after, the November elections. Usually the truth, if it comes out at all, doesn’t come out until it is too late to help Republicans.