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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46146-2003Dec31.html Head of Leak Probe Is Called Relentless Expectations High as U.S. Attorney Takes Over By David Von Drehle and Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, January 1, 2004; Page A03If Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the man chosen to investigate the leak of a CIA operative's identity to a prominent Washington journalist, is everything people say he is, there should be a nervous leaker out there today. Colleagues, classmates and more neutral observers say the Chicago-based U.S. attorney is fiercely independent, relentless, tireless, fearless. He has sent al Qaeda terrorists, mob hit men and drug dealers to jail; last month he indicted the former governor of Illinois. American Lawyer magazine has written of his "almost frightening brilliance." Author Daniel Benjamin, having studied Fitzgerald's work in prosecuting terrorists in New York, calls him "an awesome public servant." "Anybody who has done something wrong in connection with [the leak] should not be heartened by Patrick Fitzgerald's appointment," says former deputy attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. "That's an incredible understatement." On the other hand, Fitzgerald's personal friendship with No. 2 Department of Justice official James B. Comey Jr. -- he is the godfather of one of Comey's children -- leaves some critics complaining that top administration officials still have too much control over an investigation that is centered on the White House. For example, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) paused from his presidential campaign long enough yesterday to call on Comey to "relinquish his authority to limit or interfere with the investigation." Lieberman said Fitzgerald's appointment means "there is still no real independence and autonomy." Fitzgerald's assignment is to find out who told columnist Robert D. Novak last summer that the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. Wilson was in the news because he had disputed President Bush's assertion, in his 2003 State of the Union speech, that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger. Compared with the work that made Fitzgerald's career -- a series of cases in the late 1990s that laid bare the tangled and devious al Qaeda terrorist network -- the leak case is simple. "Fitzie," as his friends call him, is a mathematician by training, a person obsessive about his work and the owner of a memory so large and supple that he could piece together threads and shreds of seemingly disjointed information -- snatches of Arabic, credit card receipts, unfamiliar names -- that were just scraps to nearly everyone else. And he was able to explain it all in compelling terms to juries faced with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, and an elaborate plot based in the Philippines to hijack and destroy a number of passenger jets on a single day. As co-head of the terrorism unit in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office, he secured the first U.S. indictment of Osama bin Laden. Here, he is just looking for a few people, maybe just one, in or around the peaceful confines of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But that address can certainly complicate an otherwise straightforward inquiry. This is not the first time Fitzgerald, 43, has been presented to the public as an utterly independent prosecutor. In 2001, when northern Illinois needed a new U.S. attorney, Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (no relation) was, by custom, given the prerogative to choose. The maverick Republican bucked the long-standing tradition of naming an Illinoisan to the powerful post because, he said, he was worried that a locally connected lawyer would be reluctant to push corruption probes to the highest levels. The senator, instead, looked nationwide. He sought suggestions from then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and many others. Patrick Fitzgerald's name kept coming up. In two years on the job, Fitzgerald has pushed the investigation of corruption around former governor George H. Ryan (R) closer to the man himself, rolling up former aides, close advisers and keepers of Ryan's campaign funds. His indictment of Ryan showed he has no plans to stop. Former Illinois governor James R. Thompson (R), whose firm represents Ryan, says Fitzgerald has indicted an innocent man. But that has not changed his high opinion of the prosecutor. "He came to Chicago from his New York terrorist prosecutions with an excellent reputation," Thompson said, "and I think that reputation has held up in Chicago. He's smart, tough, determined, focused. His staff clearly works well with him and probably idolizes him." Patrick Fitzgerald is the son of Irish immigrants -- "fresh off the boat," in the words of John Goggins, a prominent corporate lawyer in New York who has known Fitzgerald since high school. He grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and won a scholarship to Regis High School in Manhattan, a highly competitive Jesuit academy. He worked his way through Amherst College, cleaning the school's restrooms and painting walls. In summers, the math and economics major earned more tuition money as a school janitor and part-time doorman in some of the same Upper East Side luxury buildings where his father had worked as a doorman for years. Fitzgerald got his fill of rich and powerful people that way, Goggins said. "He had numerous funny anecdotes about being treated shabbily by residents who didn't realize this was a Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst, and later a Harvard Law School student, holding the door." According to his friends, Fitzgerald never resented the slights, but he also made it clear that he was never going to seek the approval of such people. Goggins and others remember Fitzgerald as "very apolitical." Throughout his school years, during many heated political debates, Goggins never heard him take a predictable partisan stance. "He would be very neutral and down the middle, always taking what he thought was the logical position -- he didn't really subscribe to a political philosophy." After a brief stint in a small law firm, he was hired into the highly competitive U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, where his work habits quickly became legendary. Once, a police officer was in the building where Fitzgerald had a small studio apartment. There had been a burglary. He noticed newspapers piled high on Fitzgerald's gas stove and warned him about the fire hazard. "Don't worry," Fitzgerald told the officer. "I've never turned the gas on." He had never had time to eat a meal at home. It was in the Manhattan office, pursuing mobsters and terrorists, that Fitzgerald and Comey became best friends, two of the "bomb boys," as the terrorism prosecutors were known around the office. They entertained colleagues with their endless comic banter -- "like 'The Brothers McMullen,' " said one movie-loving co-worker -- with Fitzie playing the straight man, except for the occasional acerbic aside. David N. Kelley, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is another former "bomb boy"; he has known Fitzgerald for 15 years and has taken vacations with him. Kelley and others who are close to Fitzgerald stress that, while he is tough and aggressive, he is not unreasonable or overzealous. "There are a lot of people that you can say are dogged or aggressive and all of that," Kelley said yesterday. "But there's also an incredibly humane side of Pat. He's almost honest to a fault, if that's possible." Kelley adds: "You can't have a political conversation with him, because it's just not something he's interested in." -__ ___ _ ___ __ ___ _ _ _ __ /-_|-0-\-V-/-\|-|-__|-|-|-/-_| \_-\--_/\-/|-\\-|-_||-V-V-\_-\ |__/_|--//-|_|\_|___|\_A_/|__/ SPY NEWS is OSINT newsletter and discussion list associated to Mario's Cyberspace Station - The Global Intelligence News Portal http://mprofaca.cro.net ######## CAUTION! ######### Since you are receiving and reading documents, news stories, comments and opinions not only from so called (or self-proclaimed) "reliable sources", but also a lot of possible misinformation collected by Spy News moderator and subscribers and posted to Spy News for OSINT purposes - it should be a serious reason (particularly to journalists and web publishers) to think twice before using it for their story writing, further publishing or forwarding throughout Cyberspace. 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