Libby Trial Exposes Neocon Shadow Government

By: Sydney Schanberg
Date: 3/5/2007

Day by day, witness by witness, exhibit by exhibit, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the trial of Dick Cheney’s man, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, is accomplishing what no one else in Washington has been able to: He has impeached the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Of course, it’s an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its documentation, be inerasable. The trial record—testimony, exhibits, the lot—will be there, in one place, for investigators, scholars, reporters and Congress to pore over. It goes far beyond the charges against Mr. Libby. It is, instead, a road map to the abuses of power that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their shadow government of neoconservatives have committed as the neocons carried out what they had been planning for years: an invasion of Iraq—and other military excursions—for the purpose of expanding American dominion.

From the start, when he was named special prosecutor in late 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald seemed to understand and embrace this much wider significance.

Yet he was careful not to overreach, crafting the indictment of Mr. Libby narrowly: He had lied to a grand jury, and to F.B.I. agents, about leaks he had given his favorite media people to discredit a vocal critic of the war...

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