Three of the nations top newspapers all make the same point today.
Lying to the prosecutor kept the American public from
crucial information before the presidential elections last November. So says
The Washington Post,
the Boston Globe, and
the Los Angeles Times.
"In more common speech, obstruction of justice is a
coverup, and the coverup worked -- just as the Watergate coverup in 1972 kept facts from the public that would have guaranteed Richard Nixon's defeat."
That's Thomas Oliphant in the
Boston Globe. "[T]he obstruction of justice alleged in this case kept us from knowing material things about our leaders at the moment we were deciding whether to keep them in office." Oliphant argues that Fitzgerald himself was aware of this, and alluded to it last week.
Robert Scheer leads with the same point in his L.A. Times piece. "The most intriguing revelation of Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's news conference last week was his assertion that he would have presented his indictment of I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby a year ago if not for the intransigence of reporters who refused to testify before the grand jury. He said that without that delay, 'we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005.'"
"Had that been the case, John Kerry probably would be president of the United
States today."
Scheer lays responsibility on the person who could have thwarted Libby's ongoing cover-up: Judy Miller. His piece is titled simply "What Judy forgot: Your Right to Know."
And then there's the The Washington Post. ("What the Shield Covered Up."). E.J. Dionne writes that Libby "pursued a brilliant strategy to slow the inquiry down. As long as he was claiming that journalists were responsible for spreading around the name and past CIA employment of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, Libby knew that at least some news organizations would resist having
reporters testify."
Dionne says that Libby "threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors, in the special counsel's apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation." He also noticed when Fitzgerald compared October of 2005 to October of 2005, and opens his piece by asking the American electorate the key question.
"Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?"