Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has won the 2005 Lawyer of the Year Award from the National Law Journal.
Leigh Jones does a great job summarizing the hard work that Fitzgerald has done over the course of the year.
No one else in 2005 roiled politics inside the Beltway and the media that feed on it like the prosecutor from Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald.
As special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice, Fitzgerald has taken on some of the most influential people in the world by trying to uncover who in Washington divulged to the press the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
The list is long on powerful politicians, lawyers and journalists that his continuing investigation has touched so far. But the matter also encompasses the very reasons for the war in Iraq that has cost about 2,150 American lives, while at the same time striking at the heart of freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution.
For those reasons, Fitzgerald is The National Law Journal's 2005 Lawyer of the Year.
At 44, Fitzgerald is, to some, exacting and thorough. To others, he is perhaps obsessive and relentless. But it is this attention to detail and his formidable memory that many observers say make him a tough and level-headed adversary.
"He doesn't take unfair advantage of the fact that he's smart," Frederick Cohn said. A criminal defense attorney, Cohn represented one of four men convicted of conspiring to bomb the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Fitzgerald prosecuted the case as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he worked for 13 years before becoming the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in 2001.
"If I were someone who was a bad guy, I would not want him on my trail," Cohn said.
here that Karl? You might be able to convince some gullible pundits (Isikoff, Kornblut, Brokaw, Toobin, Abrams, Brooks, etc.) that you were off the hook and that Fitzgerald was done. But don't you realize that you're messing with the lawyer of the year who will stop at nothing until you are terminated?
The ongoing investigation has snowballed, gathering in its path top administration officials and well-known journalists, one of whom, the New York Times' Judith Miller, spent 85 days in jail for violating a subpoena to reveal her source.
So far, Fitzgerald has indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, on five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements. And Fitzgerald is presenting evidence to a new grand jury, which could lead to charges against others, including Karl Rove, top advisor to President George W. Bush.
The attorney for Rove, Robert Luskin with Patton Boggs in Washington, declined to comment for this article. Libby's attorney, Theodore Wells of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, did not return a phone call.