"The Icing on the Cake"

Yesterday’s batch of e-mails from the Justice Department reveal that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who nailed Scooter Libby, was ranked no higher than two prosecutors who were eventually fired but, according to the explainers-in-retrospect now, “was never seriously considered for removal.”

That might just have a little something to do with the fact that the other two were not in the media spotlight, as Fitzgerald was at the time. He was given the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in 2002 by John Ashcroft, Bush’s first A.G. but that was before he started looking into the Valerie Plame leak.

“He is probably the best prosecutor in the nation--certainly one of them,” Mary Jo White, who supervised his work, told the Washington Post yesterday. “It casts total doubt on the whole process. It’s kind of the icing on the cake.”

The cake seems to have been laced with arsenic, something we never would have known if the Democrats hadn’t won control of Congress in November.