Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General
It has been a bad couple of weeks for the Justice Department.
Yesterday, Rod Blagojevich outfoxed U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and tied up a jury, escaping 23 out of 24 counts.
Earlier in the week, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay announced that he was no longer a target of a Justice Department investigation.
Last week, there was renewed scrutiny over a botched effort by the Public Integrity Section to convict former Senator Ted Stevens of corruption after he perished in a tragic plane accident. In every obituary, there was further reminder of an almost comical effort to throw Stevens in jail by prosecutors who were so inept and so corrupt themselves that the Judge threw out the case and turned his attention on prosecuting the prosecutors.
It is hard to say if Fitzgerald’s case was inherently weak or if Blago’s public relations efforts were incredibly powerful. But it is easy to see that Mr. Fitzgerald sees himself in overly dramatic terms as a latter day Eliot Ness, and that his case was too nakedly political and some say too rushed to get the Illinois governor really nailed to the wall.
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