Who Talked? It Wasn't the Special Prosecutor

WASHINGTON — With U.S. troops unable to find expected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a group of officials met aboard Air Force Two in mid-2003 to discuss how to respond to the growing prominence of one particular critic of President Bush's war policy. Vice President Dick Cheney was on the flight. So was his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

It was a scene that suggested intrigue. And if it had occurred as part of a past Washington scandal, the investigator who revealed it probably would have included a wealth of details, naming everyone present and laying out what they said.

But when Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald announced Friday that he was wrapping up his two-year investigation of the CIA leak case, he offered the barest sketch of the meeting on Air Force Two -- and left many central questions in the case unanswered. Did Cheney help map out strategy with Libby during the flight? Did officials talk about Valerie Plame, the wife of the Bush critic, and that she worked for the CIA -- a detail that was soon leaked to the media?

Did Cheney attend the meeting, or did he sit elsewhere on the plane?

Answering none of these questions, Fitzgerald's 22-page indictment, with its bare-bones outlines of the case, provided a bracing lesson on what major political investigations have become now that they are no longer conducted by independent counsels, and how the culture of rooting out scandal in Washington has fundamentally changed.

Ever since Watergate, special federal investigations of political scandals have often ended with detailed accounts of the inner workings of government. The probes might take years; they might cost millions; but at the end, they often provided a rich, detailed story of episodes in question.

The reason was the independent counsel law, created by Congress in 1978 because it felt the executive branch could not be trusted to investigate itself in cases of alleged abuse and corruption. Independent counsels gave the nation book-length -- even multi-volume examinations of the Iran-Contra affair and of President Clinton's relations with a former intern. But Congress in 1999 chose not to renew the law authorizing them, out of concern that they had been used to pursue partisan witch hunts.

Fitzgerald, by contrast, is a special prosecutor, charged with bringing violations of the law to court, rather than information to the court of public opinion.