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Conrad Black Trial

Mark Steyn covers the Conrad Black trial from opening arguments to sentencing.

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If the glove is Fitz, you must acquitz

Mark Steyn | May 17, 2007 | 02:27:19 | Permalink

I've received a little flurry of e-mails from New York publishers on whether I'm interested in writing a book on what's wrong with the US justice system. Not something I regard myself as an expert in. But it's hard to watch this thing day in, day out, and not conclude that the whole business is badly out of whack.

I met Scooter Libby on Wednesday. He was the designated fall guy for US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's last busted flush of a money-no-object prosecution - the nothing leak of "CIA covert agent" Valerie Plame's name to columnist Bob Novak in the Saddam-wants-uranium-from-Africa story. Libby didn't leak Miss Plame's name. The guy who did was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's gossipy schoolgirl of a deputy at the State Department and a man who dislikes Bush, Cheney and all their neocon warmongering works.

So there was never any "conspiracy", and never any "crime". Patrick Fitzgerald knew this. The prosecutor understood from the beginning that (a) leaking Valerie Plame’s name was not a crime and (b) the guy who did it was Richard Armitage. In other words, Fitzgerald was aware that the public and media perception of this “case” was entirely wrong: there was no plot by Bush ideologues to damage a whistle-blower, only an anti-war official making an offhand remark to an anti-war reporter. Yet the US Attorney chose to let the entirely false impression of his “case” sit out there month in, month out, year after year glowering over the White House, doing great damage to the Presidency on the critical issue of the day.

Now Fitzgerald has done it again. At least two of the four defendants in this courtroom - Peter Atkinson and Mark Kipnis - are only here because they refused to be steamrollered into a plea bargain by the US Attorney's heavies. But the hollowness of the case against Kipnis, the Hollinger in-house counsel in Chicago and the most junior defendant, beggars belief. The government's proposition is that the bonuses Kipnis received during his time with Hollinger was a pay-off for facilitating the $60 million scam. "He got $150,000 in bonus money to help do their crime," said Jeffrey Cramer during his opening address. That seems like a very piffling share of the swag, but, as Cramer put it, "His price was just a little bit lower. That’s all. That’s the only difference."

Yesterday, David Radler testified that he'd told the government that Kipnis' bonuses had nothing to do with the non-competes and were related to money he'd saved the company on outside legal fees by his work on CanWest and the other deals.

In other words, Cramer and his fellow prosecutors knew all along that they had no case against this guy but they chose to pursue it anyway. He will most likely survive, but they've destroyed his reputation and his legal career, and he now runs a branch of a commercial-sign store. Kipnis' signature is on a lot of documents for the same reason my assistant's is: she's around when I'm out of town. Radler was mostly in Vancouver, and Kipnis was the guy who signed for him in Chicago.

Patrick Fitzgerald's team knew this. For them to punish Kipnis for declining to submit to their retrospective criminalization of events is the act of a third-rate bully. When Kipnis' lawyer Ron Safer (the jury's favourite) objects to something, he rises from his chair, says "Your Honour?" and then does a magnificant stage-Jewish shoulder shrug. If I were the defence team, my closing statement would be simply to read back to Jeffrey Cramer his pathetic opening statement and punctuate each of his preposterous claims with a Ron Safer shrug.

That's what you get for doing a deal with David Radler: You lie down with dogs, you wake up with pleas. Whether a jury will fall for them is another matter.