Dartblog

If there’s a must-read today, it is The Wall Street Journal’s editorial on the new congressional vogue: turning politics into crime. There is no doubt that politics waged illegally is, well, illegal. But it should be plain to any honest observer that congressional Democrats—beginning with Plame and continuing to these eight U.S. Attorneys—have discovered that frivolous prosecution can bear great political benefit, while inflicting no costs whatever.

How does it work? Consider that no one has been charged with ‘outing’ Valerie Plame. The Vice President’s aide, though it is known as a certainty that outed no one, is being sent to jail for conflicting memories of who said what and when. For the Democrats’ speechwriters, that fodder, sewn together with clever verbiage, can equate to: The Bush White House outed Valerie Plame because her husband criticized the war. Which is a darn sexy line.

The result of nonsense trials like Libby’s is that government officials will increasingly refuse to cooperate with investigations. Even if a crime underwrote the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys (it didn’t; they, like the average corporate manager, can be dismissed on a whim) there is no incentive for government employees familiar with the matter to testify. Because, when the trumpted-up charged deflate and the Democrats haven’t their man, the only recourse will be to jail some Republican—any Republican—for perjury invited by the original unnecessary investigation. And misremembering a five-years-old conversation is enough in this electric atmosphere.

Now that Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s White House liaison, has announced she will not testify—will not write her own ticket to jail—Democrats are cawing. But

Ms. Goodling has been around, and she can see Democrats don’t really want to know the truth; they want to shout “liar, liar” and set the stage to accuse Justice officials of criminal behavior. In a statement to the committee explaining her decision, Ms. Goodling said, “I have read public remarks by members of both the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary in which those members have drawn conclusions about the subject matter and the testimony now under investigation by the Committee.” We’ve read them, too.

Representative Linda Sanchez has already concluded that there have been “attempts to mislead the public on this issue.” In a joint press conference, Senators Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein characterized Justice’s testimony as “misleading statement after misleading statement—deliberate misleading statements.” Mr. Schumer is also a lawyer, and we reckon he deliberately chose that word “deliberate” as a prelude to charging criminal deception and keeping the issue alive long enough to help elect more Senate Democrats next year. (He runs the Senate Democratic campaign committee.)

Senator Leahy himself issued a press release asserting that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Mr. McNulty “failed to tell Congress the whole truth about this matter under oath.” Now that these Democrats have reached a verdict, they want to hold the trial.