Actually, here is a WSJ article on Fitzgerald:
Prosecutor Uses an Effective Playbook
By ANNE MARIE SQUEO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 29, 2005
Described as Eliot Ness with a Harvard law degree, Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor at the heart of the case that has ensnared White House officials, is a lot like the legendary law enforcer who brought down gangster Al Capone for tax evasion: While investigating bigger wrongs, he’ll settle for easier-to-prove charges to get his target.
Mr. Fitzgerald is following a playbook that has served him well in going after terrorists, mobsters and crooked politicians: narrowing complicated cases down to a handful of easily understood charges that a jury would find convincing.
That is something he learned in more than 17 years as a prosecutor, starting in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan in 1988. In a high-profile case early in his career, a four-month trial of Gambino crime-family leaders alleging murder, racketeering and narcotics trafficking resulted in a hung jury on all but one charge – jumping bail. The defendants, however, eventually decided to plead guilty for lesser sentences to avoid a new trial.
In Chicago, where he has served as U.S. Attorney since 2001, Mr. Fitzgerald, 44 years old, has been a prolific prosecutor. Picking up investigations started by his predecessor, he has continued a crackdown on government corruption, indicting numerous officials, including former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as prominent businessmen with government contracts.
In some of his cases, the charges he has brought have been narrow – identification document fraud, perjury, bribery and filing false tax returns. It is a strategy that has worked. Of the 30 cases brought under Mr. Fitzgerald’s oversight, the U.S. Attorney’s office has won 21 guilty pleas and three jury convictions. Six cases, including Mr. Ryan’s trial, are pending.
The current CIA-leak case is no different. Starting out as an investigation into whether Bush-administration officials intentionally disclosed the identity of a CIA operative in retaliation for her husband’s public criticism of the war in Iraq, Mr. Fitzgerald early on sought and was given wide latitude by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey to investigate and prosecute any criminal violations related to the unauthorized disclosure. Yesterday, Mr. Fitzgerald announced a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, on criminal charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements. The White House accepted Mr. Libby’s resignation.
Mr. Libby, through his attorney, expressed disappointment and surprise about the charges, saying “we will defend vigorously against” them.
After months of avoiding the media, Mr. Fitzgerald yesterday stood before a Department of Justice banner, faced television cameras and fielded questions from reporters, answering some bluntly and explaining why he wouldn’t answer others.
“Mr. Libby’s story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true. It was false,” the prosecutor said. “He was at the beginning of the chain of the phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And he lied about it afterward, under oath, repeatedly.”
Calling truth “the engine of our judicial system,” Mr. Fitzgerald emphasized the seriousness of the charges even though he didn’t charge anyone with illegally disclosing the identity of a CIA agent. “When a vice president’s chief of staff is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, it does show the world that this is a country that takes its law seriously; that all citizens are bound by the law,” he said.
While Mr. Fitzgerald’s style is occasionally described as overly aggressive, Republicans will have a difficult time pigeonholing his investigation as a partisan witch-hunt, an argument made against past independent counsels. Mr. Fitzgerald was named U.S. Attorney by President Bush and is registered to vote without any party affiliation to avoid the appearance of conflict. In Chicago, he has brought charges against Republicans and Democrats alike.
Unlike past special counsels who have spent all their time on one case, Mr. Fitzgerald has been busy in his day job. For instance, last month he secured a guilty plea from former Hollinger International Inc. president and chief operating officer David Radler, after charging him and former Hollinger corporate counsel Mark Kipnis with diverting more than $32 million from the Chicago newspaper publisher. Mr. Radler agreed to a 29-month sentence, while Mr. Kipnis pleaded not guilty. Mr. Radler is cooperating with Mr. Fitzgerald’s continuing investigation into Hollinger.
MaryJo White, a former U.S. attorney who oversaw his work in New York for several years, calls Mr. Fitzgerald “the total package” when it comes to prosecuting: “brain power, judgment and ability to talk to people; he’s very persuasive in front of a jury.”
Even as a young prosecutor, Mr. Fitzgerald knew how to use courtroom theatrics. Opposing counsel say he can go overboard when he’s in pursuit – not because he’s trying to be unfair or twist the facts but because “he believes that your client stands between him and justice,” says Chicago criminal defense attorney Ron Safer.
After convicting blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman for planning to attack bridges, tunnels and other New York landmarks, he went after the sheik’s court-appointed lawyer, Lynne Stewart, for violating a gag order on the case. He took the stand as the first witness against Ms. Stewart, who had released a call to arms by her client, while he was behind bars, to radical Muslims. Found guilty, she is to be sentenced in December and faces 30 years in prison. Ms. Stewart has called Mr. Fitzgerald “a crusader…in the medieval sense.”
Critics and friends alike agree Mr. Fitzgerald is a stickler for the rules with a strong innate sense of right and wrong. “He’s more than a bit of a moralist,” says Robert Litt, a former Justice Department attorney who worked with Mr. Fitzgerald during the 1990s on terrorism issues. “He follows the rules, and he thinks everyone else should too.”
The son of Irish immigrants and the third of four children, Mr. Fitzgerald grew up in a middle-class family in Brooklyn. His father was a doorman in Manhattan. He attended Regis High School, an all-scholarship Jesuit school in Manhattan, where he was a member of the debate team and is remembered by fellow students as pretty quiet. To earn extra money during school, he worked as a janitor and a doorman. He studied economics and math at Amherst College in Massachusetts and graduated Harvard Law School in 1985. During this time, he took up rugby, a sport he continued to play for years after graduation.
After three years at a private law firm, he joined the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, a job, colleagues and friends say, that turned out to be his calling. In interviews, he has talked about taking crime personally. By all accounts, he has made eradicating it his life’s work, sacrificing a personal life for an almost maniacal focus on work, friends say.
“When there’s a crime going on involving corruption or violence, or certainly terrorism, and it’s affecting people’s lives, you feel like it’s your job, together with others in the law enforcement agencies, to stop it,” he told the Illinois News, a news service
While working to build the case against Osama bin Laden and his associates for the bombing of two U.S. embassies overseas, Mr. Fitzgerald became immersed in the details of the terrorist network, and indicted Mr. bin Laden in absentia and four others in 1998. He became such an expert that when he landed in Chicago on Sept. 11, 2001, to start his new job as U.S. attorney, his beeper went off, asking him to help out in the case.
Mr. Fitzgerald took on the CIA-leak case in December 2003 at the request of his friend and former colleague, Mr. Comey, who until August was Deputy Attorney General. At the time, there were calls by congressional Democrats and news organizations for an independent inquiry into the possible illegal leaking of a CIA agent’s identity. They argued that such an inquiry, already under way, couldn’t be done independently by a Justice Department closely aligned with the president. John Ashcroft, the attorney general at the time, recused himself and handed the decision over to Mr. Comey, who tapped Mr. Fitzgerald. “When you do a criminal case, if you find a violation, it doesn’t really in the end matter what statute you use if you vindicate the interest,” said Mr. Fitzgerald. "It’s not as if, you know, you say, ‘well, this person was convicted but under the wrong statute.’