Those who leaked the information about Valerie Wilson breached signed contracts they had made with the government. These contracts, moreover, were not to be taken lightly: They enforced profoundly important obligations to national security, on the part of the very people who were supposed to be serving that end.
Why are you not enforcing those contracts? Why have you not urged the president to sanction those who have released national security information? The president has said he would fire those who committed crimes -- but breach of such profoundly important contracts, even if it does not rise to the level of a crime, is surely cause for dismissal, as well.
You should so urge the President. And if he is not willing to take appropriate action with those who have dishonored their offices, and broken their contracts, you ought to go to court and get an injunction to remove their security clearances.
Again, their agreement with the government was the very understanding upon which they were (and continue to be) given classified information. Now that they have breached it, the vital predicate for those clearances is gone.
Referring back to the Watergate scandal, of which Dean has intimate knowledge from his role as White House counsel for Nixon and from his later extensive research on the case, he wonders if Fitzgerald may in some sense be playing into the administration's strategy to limit the investigation to the narrowest possible scope. The Nixon administration, he recalls, tried to keep the Watergate investigation focused on the narrow issue of the famous burglary itself, which was really the tip of the iceberg of massive corruption.
Dean writes:
Now, with a Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican President, you (a Republican appointee) are the lastbulwark of protection for the American people. We must hope you will keep faith with them.
It was well understood at the Nixon White House, and it surely is at the Bush White House, that government attorneys do not look to prosecute those for whom they work. We knew that career government lawyers simply were not going to be looking for crimes at the White House - not because they acted with corrupt intent, but simply because it is no one's instinct to bite the hand that feeds them.
When Archibald Cox was appointed special counsel [to investigate Watergate-related crime] - under pressure from the U.S. Senate as a condition to confirm Attorney General Elliot Richardson - he immediately recognized what had occurred. While no Department of Justice lawyer was found to have engaged in the cover up, their timidity had facilitated it. Cox was fired because he refused to be intimidated. His firing became a badge of honor for all those who do the right thing, regardless of the consequences.
While I have no reason to believe you are easily intimidated, all I can say is that your investigation, thus far, is falling precisely within the narrow confines - the formula procedure - that was relied upon in the first phase of the Watergate cover-up by the Nixon administration.
Dean is quite blunt in his advice to Fitzgerald:
With all due respect, Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe you are being had. I believe that you were selected with the expectation that you would conduct the narrowest of investigations, and it seems you have done just that.
The leak of Valerie Wilson's status did not occur in a vacuum. Republicans in Congress do not want to know what truly happened. You are the last, best hope of the American people in this regard.
I can tell you, as someone who travels about the country, that Americans - regardlessof their political disposition - are deeply troubled by this case. And, increasingly so, by the limits you have apparently placed on your investigation.
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