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Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States District Attorney

On July 6, 2005 Judith Miller, then a reporter for the New York Times, was sent to prison for her refusal to testify about a confidential source before a federal grand jury in a widely publicized case. The special prosecutor in that case, United States attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, explained his decision to imprison a journalist by saying, according to Julie Hirschfeld Davis in the Baltimore Sun (July 19, 2005), "At a certain point we have to yield to law because if we don’t, we’re lost." Fitzgerald’s words and deeds that day epitomized his approach to his position as a federal prosecutor. In his primary post he heads one of the nation’s largest and most important federal-attorney’s offices, and in his temporary post he serves as a special prosecutor for a case involving the leak of a CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) operative’s name to members of the press—the case with which Miller was involved. In both capacities, Fitzgerald has combined a high-minded belief in the laws of the land as society’s fundamental ordering principles with a willingness to use any legal means at his disposal to have lawbreakers punished, even if doing so means riding roughshod over such conventions as the shaky legal protections traditionally granted journalists or the guidelines for prosecuting terrorists. By all accounts sincere, gifted, modest, and so hardworking that for 14 years he lived in an apartment without ever bothering to have the gas turned on, Fitzgerald has a long history of successfully and relentlessly pursuing convictions for crimes ranging from drug trafficking to seditious conspiracy. His work has earned him virtually universal acclaim from other law-enforcement officials. Having begun as an assistant U.S. attorney in 1988 and worked almost constantly on some of America’s most important terrorism cases since 1993, Fitzgerald has been credited with honing the legal techniques necessary to prosecute terrorism successfully. He is regarded as a foremost expert on the terrorist organization Al Qaeda and its head, the wealthy Saudi Arabian exile Osama bin Laden. "He is a one-man encyclopedia on al Qaeda because he has this absolutely scary photographic memory," his close friend and former colleague, U.S. deputy attorney general James Comey, told Chitra Ragavan and Eric Ferkenhoff for U.S. News & World Report (July 4, 2005). "He is a one-man dot connector, which is very valuable." Even Fitzgerald’s recent entry into the typically polarized activity of investigating the administration of a sitting president, which Fitzgerald is doing in connection with the CIA leak case, has not tarnished his reputation as a politically independent prosecutor. His treatment of Miller, however, and to a much lesser degree his approach to prosecuting other cases, has brought harsh criticism of his methods, particularly from members of the media, who argue that his willingness to jail Miller for maintaining the confidentiality of her source might make it harder for journalists to gather the sort of information necessary for maintaining a truly free press. Still, even those critical of Fitzgerald have generally questioned only his means, not his ends. "He’s a real prosecutor," an assistant U.S. attorney under Fitzgerald told Matt O’Connor for the Chicago Tribune (July 1, 2002). "He’s not here for advancement to a powerhouse law firm for a gazillion dollars. That’s not his agenda. He’s got one agenda: doing the job the best possible way."

One of four children, Patrick J. Fitzgerald was born in 1960 in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. His parents had both immigrated to the U.S. from County Clare, Ireland. His mother, Tillie, came when she was young, while his father, also named Patrick, arrived at age 31. In New York his father worked as a doorman at a building in Manhattan’s well-to-do Upper East Side; he is said never to have taken a vacation and always to have arrived early for his shift. Fitzgerald has credited his work ethic and his attitude toward justice to his parents. "They were very hardworking, straight, decent people," he told Peter Slevin for the Washington Post (February 2, 2005). "The values we grew up with were straight-ahead. We didn’t grow up in a household where people were anything but direct." Fitzgerald added: "I’m hoping that if you're a straight shooter in the world, that's not that remarkable."

An excellent student at Our Lady Help of Christians, a private Catholic primary school in Brooklyn, Fitzgerald was admitted to Regis High School, a highly prestigious Jesuit academy in New York City that is free of charge to the select few who are admitted. At Regis he studied Latin and other required subjects and served on the debate team. After his graduation he majored in economics and mathematics at Amherst College, in Massachusetts. There his tuition was paid in part by his earnings from a job as a janitor during his high-school years and by summer stints in college as a doorman for a building not far from the one where his father was employed. He graduated from Amherst in 1982 with a B.A. degree and as a member of the prestigious national honor society Phi Beta Kappa. Instead of seeking a job in the financial industry, which his undergraduate courses had prepared him for--as he told Kristen Scharnberg for the Chicago Tribune Magazine (February 27, 2005), the idea of "sitting around predicting turns in the stock market" seemed unappealing--he enrolled at Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In a Boston courtroom during his final year at Harvard, he accidentally bumped into a man later described to him as "the head of the New England mob." The episode inspired him to become a government prosecutor, according to Scharnberg. Nevertheless, for three years after he earned a J.D. degree from Harvard, in 1985, he worked in private practice, as a litigation associate at the New York City law firm of Christy & Viener (now a part of the international law firm Salans).

Fitzgerald’s career as a public prosecutor began in 1988, when he became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the most prominent of the nation’s 93 federal district-attorney offices. Fitzgerald’s first high-profile case came to trial in 1991, when he helped to prosecute a New York drug lord named George Rivera, who in his late teens and early 20s had amassed $15 million from heroin dealing and was believed to have been responsible for six murders. Known as "Boy George," Rivera was sentenced to life in prison for tax evasion and narcotics conspiracy; the jury was deadlocked as to whether he was guilty of the 12 other charges brought against him. Succeeding in getting a long sentence meted out for relatively minor charges became a leitmotif in Fitzgerald’s career, as did (though to a lesser degree) prosecuting cases that ended in hung juries.

Fitzgerald’s next widely publicized case involved two important Mafia figures, the brothers John and Joseph Gambino, who had been charged with crimes related to drug smuggling and murder. The four-month trial was closely followed by the media. The jury deliberated for 10 days but could not reach a verdict, leading the judge to declare a mistrial and forcing the U.S. attorney’s office to try the case again. Fitzgerald was devastated, and when he and his new partner, Richard Zabel, began pretrial hearings for the second trial, he showed little interest in what was happening, going so far as to write Zabel a note in court that—instead of offering some procedural advice or a reminder about a small but important detail—merely asked, "Is there beer back in the fridge?" It was the "lowest point in his career," Scharnberg wrote. The Gambinos did not have a second trial; in January 1994 the brothers pleaded guilty to a variety of charges, among them drug trafficking—a startling admission. "The defendants had maintained at the last trial that they were against drugs and that, if there is a Mafia, it’s against drugs," a United Press International reporter quoted Fitzgerald as saying (January 7, 1994). "We argued that that’s a myth."

After a six-week vacation in Australia and New Zealand—which marked the first time in almost two years that he had left his office for more than a few hours—Fitzgerald returned to the New York district and was soon assigned to his first terrorism case. The defendants were Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Muslim religious leader in exile from his native Egypt, and nine of his associates. Rahman had come to the attention of U.S. authorities because other associates of his had been involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which had killed six people and injured about 1,000 others. The 10 people Fitzgerald and his partners prosecuted in the new case were tried under a seldom-cited law (dating from 1861) that made it illegal to plan to commit a crime against the United States, regardless of whether the crime was even attempted. That risky prosecutorial technique had only occasionally been successful in the recent past, but for Fitzgerald and his colleagues the gambit worked. On October 1, 1995, after an eight-month trial in which more than 200 witnesses testified and a summation by Fitzgerald that continued for three days, all 10 defendants were convicted. Rahman and one other defendant later received life sentences, while prison terms for the remaining eight men ranged from 25 to 57 years. Later in 1995, in recognition of his work on the case, Fitzgerald was named co-chief of his district’s organized-crime and terrorism unit, and in July 1996 Fitzgerald and two other prosecutors involved in the case received the U.S. attorney general’s highest honor, the award for exceptional service.

Over the next few years, Fitzgerald continued to prosecute terrorists, tax evaders, and other suspected lawbreakers. During that time he began a criminal investigation of Osama bin Laden, seeking clues in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for bin Laden's whereabouts and operations. On August 7, 1998, while Fitzgerald was on vacation, working on his apartment to make it more habitable, bombs exploded almost simultaneously in front of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 257 people, most of them local civilians. Fitzgerald was immediately dispatched to Africa to begin an investigation that would take up most of his working life for the better part of the next three years. In the end he brought charges against bin Laden and 22 other people for the bombings, but he was able to locate and try only four.

As the trial got under way, at the beginning of 2001, a Republican U.S. senator from Illinois, Peter Fitzgerald (who is not related to Patrick Fitzgerald), began looking for a new head of the Northern District federal attorney's office in his state. (U.S. senators are granted the opportunity to propose candidates by tradition rather than law, as it is nominally the attorney general who appoints an attorney to the position. The president then nominates the candidate and the Senate votes to confirm.) The Northern District of Illinois is one of the nation’s largest, most visible, and most influential U.S. attorneys’ offices. It employs 300 lawyers, roughly half of them assistant U.S. attorneys, and covers an area of 18 counties, whose total population is about nine million. The top job in the Northern District has traditionally gone to an attorney from Chicago, where the office is based, or from elsewhere in that part of the state. But since 1998 the Northern District office had been investigating and prosecuting dozens of local and state officials for corruption, among them Illinois's then-governor, George Ryan, and Peter Fitzgerald feared that appointing a local attorney might cause the investigation to lose momentum—or at least give it the appearance of doing so. Turning to the then-director of the CIA, Louis Freeh, and then to several other knowledgeable people, Peter Fitzgerald asked each in turn, according to Peter Slevin, "Who’s the best assistant U.S. attorney you know of in the country?" Everyone reportedly responded, "Patrick Fitzgerald." After meeting Patrick Fitzgerald, the senator decided to recommend him for the position. One potential problem was that Patrick Fitzgerald is a confirmed political independent (he has never registered to vote as a member of a national party and has been universally described as having no aspirations to elective office), and as a Republican, Peter Fitzgerald was expected to choose a member of his party. But on May 13, 2001, as the trial of the men held responsible for the embassy bombings was nearing its end, Peter Fitzgerald's recommendation was announced to the press. While most welcomed the choice, it surprised some Chicago-area lawyers; others were put off by the implication of corruption in Chicago, however mild, that followed from Peter Fitzgerald’s emphasis on the New York attorney’s independence. A few weeks later, on May 29, the four men on trial for the embassy bombings were convicted. They were later given life sentences. (Fitzgerald had sought the death penalty for the two convicted of planting the bombs.)

On September 1, 2001, after a visit to relatives in Ireland, Fitzgerald started working in Chicago, even though the U.S. Senate had not yet confirmed his appointment. Ten days later 19 terrorists commandeered four airplanes in the northeastern part of the U.S. They flew two of the planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in New York City, and one into the Pentagon; one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks. The massive damage and loss of life were precisely what Rahman and his associates had been convicted of planning, and, as Fitzgerald told Mike Robinson for the Associated Press (November 13, 2001), while watching the towers fall on television, he immediately thought of bin Laden. Federal officials soon contacted Fitzgerald, mining him for information about Al Qaeda and its leaders and for some time keeping his location secret. "He knows more about the bin Laden network than anyone else in the world, and [federal officials] need him now," an unnamed prosecutor told Jerry Markon and Laurie P. Cohen for the Wall Street Journal (September 21, 2001). On October 23 the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to approve his appointment to the Northern District. By late November Fitzgerald had returned to his Chicago office. (Currently, he still maintains close ties to various federal investigations of terrorists, especially as the head of a subcommittee on terrorism that is an arm of the U.S. attorney general’s advisory committee.)

For most of the next two years, Fitzgerald’s work was largely restricted to overseeing cases involving corruption, drug sales, gang activities, fraud, and white-collar crime cases. During that time any lingering resentment over his outsider status faded from view. Office morale was reported to have improved, and other federal law officials said that his work was helping to motivate their staffs as well as his own. Among other actions, he set in place new rules governing how his office can negotiate plea agreements with defendants.

During the first third of 2002, according to O’Connor, Fitzgerald’s office brought 229 indictments against a total of 457 felony defendants--55 and 137 more, respectively, than for the same period the year before. The first of the indictments to attract national attention was against Enaam Arnaout, the executive director of an Islamic charitable organization known in the U.S. as the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF). Though the government acknowledged that Arnaout’s organization operated in part as a charity, when he was arrested in May 2002 it alleged that BIF directed a portion of its funds toward the support of terrorists and that Arnaout had direct ties to Al Qaeda. In addition to accusing him of providing material support to terrorists, the government indicted Arnaout for fraudulently obtaining funds for his charity (technically, the charge was racketeering) and for perjury. Arnaout denied any connection to Al Qaeda, but on the eve of the trial, he pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering and promised to provide the government with information. The judge in the case emphasized that no connections with Al Qaeda had been proven, and to many the plea to the lesser charge and the relatively light sentence (11 years in prison) that Arnaout received were evidence that Fitzgerald’s case had been weak from the beginning. An independent government commission (the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States) charged with investigating the events of September 11, 2001 later concluded that the methods used to prosecute BIF and another Islamic charity that had been charged around the same time raised "substantial civil liberty concerns" and that the two investigations "revealed little compelling evidence that either of these charities actually provided financial support to al Qaeda—at least after al Qaeda was designated a foreign terrorist organization in 1999." According to Kirsten Scharnberg, Fitzgerald nonetheless remains pleased with the results of his investigation.

In December 2003 the continuing federal investigation into corruption among Illinois state-government officials, named Operation Safe Roads after the trucking-license scandal that inspired the original inquiry, led to the indictment of former Illinois governor George Ryan. Fitzgerald alleged in the indictment that Ryan had obtained $167,000 by illegal means during his time in office and had funneled to a friend over $300,000 worth of gifts, services, and loans. Ryan's trial started in September 2005 and as of early December had not yet ended.

Less than a month after he indicted Ryan, Fitzgerald was named by James Comey, his former colleague in New York and currently the assistant U.S. attorney general, to lead a grand jury investigation into the revealing of the name of a covert CIA agent to the syndicated newspaper columnist and cable-television commentator Robert Novak. The CIA agent, whom Novak identified by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, was the wife of a former U.S. ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who, in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, had criticized the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by a coalition of forces led by the U.S. The leak of the agent’s name was said to have come from members of the administration of President George W. Bush in retribution for Wilson’s making his criticisms public. Fitzgerald’s political independence was one of the qualities that stood most strongly in his favor as the potential prosecutor of what became known as the Plame case. "He is an absolutely apolitical career prosecutor," Comey said in his formal announcement, according to Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe (December 31, 2003). "He is a man with extensive experience in national security and intelligence matters, extensive experience conducting sensitive investigations, and in particular in conducting investigations of alleged government misconduct."

As the Plame case has proceeded, the media have watched Fitzgerald closely, but very little information about his activities has been revealed. From early on, speculation as to the identity of the leaker focused on senior officials in the Bush White House, in particular Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior adviser and current deputy chief of staff, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was then serving as the chief of staff of Vice President Richard B. Cheney. Fitzgerald was permitted to interview President Bush and Vice President Cheney together for an hour, though not under oath, and many other senior officials have spoken to him as well. Almost from the beginning, Fitzgerald stirred controversy because of his expressed determination to force journalists connected with the case to testify, even if in doing so they would have to reveal the names of sources who had given them information in strict confidence. Though it has been upheld in certain circumstances by Supreme Court rulings, the confidentiality of journalistic sources is not protected explicitly by legislation. Journalists have long insisted that such confidentiality is essential to their work, and for the most part prosecutors have recognized it as a proper privilege of the press.

Most journalists connected with the case have either acknowledged testifying for the grand jury or refused to comment to other members of the press about their involvement in the investigation. One influential reporter, the New York Times journalist Judith Miller, vocally and repeatedly refused to tell Fitzgerald about her involvement with the case, despite Libby's having signed a formal letter releasing her from the confidentiality agreement after Fitzgerald began working on the case; Libby's signature was viewed by Miller as having been coerced. Her determination to protect her source brought the somewhat controversial Miller admiration from members of the media even before Fitzgerald succeeded in putting her in jail for contempt of court, on July 6, 2005. The columnist William Safire, for example, wrote for the New York Times (September 29, 2004), "This principled journalist is risking her freedom and defending us all by fighting the subversive subpoena" brought against her by Fitzgerald, whom Safire described as a "runaway Chicago prosecutor." Editorial writers around the country concurred with Safire’s argument that the pursuit of Miller constituted a threat to the freedom of the press. Miller spent 85 days in jail, gaining her release only after she agreed to testify, having received a second letter from Libby. In an appearance on the Cable News Network show Lou Dobbs Tonight, Miller said after her release, according to a transcript on the Web site for the magazine Editor and Publisher (October 4, 2005), that if Fitzgerald succeeds in bringing "serious" indictments "then I might have to say that perhaps his zealousness with respect to his mission was justified. . . . But if he doesn’t have anything, I will wonder about why I had to spend 85 days in jail, and why I may be the only one to spend time in jail." (Miller and the New York Times ended their association on November 9, 2005.)

On October 28, 2005, three days before the grand jury was scheduled to be dismissed, Fitzgerald announced at a press conference in Washington, D.C., that he was bringing five charges against Libby, who insisted that he was innocent but offered his resignation at virtually the same time that Fitzgerald made his announcement. (One charge against Libby was for obstruction of justice, two were for perjury, and two were for making false statements to FBI agents who interviewed him in the case.) Rove was not indicted but, according to Fitzgerald, remained a subject of investigation. During his 66-minute session with the press, Fitzgerald fielded questions from reporters but pointedly refused to provide more information than his indictment mentioned. "My job is to investigate whether a crime was committed, can be proved and should be charged," Fitzgerald said, according to Richard B. Schmitt in the Los Angeles Times (October 30, 2005). "I’m not going to comment . . . beyond that. It’s not my jurisdiction, not my job, not my judgment." Less than a month later, on November 17, Fitzgerald announced an eight-point indictment for fraud against another high-profile figure, the financier Conrad Black, in a matter not connected to the Plame case. The following day Fitzgerald said that he planned to convene another grand jury to look into the Plame case, which had taken an unexpected turn only a few days before, when the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward revealed that he had been told Valerie Wilson’s name by a White House official before Libby had allegedly leaked it to a number of other reporters, including Miller.

Never married, Fitzgerald has been described by friends as unable to sustain an intimate relationship because of his long work hours. As of early December 2005, though, he was said to be dating.