Jack Kelly quotes the Anchoress, who describes a recent conversation with a neighbor at the supermarket on democrat partisanship and MSM coverage of the NSA Flap. The Democrats and the press seem to have lost all seriousness and all credibility regarding national security, ” says the Anchoress , to which her neighbor (a democrat) responds:

“Oh, you said a mouthful, kid! I’m so disgusted with my party I’m thinking of sittin’ out the next election, because these people have lost any sense of what their jobs are; they seem to think they were put into office to destroy Bush, and that is all that motivates them – it’s all they can think about, and they seem to think this is what they were charged with, when we put them in office. Hello? I didn’t freaking vote for Schumer to shove his face into every camera, promote himself and play obstruction games when we have a war to fight. I did not vote for Hillary so she could sit around waiting for opinion polls to tell her what to do before she runs for president, and you know what, if she doesn’t mean to be a senator then she shouldn’t be running for the seat in ‘06! Let her step aside, and be honest for once, and start her freakin’ presidential campaign, already, and let a serious legislator run for her seat – her office is rude and unresponsive, anyway – she’s useless! At least you call Schumer’s office, they are respectful – if you look for help, they actually respond, even if they don’t do anything, they send a freakin’ letter letting you know they know you’re alive and they need your vote again. Hillary’s office? They can’t be bothered with anyone! And don’t get me started on this Patriot Act nonsense! When I saw Reid saying they killed it I flipped out! I FREAKIN’ FLIPPED OUT! FOUR YEARS and we haven’t been attacked – what are Reid or Schumer or Hillary gonna say if they let the Patriot Act die and six months from now we’re attacked? They’re gonna blame Bush? Of course, they are, but they’re gonna have a hell of a time convincing the country that Bush is responsible for an attack when THEY were the ones who dropped the Patriot Act! And this FISA baloney is just that: BALONEY! I want to know whose (sic) leaking this crap! We had a big investigation on that stupid Valerie Plame deal, and who was she – she’s a nobody at a desk at Langley – we have two freakin’ years of investigations on that stupid issue, and it’s all probably Tim Russert’s doing, anyway – end it, already – let’s investigate who’s freaking LEAKING real national secrets! Whose leaking the CIA work? Whose leaking the surveillance? That’s what we need to know! THAT’S what we should be investigating, and if we find out who did it, we arrest the scum and throw him in jail, I don’t care who he is! I read that Jonathan Alter piece and I wanted to vomit, I wanted to puke my guts up! You know why? Because I remember something that maybe Alter has forgotten, that when 9/11 happened, Bush said he’d use ‘every tool’ at his disposal, and we all applauded that! Remember? We all said, THANK FREAKIN’ GOD this man is in charge, and he clearly means this! I haven’t forgotten it. I haven’t forgotten what downtown NYC smelled like for weeks after the attack. I haven’t forgotten the big freakin’ hole in the city. I haven’t forgotten what it felt like to look at a plane taking off from the airport, and me worrying that it was going to be blown up before my eyes from some freakin’ crazed assh*le with a bomb in his shoe, or someone on the ground with a surface-to-air missile – I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN – and I’m getting damned fed up with my party leadership that seems to have forgotten, and I’ll tell you what, they had better start REMEMBERING, real soon, or they’re gonna find their asses tossed OUT, come November if they don’t get with the program! And don’t even get me started with the papers, I cancelled the freakin’ papers – I’m fed up with all of them! What do I need the papers for, so I can read how everything bad that happens in the whole world is Bush’s fault? I can predict what they’re gonna write! Now, I want news, I go look at the internet, I turn on C-span and watch things for myself! I’m an educated woman, and I can think for myself, I don’t need newspapers if they’re not gonna gimmee news!”

Impeachment talk started on the left not long before Xmas: example, example2.

Responding, the New York Post today proposed another discussion meme: Treason.

What if they gave a scandal and nobody came? asks one of Roger L. Simon’s commenters.

Posted by: chuck at December 24, 2005 05:07 PM

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The New York Times’ James Bamford cheerfully tells us all about “the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word – which itself is secret,” and in the omniscient manner of journalists everywhere proceeds to evaluate the ultra-secret NSA’s current operations as “struggling to adjust to the war on terror.”

Jokingly referred to as “No Such Agency,” the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward.

Bamford naturally understands NSA’s mission better than its own leadership, or that of the elected administration. And he understands better too the limitations of data mining:

Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country… “Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands.”

Ignoring these insurmountable obstacles, Bamford scolds, the Bush Administration heedlessly proceeded to engage in automated data-mining, which he refers to as “eavesdropping.” Impersonal and automated monitoring of international communications searching for keywords, he thinks, should be out-of-bounds. US intelligence and defense agencies should be forced to investigate only on an individual basis, filling out the proper pile of paper work, and going to court, presenting a case, and obtaining an individual warrant. Such practices push the boundaries of the law, and might lead to tyranny.

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The Washington Post’s Susan Spaulding editorializes indignantly that the Bush Administration went right ahead, and covertly conducted an impersonal and automated search for potential terrorist communications in such secrecy “that Congress was [only] briefed ‘at least a dozen times’ in the four years since the wiretap program started.”

Presumably, the president should have funded an international advertising campaign to notify everyone what he was plannng to do, then conducted a full-scale national political debate before proceeding with a secret intelligence operation in time of war:

Even assuming that these classified briefings accurately conveyed all relevant facts, it appears that they were limited to only eight of the 535 senators and representatives, under a process that effectively eliminates the possibility of any careful oversight.

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In U.S. News & World Report, David E. Kaplan shrieks:

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree.

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The more sensible Mickey Kaus notes ruefully:

Another spy scandal and Bush will be at 60%.

While the Wall Street Journal quotes St. Paul on standing fast in liberty, the New York Times is publishing ersatz further revelations from the Pouting Spook Community attempting to build a case that the Bush Administation has been guilty of illegally defending the United States from legitimate forms of dissent, such as detonating nuclear devices in major cities like New York.

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

I find it very simple to refute the left’s nonsensical theories of sinister Executive Branch plots to violate the Constitution and stifle dissent. If the government were actually doing what it could, and should, be doing lawfully in time of war, none of these kinds of stories would be being published at all, since all domestic subversives (including the leaking doves and their jounalistic collaborators) would have long since been interned for the duration of the war to some inclement locality, an hour or so south of Barstow, California, where from behind barbed wire, they could devote their attention to herpetological studies and counting Joshua trees, instead of providing aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States.

Clarice Feldman is reporting in The American Thinker on the developments in the Pouting & Leaking Spooks affair. She is of the opinion that the tables are soon to be turned:

Liberal fantasies of Karl Rove being frog-marched in handcuffs for leaking classified information may turn into a nightmare of prominent liberals being prosecuted for damaging the fight against al Qaeda via leaks of classified data. There are no names on the public record yet, but somebody leaked the classified information about NSA surveillance to James Risen of the New York Times, and a year later his paper published the story.

The pieces falling in place are far from conclusive, but they are mighty suggestive.

President Bush believes that the national interest has been harmed. In all probability, gears are turning right now for a criminal investigation leading to a possible felony prosecution. Others are noting, as AT did last Sunday, that at the demand of the left itself, precedents have been set that could ensnare not “evil Republicans,” but “virtuous liberals” who think of themselves as whistleblowers. As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”

She links Jack Kelley who notes that L’Affaire Plame has already established the precedent of throwing reporters in the slam until they divulge their sources.

And she refers us to a very interesting theory proposed by AJ Strata, and continued here suggesting that activist liberal FISA Judge Robertson didn’t really resign after all, that he was suspended for a participatory role in the NYT leak leading to the current NSA Flap.

Editor & Publisher notes the appearance of impeachment talk recently in connection with the NASA flap all over the outposts of the leftwing commentariat:

NEW YORK Suddenly this week, scattered outposts in the media have started mentioning the “I” word, or at least the “IO” phrase: impeach or impeachable offense.

The sudden outbreak of anger or candor has been sparked by the uproar over revelations of a White House approved domestic spying program, with some conservatives joining in the shouting.

Ron Hutcheson, White House correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (known as “Hutch” to the president), observed that “some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.” Indeed such talk from legal experts was common in print or on cable news.

Newsweek online noted a “chorus” of impeachment chat, and its Washington reporter, Howard Fineman, declared that Bush opponents are “calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The ‘I-word’ is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more.”

Make no mistake. The level of the tactics of opposition the left is willing to resort to has increased continually over the last few decades with their ever growing frustration at political losses. These days, we see the Senate filibuster applied not just for the kind of primal confrontations which used to lead opponents in the major parties to die in the last ditch efforts. Today every significant mildly controversial bill, every tax cut, every presidential legislative initiative will reliably be filibustered.

We have reached a point of political opposition in which, if the weapon is available, the democrat opposition will use it.

The Bush Administration had better realize that it has only to lose control of the House of Representative in 2006, and they can bet that the NASA Flap or any later equivalent issue which can be inflated into a major scandal by the loving attentions of the democrat party’s MSM allies will be employed as a pretext for the Impeachment card to be played. The Left still believes it deserves revenge for the Clinton Impeachment, and for what it insists on looking upon as two “stolen” elections. The actual facts, fair play and intellectual honesty will have nothing to do with it. Lose the House and it will be Sauve qui peut! for the Bush Administration.

Since we could very well lose the House, if I were advising George W. Bush, I would tell him to fire that wimp Karl Rove, and get himself what is referred to in The Godfather as a war-time consigliere. The Bush Administration is being gradually brought down by the political equivalent of the death of a thousand cuts, by an endless succession of leaks and accusations. The opponents of the administration just keep throwing this one at the wall, and that one, to see which one is going to stick, and serve as the basis for a good old-fashioned Watergate-style scandal which can bring down the Administration.

Over four years, any endlessly repeated political initiative has a pretty decent probability of bearing fruit. As we have editorialized before, just like a football team, either an Administration is on the offensive or it is on the defensive. The only effective response to the calculated politics of scandal is to retaliate in kind more effectively. It’s not as if the opportunity does not exist. You have an active conspiracy of disgrunted former, and still active, Intelligence Community personnel leaking the most sensitive kinds of intelligence information for political purposes on time of war. A really aggressive Administration could be indicting people for treason. In this case, it should be entirely adequate to identify, prosecute, and punish some of the principal guilty parties on less extravagant charges.

The Bush Administration could take a leaf from the democrat party’s book, and learn how to use the politics of scandal to its own advantage. Only the politics of mutually assured destruction via scandal is likely to persuade democrats to relinquish ambitions of removing this president from office by impeachment.

Writing in the Washington Post, Posner argues that innocent parties’ privacy is not really generally being invaded by data-mining to find terrorist communications:

The collection, mainly through electronic means, of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy. But machine collection and processing of data cannot, as such, invade privacy. Because of their volume, the data are first sifted by computers, which search for names, addresses, phone numbers, etc., that may have intelligence value. This initial sifting, far from invading privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer.

Max Boot writing in the LA Times notes the left’s hypocritical double standard on leaking. Robert Novak’s mention of Valerie Plame’s employment has been treated in every MSM outlet, and throughout the leftwing Blogosphere, as the gravest intelligence-related crime in US history since Benedict Arnold tried selling West Point to the British. On the other hand, an endless succession of intelligence leaks far more damaging to US interests, emanating from the anti-Bush administration conspiracy of pouting spooks not only never receives the slightest criticism, but instead, in each and every case, the revelation is promoted as a government scandal revealed by crusading journalists, assisted by righteously distressed officials, whose identities must be kept secret.

IT SEEMS like only yesterday that every high-minded politician, pundit and professional activist was in high dudgeon about the threat posed to national security by the revelation that Valerie Plame was a spook. For daring to reveal a CIA operative’s name — in wartime, no less! — they wanted someone frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs, preferably headed for the gallows.

Since then there have been some considerably more serious security breaches. Major media organs have broken news about secret prisons run by the CIA, the interrogation techniques employed therein, and the use of “renditions” to capture suspects, right down to the tail numbers of covert CIA aircraft. They have also reported on a secret National Security Agency program to monitor calls and e-mails from people in the U.S. to suspected terrorists abroad, and about the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity designed to protect military bases worldwide.

Most of these are highly classified programs whose revelation could provide real aid to our enemies — far more aid than revealing the name of a CIA officer who worked more or less openly at Langley, Va. We don’t know what damage the latest leaks may have done, but we do know that past leaks about U.S. successes in tracking cellphones led Al Qaeda leaders to shun those devices.

So I eagerly await the righteous indignation from the Plame Platoon about the spilling of secrets in wartime and its impassioned calls for an independent counsel to prosecute the leakers. And wait … And wait …

Hat tip to Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The Harvard Crimson yesterday reports that Bob Woodward disclosed an interesting bit of gossip, over roast beef and asparagas, during an invitation-only dinner he attended at Harvard on December 5th:

in a conversation at Harvard earlier this month, Woodward hinted that he knows the identity of yet another key player in the case: Robert D. Novak’s original source for his July 2003 column on Plame, which touched off the scandal in the first place.

“His source was not in the White House, I don’t believe,” Woodward said of Novak over a private dinner at the Institute of Politics on Dec. 5. He did not indicate what information, if any, he had to corroborate the claim.

Woodward also denied conventional wisdom about the leak:

At the Harvard dinner, Woodward sparred with his friend and former Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, over the motives behind the leak. The pair had just come from the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics, where they spoke for more than an hour before television cameras and a large audience. The invite-only dinner afterward, which was attended by Harvard students as well as a handful of journalists and politicians, was declared on-the-record from the outset by Alex C. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, who moderated the dinner conversation.

Responding to Bernstein’s claim that the release of Plame’s identity was a “calculated leak” by the Bush administration, Woodward said flatly, “I know a lot about this, and you’re wrong.”

The Pouting Spooks unleashed today their latest salvo against the Bush Administration. This intelligence leak concerned the National Security Agency, was released via the NY Times, and featured a civil liberties scare story. The leak was carefully timed to compete for attention with headlines of the election in Iraq, and to assist Senate opponents in preventing a vote on the renewal of the Patriot Act.

The Times informed its readers breathlessly that:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

And then went on to source the story:

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Oh sure, they’re so anonymous. The pouting spooks behind this leak, and all the others, are a collection of Intelligence community and State Department doves, operating above-ground as Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS, which ought to be Vipers), mentioned here previously:

Ray McGovern, in a 2004 interview with the leftwing journal Mother Jones, stated that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Earlier Posts

NY Times promises of anonymity have already been demonstrated to be valueless in the face of criminal investigations, specifically as the result of the efforts of the same pouting spooks to criminalize policy differences. It seems inevitable that sooner or later the Administration is going to get tired of passively serving as a punching bag for an endless series orchestrated media attacks, and will decide what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, and begin prosecuting obvious breaches of federal law. The federal prison system is large enough to accomodate 35+ Vipers.

One of our correspondents in the Comments section, who signs himself “Charles Peirce” (clearly a pragmatist), cites a CNN article, dated 11 Feb 2004, in which it is reported that:

Sources told CNN that Plame works in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations — the part of the agency in charge of spying — and worked in the field for many years as an undercover officer.

“If she were only an analyst, not an operative, we would not have filed a crimes report” with the Justice Department, a senior intelligence official said.

Thanks to “Charles Peirce” for bringing this to our attention, but the question remains: is it actually true that Valerie Plame was in the Directorate of Operations? The Counterproliferation Center was clearly an analytic, rather an operational, entity.

A bit of web searching discloses an earlier Valerie Plame career as an CIA officer working with Non-Official Cover, what is called an NOC:

Plame worked as a spy internationally in more than one role. Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who put in 24 years as a spymaster and was Plame’s boss for a few years, says Plame worked under official cover in Europe in the early 1990s — say, as a U.S. embassy attache — before switching to nonofficial cover a few years later. Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student in what Rustmann describes as a “nice European city.” Plame was never a so-called deep-cover NOC, he said, meaning the agency did not create a complex cover story about her education, background, job, personal life and even hobbies and habits that would stand up to intense scrutiny by foreign governments. “[NOCs] are on corporate rolls, and if anybody calls the corporation, the secretary says, ‘Yeah, he works for us,'” says Rustmann. “The degree of backstopping to a NOC’s cover is a very good indication of how deep that cover really is.”

We find also some speculation on her earlier career:

France to expel US ’spy’ diplomats Evening Standard (London) February 22, 1995

FRANCE has accused four American diplomats and a fifth US citizen of political and economic spying and has ordered them to leave the country, Le Monde newspaper has reported.

Interior Minister Charles Pasqua wrote to President Francois Mitterrand that the five worked for the CIA and were guilty of “acts of interference”, including attempts to recruit aides to Cabinet ministers, the newspaper said. The letter reportedly said the five were uncovered in a “long, detailed investigation” by France’s counter-intelligence service. It was not immediately clear whether France had set a deadline for them to leave. The State Department would not comment today on the expulsion but former deputy assistant Secretary of State Ernest Preeg, who ran the White House Economic Policy Group, said the action seems unnecessarily dramatic and may have an ulterior motive. “It looks as if this may be just a little hanky-panky around the edges,” he said.

‘Every country has people trying to get intelligence one way or another. It’s standard practice, even among allies. You don’t do anything as sensational as expelling five Americans unless there is something else going on.” Mr Preeg added: “It is well known that the French are doing a lot of espionage in America, most of it commercial.”

Other sources suggest the motive for CIA recruitment of French officials may be political. France’s recent relations with Iran and Iraq have been worrying to Washington, which has focused a great deal of intelligence activity on the two governments.

One of the five, a woman, worked with “clandestine cover” outside the embassy, said Le Monde. One is considered the head of the CIA’s Paris operations and a second his deputy. The other two, a man and a woman, also have diplomatic status, said the paper.

Exaggeration on the part of the pouting spooks of the hazardous character of Valerie Plame’s CIA activities is not unknown:

Former CIA official Larry C. Johnson, who left the CIA in 2004, indicated Plame had been a ‘non-official cover operative’ (NOC). He explained: ‘…that meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.’

Valerie Plame graduated from the College of Europe, an international-relations school in Bruges, in 1995. One tends to doubt that even the bloodthirsty Belgians would really have executed the poor girl, no matter how mad the frogs had gotten at US attempts to suborn ministerial assistants or to steal recipes.

Valerie Plame is next known to have met Joe Wilson at a Washington party in early 1997. If she is, in fact, working in Washington in “early 1997,” then she is not stationed overseas five years before July of 2003, and no one has violated the Covert Agent Identity Protection Act.

Tom Maguire quotes Don Luskin, who concludes:

Was Plame really a covert operative? Yes, but this will be difficult to officially confirm and there will be debates as to just how covert she really was, and what real harm was done by outing her.

But is that really true?

Bob Novak, in the infamous 14 July 2003 column, refers to her imprecisely as an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. The word operative suggests that Valerie Plame was an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and a covert agent, working undercover on hazardous overseas assignments.

Valerie Plame was working in the Directorate of Operations, but she was working domestically in the DO Counterproliferation Division (CPD).

corrected 1 May 2006.

The MSM made much of Valerie Plame’s Brewster Jennings & Associates cover. The reality is not that Mrs. Wilson infiltrated the barbed-wire fortified boundary of a hostile foreign state, trusting for protection in her forged Brewster-Jennings parking permit. She merely listed that imaginary firm as her employer in connection with a 1999 one thousand dollar campaign donation to Al Gore. It appears that the reality is that “Brewster-Jennings” was merely a general purpose CIA front address, established in 1994, and available to numerous CIA personnel for use as a very modest form of employment camouflage.

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The real case for prosecuting the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment is based on the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which defines the protected category of covert agent as:

The term “covert agent” means—
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or
(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and—
(i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or
(ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or
(C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.

She obviously was not serving outside the United States at the time of the publication of the Novak column, so the basic question for a Special Counsel ought to have been: did Valerie Plame Wilson within the five years prior to 14 July 2003 really serve on CIA assignment outside the United States? If she did not, he ought to have packed his bags, closed the investigation, and gone back home to Chicago.