Blog of law articles

Our friend Glenn continues to pretend he's a lawyer, except now he's a top-notch US Attorney taking pot shots at the prosecutorial record of Patrick Fitzgerald, one of the more celebrated US attorneys in the country.

There's so much straw men hackery to unpack in Glenn's op-ed that it could take literally days and valuable billable hours, but let's just examine the main claim -- that Peter Lance wrote a good book that exposes Patrick Fitzgerald as a bumbling, inept and dishonest AUSA.

In other words, Glenn wrote a press release!

Glenn even kindly timed it so his column would coincidentally run the same day (today) that Lance holds a big press conference in DC to drum up publicity for his book.

Nice work Glenn!

From what I can tell, Glenn basically cribbed his op-ed almost entirely from Peter Lance's own voluminous press releases, available at his website. (The oddball stuff about the Plame prosecution is of course Glenn's own straw-man invention).

If you actually read the letters from Fitzgerald (which are extremely well-written and highly persuasive), Fitzgerald makes a compelling case that Lance made or makes a number of dubious and/or possibly defamatory claims.

I'm sure due solely to word constraints, Glenn fails to mention that some of Lance's key claims were debunked in a recent book by former AUSA and NRO legal contributor Andy McCarthy, who appeared on The O'Reilly Factor to denounce the book as follows:

"This (book) is scurrilously presented. Everything he says we were hiding about Ali Mohamed was presented in open court. It is represented in the book in a widely disingenuous way, relying on convicted terrorists and convicted murderers as sources."

Glenn also fails to mention that the book was first published under the now defunct "Regan Books" imprint, in a lame effort to make the book seem more respectable.

Regan Books, you may recall, published important literary works such as "O.J. Simpson: If I Did It," as well as highly regarded tomes by Janice Dickinson, Jenna Jameson, Jose Conseco, and of course Sean Hannity.

Didn't one of those win the Booker Prize?

Glenn also neglects to inform his readers that National Geographic apparently dissociated themselves from Lance due to his insistence on making claims that could not be "independently confirmed."

You can see see other thoughtful, detailed criticism of the book not anywhere in Glenn's column, but instead here, here and here.