Scooter Libby got screwed. The former chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney was convicted Tuesday on four of five charges of perjury and obstruction in the Valerie Plame identity leak affair and now faces years of jail time. Yet justice was not served: Mr. Libby was merely the political fall guy in a circus-like story of a headhunting special prosecutor determined to get a conviction at any cost. The problem for prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was that, from the beginning, there was no crime to go after.

The media and political insiders have been obsessed with this scandal for more than three years, yet some basic truths of the whole affair have been misreported to the general public from the beginning. Nobody in the White House "outed" CIA employee Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joe Wilson; Richard Armitage, a former State Department official who frequently butted heads with the Bush administration, unintentionally leaked Ms. Plame's identity in 2003.

Another fact in this case that we must shine light on, since the mainstream media will not, is that the leak of Ms. Plame's identity was not even a crime — her identity is not protected under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. She was not undercover, yet Mr. Wilson, Ms. Plame and Democratic leaders in Congress have been accusing the Bush administration of breaking laws by leaking a protected CIA official's identity for political reasons when that is simply untrue. Even Mr. Fitzgerald has acknowledged this!

But if no initial crime against CIA official Ms. Plame was ever committed, why did Mr. Fitzgerald charge ahead against top Bush administration officials like Karl Rove and Mr. Libby? Good question. Mr. Fitzgerald overzealously pursued the Bush inner circle until he found a crime to hang his hat on, however irrelevant it might be to the initial case. Ultimately, Mr. Libby's charges were based on inconsistencies within his grand jury testimony. He testified that he was "taken aback" when NBC journalist Tim Russert mentioned Ms. Plame's CIA status to him, yet it emerged that he had already been informed of her status from Mr. Cheney and lied about already knowing. Did this truly have to become the political scandal of the decade?

So if the upper echelons of the Bush White House never orchestrated some grand scheme to out Ms. Plame in an attempt to sabotage her husband, why are the Wilsons, along with Democratic leaders, so happy with this guilty verdict? Mr. Wilson reported that he is satisfied with this verdict, even though the case had nothing to do with him. According to Fox News, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said, "It's about time someone in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics." What are you talking about, Harry? This trial had nothing to do with intelligence manipulation. It had nothing to do with discrediting war critics. But the anti-Bush clowns in Washington, including the mainstream media, are more interested in distorting the facts and the integrity of our legal system to achieve their political goals than they are with telling the truth.

I'm not saying Mr. Libby did not lie under oath. But maybe the legitimacy and integrity of the trial that delivered that verdict should be questioned. From the outset, Mr. Fitzgerald has appeared more motivated by toppling a high-ranking official than serving justice. By the time he was appointed in December 2003, Mr. Armitage had already acknowledged that he was responsible for the original leak of the identity, and the investigation should have gone no further. Yet, with clear evidence to the contrary, Mr. Fitzgerald — convinced that laws were broken — continued going after figures at the top of the Bush White House, including the vice president. It was not until this unnecessary investigation proceeded that a purported crime was committed, and that is how the prosecutor got his much-wanted scalp Tuesday.

Mr. Fitzgerald simply wanted to inflate his own importance by creating the false impression that a crime was committed. When he found no real crime, he manufactured a crime of process. That is, a charge related to his investigation, not the purported CIA leak. Unfortunately, Mr. Fitzgerald's pathetic antics not only do not serve the American political and judicial systems, they will instead have a chilling effect on future testimony in cases where a witness can simply cooperate minimally by "not recalling."

The usual suspects in our Democrat-controlled Congress can lie to themselves all they want about this trial being about the Bush administration smearing its enemies. But the only things that got smeared were the justice system and Mr. Libby. Now, the only way for justice to be served is for President Bush to pardon Mr. Libby.

Will Smith ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in political science and religious studies.