US: As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up his investigation into the leaking of a CIA agent's identity, the White House and its allies are preparing to attack any criminal charges as overzealous and based on legal technicalities.
Mr Fitzgerald is widely expected to issue indictments in the case this week and he has told Karl Rove, President George W Bush's top political adviser, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, that they are in serious legal jeopardy.
The case centres on the 2003 leaking to reporters of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent. Ms Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had embarrassed the Bush administration by debunking claims it made about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons capability.
Leaking a CIA agent's identity is considered a crime - but only if the culprit does so maliciously and deliberately, using information obtained in an official capacity and knowing that the person in question is an undercover agent.
Mr Fitzgerald's inquiry appears to be focusing less on the leak itself than on the cover-up that followed it and the lies some officials may have told to investigators.
Texas Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson this week warned Mr Fitzgerald against bringing charges of perjury or obstruction of justice. The conservative Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that Mr Fitzgerald risked being dragged into a political dispute over the war in Iraq and urged him to exercise caution in pressing charges.
"The temptation for any special counsel, who has only one case to prosecute, is to show an indictment for money and long effort. But Mr Fitzgerald's larger obligation is to see that justice is done and that should include ensuring that he doesn't become an agent for criminalising policy differences," the paper said.
The White House and its surrogates have been slow to attack Mr Fitzgerald personally, not least because he was appointed by the administration itself. Mr Bush recently praised the "dignified way" the special prosecutor was conducting the investigation, but the New York Daily News yesterday quoted a "White House ally" denouncing Mr Fitzgerald. "He's a vile, detestable, moralistic person with no heart and no conscience, who believes he's been tapped by God to do very important things," the source said.
The son of Irish immigrants, Mr Fitzgerald grew up in New York where his father worked as a doorman on the upper east side of Manhattan. He attended Regis High School, an all-scholarship Jesuit school for gifted children from all backgrounds, before working as a caretaker to pay his way through Amherst College and later attending Harvard Law School.
He worked in a New York law firm before joining the US attorney's office in Manhattan in 1988, where he won a reputation as a meticulous, aggressive and tenacious prosecutor.
He stayed for 13 years, convicting Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and indicting Osama bin Laden in a conspiracy that included the bombings of two US embassies in Africa.
The CIA leak investigation has provoked serious soul-searching in the New York Times. Its editor, Bill Keller, last week distanced the paper from its Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail before telling the grand jury that Mr Libby discussed the CIA agent with her.
Mr Keller said this week that Ms Miller, who has taken leave of absence to write a book, is unlikely to return to the New York Times.
