February 13, 2004: Fitzgerald Grants Former White House Press Secretary Immunity in Return for Testimony

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald grants former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony in the Plame Wilson leak investigation. Fleischer is granted immunity from any criminal charge related to his involvement in the Plame Wilson identity leak (see July 7, 2003, 8:00 a.m. July 11, 2003, and 1:26 p.m. July 12, 2003) except “against charges of perjury, giving false statement, or otherwise failing to comply with the Order of the Court.” Fleischer will testify to the FBI several days later. [US District Court for the District of Columbia, 2/13/2004] In 2007, during the Lewis Libby trial, Fitzgerald will tell presiding Judge Reggie Walton (see January 25-27, 2007) that he opposed granting immunity to Fleischer because Fleischer’s lawyers refused to give a detailed “proffer” of what Fleischer would reveal. “They refused to give us a proffer,” Fitzgerald will say. “It wasn’t as if someone said ‘here’s what we’ll give you.’ It wasn’t something that we had laid out before us.… We were told he had relevant information. Frankly, I didn’t want to give him immunity, I was buying a pig in a poke. I did not know what we were going to get other than I knew it was going to be relevant to the case.” [Marcy Wheeler, 1/25/2007]