Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois since 2001, gets the nod as The National Law Journal's 2005 Lawyer of the Year. Writes the mag's Leigh Jones, "No one else in 2005 roiled politics inside the Beltway and the media that feed on it like the prosecutor from Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald."
The list is long on powerful politicians, lawyers and journalists that his continuing [Plamegate] investigation has touched so far. But the matter also encompasses the very reasons for the war in Iraq that has cost about 2,150 American lives, while at the same time striking at the heart of freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution. For those reasons, Fitzgerald is The National Law Journal's 2005 Lawyer of the Year. At 44, Fitzgerald is, to some, exacting and thorough. To others, he is perhaps obsessive and relentless. But it is this attention to detail and his formidable memory that many observers say make him a tough and level-headed adversary."
"If I were someone who was a bad guy, I would not want him on my trail," Jones quotes criminal defense attorney Frederick Cohn, who once opposed him. "He doesn't take unfair advantage of the fact that he's smart." Fitzgerald's accomplishments are recounted along with notes that "The attorney for [Karl] Rove, Robert Luskin with Patton Boggs in Washington, declined to comment for this article. [Scooter] Libby's attorney, Theodore Wells of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, did not return a phone call... Fitzgerald, famously press shy, is known to keep cool under pressure. Dean Polales, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago who served as counsel to Fitzgerald until last February, said that his former boss is positively "mellow." ... Fitzgerald would not comment for this article."
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