Patrick Fitzgerald

Patrick Fitzgerald (born December 22, 1960, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American lawyer who, as the U.S. attorney (Northern District of Illinois) in Chicago (2001–12) and as a special prosecutor, supervised a number of high-profile investigations in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Fitzgerald was born to Irish immigrant parents in New York City. He paid for his university studies by working as a janitor and—like his father—as a doorman in Manhattan. Fitzgerald studied mathematics and economics at Amherst (Massachusetts) College, graduating in 1982. He earned a law degree from Harvard University in 1985 and worked in private practice until 1988, when he joined the U.S. Department of Justice (Southern District of New York) as an assistant U.S. attorney in New York City. In that job, he pursued cases against drug dealers, Mafia leaders, and terrorists—including the indictment of Osama bin Laden in 1998 for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He also developed a reputation for using obscure or long-forgotten laws to clinch a case; he built his case against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) upon a statute that dated back to the Civil War.

Despite a portfolio brimming with high-stakes, politically charged cases, Fitzgerald shunned affiliation with any political party—a stance that lent credence to his work. This helped when in 2001 Fitzgerald became the U.S. attorney in Chicago, where he brought corruption charges against Republicans and Democrats alike, among them former Illinois governor George Ryan and associates of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. He again drew on the finer points of law, using mail fraud charges to bring indictments against Ryan.

Fitzgerald continued his work as the U.S. attorney in Chicago after becoming in 2003 the Justice Department’s special prosecutor for the investigation into the leak of the identity of a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer (Valerie Plame). In October 2005, after two years of conducting interviews and collecting evidence, Fitzgerald indicted I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, chief of staff to U.S. Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, for having made false statements and having committed perjury during a grand jury investigation of the case. The following month Fitzgerald made new headlines by indicting Canadian-British media tycoon Conrad Black for fraud. Both Libby and Black were later convicted. In December 2008 Fitzgerald filed criminal corruption charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, alleging that, among other things, Blagojevich had attempted to “sell” the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The first trial of Blagojevich ended in August 2010 with a hung jury on all but one of the corruption counts (lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation). Prosecutors sought to streamline their case by dropping a number of redundant charges in the subsequent retrial, which concluded in June 2011 when the jury returned a guilty verdict on 17 of the 20 charges against Blagojevich.

In June 2012 Fitzgerald stepped down as the U.S. attorney in Chicago. He subsequently joined a private law practice in the city. In 2017 Fitzgerald and his firm were hired by Michigan State University (MSU) after one of its former doctors, Larry Nassar, was accused—and later found guilty—of sexually abusing numerous girls and women. Although school officials had implied that Fitzgerald was conducting an independent investigation into whether MSU had been aware of Nassar’s criminal behaviour, it was later revealed that he had only been hired as legal counsel.