Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson today criticized 
    Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's handling of the C-I-A
    leak investigation. The Republican former lawmaker said 
    the prosecutor had to have known from the start that it 
    was not a crime to disclose Valerie Plame's identity as an
    agent. . . .

    Thompson's objections are the same ones Democratic 
    politicians made in the 1990s about independent counsel 
    Kenneth Starr, who spent six years investigating President
    Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.