Plamegate

[Mister Tee]

So did I, Damien.

[Damien]

Meaningless bit of trivia: Patrick FitzGerald and Bill Condon went to the same high school (Regis High in New York City).

[Sonic Youth]

For all we know, Fitz may ask for an extension. In which case, I'm getting my doctor to prescribe me a bottle of tranquilizers.

[Mister Tee]

I know what you're saying, Sonic. There's always the fear this is Exit Polls II - the Sequel.

But these reports are from people who aren't inclined to shoot from the hip -- who've been very accurate in the past.

[Sonic Youth]

Let me just go on the record as saying that the longer this goes on, the more skeptical I become. We've been burned too many times.

I did put a bottle of wine in the fridge, just in case.

[Penelope]

LOL, I'm just now listening to the old Jigsaw song "Sky High" as I read this!

[Mister Tee]

Anyone interested in the close-to-confirmed buzz floating around today should go to dailykos.com for stuff that won't make it onto network until the "i"'s are dotted, but seems awfully legit.

What's being bandied about -- major indictments; Cheney's office being directly questioned; civil rights violations asserted in the Wilson matter; Fitzgerald investigating the phony Niger document itself; a request to empanel a NEW grand jury -- all suggests the term "sky high" isn't big enough to describe how far the adminstration will be blown out of the water.

[Sonic Youth]

One more thing. I sort of know someone who works in the media. (Don't ask who. I'm not telling, and you've never heard of her, anyway.) In an email, she told me she's heard that there will be twelve indictments handed down... at least.

[Sonic Youth]

<span style='font-size:12pt;line-height:100%'>LIBBY'S INDICTED</span>

(Maybe. Hold your applause.)

EDIT: ABC has denied the story.

[Sonic Youth]

Correction: Raw Story says there will be AT LEAST one or two indictments handed down for sure. There could be more. Either I misread or Raw Story updated. As long as they get indicted for something, that's fine, and I don't care what it is.

Anyway, here's something from a blog called The Washington Note. It may or may not be true. I choose to believe it is, otherwise I'll go out of my mind with impatience.

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001031.html

October 25, 2005
Indictments Coming Tomorrow; Targets Received Letters Today

An uber-insider source has just reported the following to TWN (since confirmed by another independent source):

1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.
2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.

3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and "filed" tomorrow.

4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.


The shoe is dropping.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

[Sonic Youth]

Raw Story is reporting that Fitzgerald is only planning to hand down one or two indictments. And there's no guarantee if the grand jury will go along with it or not. I have no idea if their sources are correct or not. What an anti-climax if this is true.

[Sonic Youth]

Is anyone indicted yet?!?

While we're biding our time...


My take on Plamegate (Pat Buchanan)


During Watergate, a good friend went to prison for saying twice before a grand jury, "I can't recall." That was about a picayune matter compared to Judy Miller's "I can't recall" to the question, "Who gave you this name, 'Valerie Flame'?"

So, my guess is that there are multiple indictments coming, for lying to investigators, perjury, obstruction of justice, and disclosure of national security secrets for political purposes. And maybe conspiracy.

As for the original charge of deliberately and knowingly outing a CIA covert operative, I still can't see it. Novak's second column seems to exonerate totally both his sources of any such charge.

As for the charge that the White House Iraq Group was out to "get" Joe Wilson, this does not seem to stand up either, unless the WHIG did something criminal to discredit him. Wilson's column struck the king and the king's men have as much right to challenge his veracity and motives, and even impeach his character as does a defense attorney dealing with a hostile prosecution witness trying to help convict his client.

My view remains: The White House leakers, in naming Plame, were not trying so much to "out" her, as to shift blame for have sent Wilson to Niger away from the White House and Veep over on to the CIA where, quite frankly, it belonged. They were not trying to kill Valerie's career, but simply saying, "We weren't the dumbos who sent Joe, the CIA did it."

My guess is, however, this thing has metastasized from the original charge and Libby or his lawyer may have problems in that they appear to have tried to signal Miller to invoke reporters' privilege, or not to testify, which seems to be not only interference with the investigation but an encouragement to Miller to commit contempt of court rather than help out the Bulldog. Scooter's lawyer has been scrambling like a runner caught fifteen yards behind the line of scrimmage on fourth down.

My own sense, from hearing and reading about Fitzgerald is that he may be going after much larger game, that he may have what Bob Bennett calls a "big case," that he may be going after the White House and WHIG for fabricating the case for war, that he is roaming afield, looking into who forged the Niger documents and passed them on to U.S. intelligence and whether the case for war was shot through with deceit and lies. (But if lying us into war is a crime, we would have to have a second look at that FDR memorial on the trail to Haynes Point.)

An interesting question is whether Fitzgerald is now working with McNulty, who got Larry Franklin to plead and is now going after AIPAC and the Israelis and has the fruits of five years of FBI investigations going back into the 1990s. Are the two Irish prosecutors collaborating?

What the White House has to fear is a trial, six months or a year down the road, where all the secrets of what was done to stampede us into war come spilling out, when the war is now going well, giving Democrats an excuse to say they were misled in voting for war.

While it may be a reach, this could be like the Hiss case. There, the Republican Right caught out a golden boy of the establishment whom the Left felt it had to defend, guilty or not. The Left took a beating in the public's eyes there as bad as the French Right did in the Dreyfus case. After Hiss, the Left never fully recovered the trust of the people or the confidence of the country.

Though this case may be narrowly about whether Libby or Rove lied to investigators or the grand jury, it could also become about whether we were lied into a war General Odom calls the "greatest strategic disaster in the history of the United States."

There is simply no good news here for Bush & Co., unless Patrick Fitzgerald declines to indict anyone. If, however, Fitzgerald comes down with no indictments, some journalists will have to be put on suicide watch, so heavy is their psychological and emotional investment in this case.

[Sonic Youth]

Woman of Mass Destruction
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

Saturday 22 October 2005

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur - never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times' seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok."

Judy's stories about WMD fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber that former Senator Bob Graham dubbed "incestuous amplification." Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.

Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.

When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D issues. But he admitted in The Times' Sunday story about Judy's role in the Plame leak case that she had kept "drifting" back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she "got it totally wrong" about WMD "If your sources are wrong," she said, "you are wrong." But investigative reporting is not stenography.

The Times' story and Judy's own first-person account had the unfortunate effect of raising more questions. As Bill said in an e-mail note to the staff on Friday, Judy seemed to have "misled" the Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, about the extent of her involvement in the Valerie Plame leak case.

She casually revealed that she had agreed to identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, as a "former Hill staffer" because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The implication was that this bit of deception was a common practice for reporters. It isn't.

She said that she had wanted to write about the Wilson-Plame matter, but that her editor would not allow it. But Managing Editor Jill Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief, denied this, saying that Judy had never broached the subject with her.

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame." Nor does it seem credible that she doesn't know how the name got into her notebook and that, as she wrote, she "did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby."

An Associated Press story yesterday reported that Judy had coughed up the details of an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log showing that she had met with him on June 23, 2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

Judy is refusing to answer a lot of questions put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes that she shared with the grand jury. I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

[Sonic Youth]

Prosecutor Fitzgerald opens web site

Save it on Favorites!

[Sonic Youth]

Post-Rove thinking under way at White House
Bush administration mulls effects of CIA leak case

By Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker
The Washington Post
Updated: 1:31 p.m. ET Oct. 21, 2005


WASHINGTON - At 7:30 each morning, President Bush's senior staff gathers to discuss the important issues of the day -- Middle East peace, the Harriet Miers nomination, the latest hurricane bearing down on the coast. Everything, that is, except the issue on everyone's mind.

With special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald driving his CIA leak investigation toward an apparent conclusion, the White House now confronts the looming prospect that no one in the building is eager to address: a Bush presidency without Karl Rove. In a capital consumed by scandal speculation, most White House senior officials are no more privy than outsiders to the prosecutor's intentions. But the surreal silence in the Roosevelt Room each morning belies the nervous discussions racing elsewhere around the West Wing.

Out of the hushed hallway encounters and one-on-one conversations, several scenarios have begun to emerge if Rove or vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis Libby is indicted and forced out. Senior GOP officials are developing a public relations strategy to defend those accused of crimes and, more importantly, shield Bush from further damage, according to Republicans familiar with the plans. And to help steady a shaken White House, they say, the president might bring in trusted advisers such as budget director Joshua B. Bolten, lobbyist Ed Gillespie or party chairman Ken Mehlman.

'Demoralized and unhappy'

These tentative discussions come at a time when White House senior officials are exploring staff changes to address broader structural problems that have bedeviled Bush's second term, according to Republicans who said they could speak candidly about internal deliberations only if they are not named. But it remains unclear whether Bush agrees that changes are needed and the uncertainty has unsettled his team.

"People are very demoralized and unhappy," a former administration official said. "The leak investigation is [part of it], but things were not happy before this took preeminence. It's just been a rough year. A lot has gotten done, but nothing is easy."

Bush implicitly acknowledged the distractions in answer to a reporter's question during a Rose Garden appearance with visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday, while reassuring the public that he remained focused on the pressing matters of state facing his White House.

"There's some background noise here, a lot of chatter, a lot of speculation and opining," Bush said. "But the American people expect me to do my job, and I'm going to."

Losing the upper hand

For a president and a White House accustomed to controlling their political circumstances in a one-party town, the culmination of the leak investigation represents another in a string of events beyond their grasp. Like Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war and rising gasoline prices, there is little at the moment that Bush strategists can do to alter the political equation.

But the road that led them to this moment is paved with potholes that Bush aides privately concede they could have avoided, and many Republicans are examining the situation for deeper issues to address. From the failed effort to restructure Social Security to the uproar over the Miers nomination to the Supreme Court, Bush's second-term operation has been far more prone to mistakes than his first.

In the view of many Republicans, fatigue may be one factor affecting the once smooth-running White House. Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. gets up each day at 4:20 a.m., arrives at his office a little over an hour later, gets home between 8:30 and 9 p.m. and often still takes calls after that; he has been in his pressure-cooker job since Bush was inaugurated, longer than any chief of staff in decades. "He looks totally burned out," a Republican strategist said.

Others, including Rove, Bolten, counselor Dan Bartlett, senior adviser Michael J. Gerson and press secretary Scott McClellan, have been running at full tilt since 1999, when the Bush team began gearing up in Austin for the first campaign.

At the same time, the innermost circle has shrunk in the second term, mainly to Vice President Cheney, Card, Rove, Bartlett, Libby and, on foreign policy issues, national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. Aides who joined the White House staff after last year's reelection, such as communications director Nicolle Devenish (who now goes by her married name, Nicolle Wallace), domestic policy adviser Claude Allen and political director Sara Taylor, have brought fresh perspectives and earned Bush's trust but do not share the long history with him that he values.

Many allies blame the insularity of his team for recent missteps, such as the Miers nomination. Even some sympathetic to her believe the vetting process broke down because as White House counsel she was so well known to the president that skeptical questions were not asked.

Rove ‘the central nervous system'

Some GOP officials outside the White House say they believe the president rejects the idea that there is anything fundamentally wrong with his presidency; others express concern that Bush has strayed so far from where he intended to be that it may require drastic action.

At the heart of all those discussions is Rove. With the deceptive title of deputy chief of staff, Rove runs much of the White House, including its guiding political strategy and many of its central policy initiatives. "Karl is the central nervous system right now, and that's obviously a big thing -- not only politically, but now he's in that big policy job," a former White House official said.

At the White House and among its close allies, discussion about Rove's fate is verboten -- in part of out of fear and in part out of ignorance about what his legal vulnerability actually is. "No one in the White House wants to talk about an indictment," another former official said. "No one wants to believe anything's going to happen." Nor do people easily discuss other staff changes. "Anyone who talks about that kind of stuff should be shot," said a third Republican with close ties to the White House.

But, this Republican noted, "I am sure Karl and the president talk about it." And the assumption is Rove could not stay if indicted.

Big shoes to fill

Without Rove, Bush likely would need more than one person to take his place, according to people close to the White House. Bolten, who served as deputy chief of staff in the first term and now heads the Office of Management and Budget, is widely deemed a savvy policy master who could assume a broader role. Gillespie, who shepherded the confirmation of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and advises Miers, had hoped to extricate himself even from this assignment, but colleagues said he would be a logical person to bring in for political strategy.

Mehlman, who was White House political director before becoming chairman of the Republican National Committee, has been a key adviser, although some colleagues worry that bringing in the party chief might send too political a message. Some close to the White House suggest Clay Johnson III, the deputy budget director who was Bush's chief of staff in the Texas governor's office, could be part of a reconstituted team. Attention has also focused on former White House counselor Karen P. Hughes, but she was just confirmed by the Senate as undersecretary of state and seems unlikely to leave.

Some strategists said Bush could accommodate the loss if he had to. "When Karen Hughes left, a lot of people said she's indispensable and impossible to replace and it might hurt the president in an election year," said Charles R. Black, a GOP lobbyist who advises the White House. "But Dan Bartlett and others stepped up, and no one missed a beat."

Mehlman said the president's problems would eventually be overshadowed by his broader agenda. "It's a mistake to allow the political headline of the moment to obscure the overall progress being made on a lot of important fronts," he said. "We're about to have a big debate about taxing and spending. Those are debates where we historically have done well and will this time."

Another former administration official said the key to the future for the White House will be restoring unity within the party. "Everyone in the Republican Party needs to figure out how to stick together and get things done in a constructive manner," he said. "That hides all sorts of fault lines."