Rove - to be indicted

[deep]

UPDATE: Plamegate: the Next Step

This just in from the AP:

Federal prosecutors have accepted an offer from presidential adviser Karl Rove to give 11th-hour testimony in the case of a CIA officer's leaked identity but have warned they cannot guarantee he won't be indicted, according to people directly familiar with the investigation.

What this means is Rove's lawyer, Bob Luskin, believes his client is defintely going to be indicted.
So, Luskin is sending Rove back into the grand jury to try to get around the prosecutor and sell his innocence directly to the grand jurors. Legal defense work doesn't get more desperate than this. The prosecutor is happy to let Rove go under oath again--without his lawyer in the room--and try to wiggle out of the case. The prosecutor has every right to expect that Rove's final under-oath grilling will either add a count or two to the indictment or force Rove to flip and testify against someone else.

Also from the AP story, this Luskin quote:


"I can say categorically that Karl has not received a target letter from the special counsel. The special counsel has confirmed that he has not made any charging decisions in respect to Karl."

I love Luskin. I really do. He is the best legal curve ball pitcher in Washington. How is the AP reporter supposed to know that prosecutors do not have to send target letters to targets? Mafia lawyers are not sitting around waiting for target letters.

Fitzgerald could have told Luskin verbally that Rove is a target. And because Fitzgerald is not subpoening Rove to testify, he has no obligation to send him a target letter.

If Fitzgerald told Luskin that the grand jury was very likely to indict Rove, Luskin can very honestly say, "The special counsel has confirmed that he has not made any charging decisions in respect to Karl."

As usual, Luskin has said nothing that is inconsitent with Rove being indicted. But it usually takes the MSM a news cycle or two to figure that out.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

I'll bring the popcorn

 

[trevster2k]

Isn't this the kind of thing presidential pardons are for? Ken Lay, Tom Delay and the like aren't to worried so long as they are convicted before Georgie leaves office.

 

[najeena]

They might get pardoned, but the pardoner and the padonee will both be remembered for it.

 

[deep]

They are all scared shitless at the WhiteHouse.

Rove, Libby, Cheney should be indicted, convicted and jailed.


Judy Miller is no first amendment hero.

She is a coconspirator piece of crap!

 

[Irvine511]

They are all scared shitless at the WhiteHouse.

Rove, Libby, Cheney should be indicted, convicted and jailed.


Judy Miller is no first amendment hero.

She is a coconspirator piece of crap!

let's not forget -- it was Judy Miller's pieces in that liberal newspaper called The New York Times that played a *huge* roll in helping the administration sell it's case about Iraq's fradulent WMD's. her column was essentially a mouthpiece for administration stooge (and later dupe) Ahmed Chalabi.

yes, it's that liberal media, unwilling to tell the truth about what goes on in iraq.

only this time, it that liberal media spread lies fed to it by the adminstration.

 

[Dreadsox]

I hope that the guilty party suffers. This whole thing pissed me off tremendously.

 

[deep]

Vice President's role in outing of CIA agent under examination, sources close to prosecutor say
10/12/2005 @ 10:10 pm
Filed by Jason Leopold

Cheney's role in CIA outing not known


Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to determine whether Vice President Dick Cheney had a role in the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson, individuals close to Fitzgerald say. Plame’s husband was a vocal critic of prewar intelligence used by President George W. Bush to build support for the Iraq war.

The investigation into who leaked the officer's name to reporters has now turned toward a little known cabal of administration hawks known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which came together in August 2002 to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. WHIG was founded by Bush chief of staff Andrew Card and operated out of the Vice President’s office.

Fitzgerald’s examination centers on a group of players charged with not only selling the war, but according to sources familiar with the case, to discredit anyone who openly “disagreed with the official Iraq war” story.

The group’s members included Deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove, Bush advisor Karen Hughes, Senior Advisor to the Vice President Mary Matalin, Deputy Director of Communications James Wilkinson, Assistant to the President and Legislative Liaison Nicholas Calio, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby - Chief of Staff to the Vice President and co-author of the Administration's pre-emptive strike policy.

Rice was later appointed Secretary of State; her deputy Hadley was made National Security Advisor. Wilkinson departed to become a spokesman for the military's central command, and later for the Republican National Convention. Hughes was recently appointed Undersecretary of State.

Several members of the group have testified before Fitzgerald’s grand jury.

Cheney’s role under scrutiny

Two officials close to Fitzgerald told RAW STORY they have seen documents obtained from the White House Iraq Group which state that Cheney was present at several of the group's meetings. They say Cheney personally discussed with individuals in attendance at least two interviews in May and June of 2003 Wilson gave to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, in which he claimed the administration “twisted” prewar intelligence and what the response from the administration should be.

Cheney was interviewed by the FBI surrounding the leak in 2004. According to the New York Times, Cheney was asked whether he knew of any concerted effort by White House aides to name Ms. Wilson.

Sources close to the investigation have also confirmed that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to determine Vice President Cheney's role in the outing of Mrs. Wilson, more specifically, if Cheney ordered the leak.

Those close to Fitzgerald say they have yet to uncover any evidence that suggests Cheney ordered the leak or played a role in the outing of Mrs. Wilson. Still, the sources said they are investigating claims that Cheney may have been involved based on his attendance at meetings of the Iraq group. Previous reports indicate Cheney was intimately involved with the framing of the Iraq war.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Iraq group was under scrutiny.

“Formed in August 2002, the group, which included Messrs. [Karl] Rove and [Lewis] Libby, worked on setting strategy for selling the war in Iraq to the public in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion,” the Journal reported. “The group likely would have played a significant role in responding to [former Ambassador Joseph] Wilson's claims” that the Bush administration twisted intelligence when it said Iraq tried to acquire yellow-cake uranium from Africa.

Rove's "strategic communications" task force operating inside the group was instrumental in writing and coordinating speeches by senior Bush administration officials, highlighting in September 2002 that Iraq was a nuclear threat.

Background

The White House Iraq Group operated virtually unknown until January 2004, when Fitzgerald subpoenaed for notes, email and attendance records. Bush Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. created the group in August of 2002.

“A senior official who participated in its work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities," according to an Aug. 10, 2003, Washington Post investigative report on the group’s inner workings.

Senior Bush adviser Karl Rove chaired meetings of the group.


The group relied heavily on New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who, after meeting with several of the organization’s members in August 2002, wrote an explosive story that many critics of the war believe laid the groundwork for military action against Iraq.


On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, Miller wrote a story for the Times quoting anonymous officials who said aluminum tubes found in Iraq were to be used as centrifuges. Her report said the "diameter, thickness and other technical specifications" of the tubes -- precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts -- showed that they were "intended as components of centrifuges."

She closed her piece by quoting then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice who said the United States would not sit by and wait to find a smoking gun to prove its case, possibly in the form of a “a mushroom cloud." After Miller’s piece was published, administration officials pursued their case on Sunday talk shows using Miller’s piece as evidence that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear bomb, even though those officials were the ones who supplied Miller with the story and were quoted anonymously.

Rice's comments on CNN’s “Late Edition” reaffirmed Miller’s story. Rice said that Saddam Hussein was "actively pursuing a nuclear weapon" and that the tubes -- described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as "dual-use" items -- were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."

Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press," also mentioned the aluminum tubes story in the Times and said "increasingly, we believe the United States will become the target" of an Iraqi atomic bomb. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on CBS's "Face the Nation," asked viewers to "imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction.”

President Bush reiterated the image of Rice’s mushroom cloud comment in his Oct. 7, 2002 speech.

The International Atomic Energy Agency later revealed that Iraq’s aluminum tubes were never designed to enrich uranium.

In February of 2003, WHIG allegedly scripted the speech Powell made to the United Nations presenting the United States’ case for war.

Powell’s speech to the UN, United Press International reported, “was handled by the White House Iraq Group, which… provided Powell with a script for his speech, using information developed by Feith's group. Much of it was unsourced material fed to newspapers by the OSP. Realizing this, Powell's team turned to the now-discredited National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. But some of Feith's handiwork ended up in Powell's mouth anyway.”

Miller appears in Jury room again

Miller’s second appearance before the grand jury investigating the CIA leak seems to be tied to her meeting and discussions in June of 2003 with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, sources close to the investigation said. The meeting came one year before the New York Times printed a lengthy mea culpa discrediting a half-dozen of Miller’s prewar stories on the Iraqi threat.

Fitzgerald’s investigation resulted when allegations surfaced that Bush Administration officials had called reporters to circulate the name of the CIA officer, Valerie Plame-Wilson, in an attempt to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the administration's Iraq policy.

Wilson went to Niger in 2002 at the request of the CIA to investigate reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium "yellow cake" to develop nuclear weapons. He found that the reports were not credible.

Until now, Fitzgerald’s two-year investigation has focused on conversations Karl Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby have had with individual journalists, including Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

That has now changed. Fitzgerald has retraced his steps to an earlier period when he first began to examine the White House Iraq Group.

During its very first meetings, Card's Iraq group ordered a series of white papers showing Iraq’s arms violations. The first paper, "A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein's Quest for Nuclear Weapons," was never published. However, the paper was drafted with the assistance of experts from the National Security Council and Cheney's office.

“In its later stages, the draft white paper coincided with production of a National Intelligence Estimate and its unclassified summary. “But the WHIG, according to three officials who followed the white paper's progress, wanted gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence,” according to the Post.

Eight months later, Joseph Wilson began to question the veracity of the Bush administration’s prewar intelligence in private conversations with reporters. His talk threatened to undercut the administration’s successful marketing campaign: that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East.

Wilson’s allegations threatened to chip away at the credibility of individuals such as Cheney, who, in dozens of speeches just a few months prior had said that Iraq was dangerously close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. It also threatened to ruin Miller’s credibility. It was then that Administration officials started to discredit Wilson.

Now Fitzgerald is trying to find out whether Cheney was involved.

Larisa Alexandrovna contributed research for this report.

 

[Irvine511]

i wonder who will be the fall guy here.

this is an administration where no one is ever guilty. i mean, the only person who's ever tortured anyone was that Lyndie England chick, right? and Brownie just had no way of knowing that all of Louisiana was dysfunctional and did just a heckuva job, right?

i wonder if, in true Bush fasion, Scooter and Rove will take the fall for their respective bosses, Cheney and Bush. they are ultimately responsible for a silly smear on a whistleblower that has now come back in their faces. just like fitting intelligence (WMDs) to a set-in-stone policy (we are attacking Iraq) has embarassed the United States with the greatest strategic disaster in American history.

how were these people elected?

i demand accountability from every last person who voted for these monsters.

when the history books trace the rise and fall of the American century, it will have ended with a 5-4 Supreme Court decision at the very end of 2000.

 

[deep]

i wonder who will be the fall guy here.


.

Very real chance they will say there is not conclusive evidence for indictments.

The Administration has put on a full court press to deflect, and cover this up.

They are criminal,

Miller spent all that time in Jail for what reason?

They claim she had been released from her obligation.

She received many. many visitors in jail.

Ambassador John R. Bolton was there to visit and plan who knows what? to thwart the investigation.

Plame was outed in retaliation, to discredit Wilson for revealing the truth.

And exposing the Administration for presenting known false evidence.

They have gotten away with murder.

A little more? We will see.

 

[nbcrusader]

I hope that the guilty party suffers. This whole thing pissed me off tremendously.

If only we can wait to identify the guilty party.

 

[deep]

If only we can wait to identify the guilty party.

Is it Wilson

or

Plame?

 

[Dreadsox]

I do not think that comment was necessary. Neither NB or myself have ever taken a stance on this issue blaming them. Who knows if her contacts were affected by this outing? It sickens me that people who may have risked their lives were put in jeopardy.

 

[Judah]

Wilson may eventually launch a civil suit against Cheney, Bush, etc.

From markarkleiman.com:

"Richard Keil of Bloomberg buries a bombshell in the last two grafs of his excellent long take-out on the Fitzgerald investigation:

" 'In an interview yesterday, Wilson said that once the criminal questions are settled, he and his wife may file a civil lawsuit against Bush, Cheney and others seeking damages for the alleged harm done to Plame's career.

" 'If they do so, the current state of the law makes it likely that the suit will be allowed to proceed -- and Bush and Cheney will face questioning under oath -- while they are in office. The reason for that is a unanimous 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit against then-President Bill Clinton could go forward immediately, a decision that was hailed by conservatives at the time.'

"I hope someone on the Senate Judiciary Committee asks Harriet Miers what she thinks of the precedent in the Paula Jones case."

--------------

 

[Irvine511]

consider: if a senior WH staffer had intentionally outed an American spy during World War II, he'd have been shot.

aren't we at war? a pre-9/11 mentality is deadly. putting the lives of our troops at risk is treason!

right?

and what response do we get from the Bush White House and the Republicans?

the same that we get when they are faced with their policies of torture in theaters of war across the globe.

silence.

a senior aide to the President of the United States has endangered the life of an undercover CIA agent, her colleagues and contacts around the world. he has put at risk our entire effort to uncover weapons of mass destruction before they are used to kill millions in an American city. it is the height of hypocrisy and hubris to attempt to minimize a crime that not only puts our troops at risk, but risks the lives of every one in the US -- especially those of us living and working in highly vulnerable East Coast cities.

 

[Iskra]

If Clinton White House did this the republicans would have hung him from a flagpole.
One minute Rove had nothing to do with it WHATSOEVER. It was "ridiculous" to even think so said a certain White House spokesperson.
Then all of a sudden.....why am I not shocked?

 

[verte76]

I don't care who it is, if someone in the White House has committed a crime, they should pay for it. This includes Rove. He's a citizen just like me.

 

[deep]

”I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.”

Providing a journalist with a security clearance is unusual to begin with—former CBS correspondent Bill Lynch has likened it to the government's licensing journalists—but a security clearance within a WMD investigations unit dealing with highly sensitive matters is hard to believe.

If Miller couldn't tell her editors what she had learned as a reporter because it would be revealing classified information, then how could she perform her job as a reporter?

Did Miller instead become a secret government agent, as it were, operating within The New York Times?

In any event, she may have come close to violating secrecy laws herself.

no hero


just a slime

printing lies

masquerading as a journalist.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

President Bush vowed Thursday to avoid the "background noise" of investigations and political problems to focus on the nation's needs.

"The American people expect me to do my job, and I'm going to," he said.

With his political stock falling and several allies under investigation, Bush tried to keep focus on the nation's business at a Rose Garden news conference with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

... Asked how he is dealing with such a full plate, Bush said: "There is some background noise here, a lot of chatter, a lot of speculation and opining, but the American people expect me to do my job and I'm going to."

He also said, "part of my job is to work with others to fashion a world that will be peaceful for future generations. I've got a job to do to make sure the economy continues to grow. I've got a job to make sure there is a plausible reconstruction plan for cities affected by Katrina."

 

[anitram]

I don't want to see anybody opining in here anymore.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

opining was outlawed as of 5 PM ET yesterday

 

[hiphop]

They are all scared shitless at the WhiteHouse.

Rove, Libby, Cheney should be indicted, convicted and jailed.

A side question, is Libby related to the Libby of Watergate under Nixon?

 

[Irvine511]

A side question, is Libby related to the Libby of Watergate under Nixon?

no. this is "Scooter" Libby -- Cheney's chief of staff.

the Libby of Watergate is G. Gordon Liddy who is now a rabid right wing talk show host who writes books with titles like When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country and made some waves in the mid-1990s by telling his viewers that, should federal agents ever come to the house, to make sure that they aimed for the heads and not the chests, because the agents wear bullet proof vests but not helmets.

both classy guys.

 

[hiphop]

both classy guys.

Apparently, yes.

You never know.. maybe its the coke.. certainly it makes people arrogant.

 

[Judah]

It's sounding like Fitzgerald may have caught Judy Miller in a classic perjury trap...will probably use her to bring 'em all down; good write-up at Billmon:

http://billmon.org/archives/002282.html

And, I like what Arrianna's doing at her site; she's opposiing Judy's "we all got it wrong!" contentions with a list of journalists who got it right:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sorry-judy-everybody-_b_9239.html

 

[Teta040]

I think the only appropriate comment here should be:

LET JUSTICE BE DONE. (and yes, that is a "shout".)

I think a stanza from W.H. Auden is appropriate here:

Acts of injustice done
In history lie like bones, every one.

As we all know, history does not always agree with Auden's take. But sometimes it does.

 

[deep]

As anticipation built in Washington about potential indictments -- and what it would mean for a Bush administration beset by low approval ratings, the Iraq war and a controversial Supreme Court nomination -- a related problem was brewing in Italy over how the Niger allegations made their way into the intelligence stream.


Italian parliamentary officials announced that the head of Italy's military secret service, the SISMI intelligence agency, would be questioned next month about allegations that his agency gave the disputed documents to the United States and Britain, an Associated Press report said. A spokeswoman said Nicolo Pollari, the agency's director, asked to be questioned after reports this week in Italy's La Repubblica newspaper claiming that SISMI sent the CIA and U.S. and British officials information that it knew was forged.





The newspaper reported that Pollari met at the White House on Sept. 9, 2002, with then-deputy national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley. The Niger claims surfaced shortly thereafter. A spokesman for Hadley, now the national security advisor, confirmed that the meeting took place but declined to say what was discussed.

Hadley played a prominent role in the controversy over Bush's claims in his State of the Union address. He took responsibility for inserting into the speech the famous 16 words that laid out the allegations.

Don't you think that the Administration would be up in arms that someone misleads them?

Provided fake evidence?

I sure would be.

Seems like the only one that was outraged is Colin Powell.

Why is that?

Who is stupid enough to believe that the Administration was not there when the plan was hatched to fake the evidence?


They could not make their case WITHOUT the lies.

"Mushroom clouds" over American cities, etc.

"We know that Saddam has sought uranium from Africa"

"We have bullet-proof evidence".

 

[Scarletwine]

Well the nicknames are:

Roveshana

Fitzmas of course

Cronywanza

ect

that little man

 

[joyfulgirl]

the Libby of Watergate is G. Gordon Liddy

He called my number in NYC a couple of times looking for William F. Buckley, Jr. Apparently I had Buckley's old number.