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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Plame Gossip - Night Version

NYTimes has piece up tonight that seems to have some authority about it. This is about as certain as any of the coverage I've seen on Plame. Indicates Rove and Libby are targets, duh, but makes only passing mention of anybody else.

Among the charges that Mr. Fitzgerald is considering are perjury, obstruction of justice and false statement - counts that suggest the prosecutor may believe the evidence presented in a 22-month grand jury inquiry shows that the two White House aides sought to cover up their actions, the lawyers said.

Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have been advised that they may be in serious legal jeopardy, the lawyers said, but only this week has Mr. Fitzgerald begun to narrow the possible charges. The prosecutor has said he will not make up his mind about any charges until next week, government officials say.

With the term of the grand jury expiring in one week, though, some lawyers in the case said they were persuaded that Mr. Fitzgerald had all but made up his mind to seek indictments. None of the lawyers would speak on the record, citing the prosecutor's requests not to talk about the case. ......

At the bottom, it goes into the probable specific allegations against both Rove and Libby.

UPDATE: National Journal (Murray Wass) has a piece on Judy suddenly remembering visiting Libby on June 23, after she was shown the Secret Service logs for that day. Oh, and Libby also had not "remembered" that meeting.

Update AM: I just ran across a very weirdly written AP piece this morning. Look at the construction of the first para.

Even if White House aides leaked a covert CIA officer's identity, they were simply passing along information they'd already heard from the news media, the administration's supporters maintain in a defense that looks increasing shaky as new evidence accumulates.
Isn't that an odd construction for a lead paragraph of a news piece? Shouldn't it be "An increasingly shaky defense is being offered that White House aides.....?" Oh, and then we do get a great paragraph on the Republican Meta-Defense, the one that is used for everything thy can't blame on "liberals."

Until this week, "the news media did it" was a standard defense among Republicans trying to protect the Bush administration from the political fallout of Fitzgerald's criminal investigation. Loyalists said that even if White House aides had passed on information, they didn't get it from classified sources and were simply repeating what they heard from journalists.

1 Comments:

  • right...and how did these journalists get the information in the first place?

    Looks like it will be Libby and Rove going done for their roles in the cover up, not the actual leak.

    As long as they are indicted, I'll be happy, but Dick and by the way Donald Rumsfeld, forced this country to war on false information and should be punished.

    By Blogger JOS, at 8:44 AM  

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