Plame Gossip Sunday

As always, trying to put the freshest and newest Plame related articles up here. Be sure to check updates at the bottom of this entry as new stuff comes out.

First up today, a Reuters piece, it's a bit of a rehash by the same author of this story, but it has something new in it.

Top administration officials are expected to learn from Fitzgerald as early as Monday whether they will face charges as the prosecutor winds up his nearly two-year investigation, the lawyers said.

Fitzgerald could convene the grand jury as early as Tuesday to lay out a final summary of the case and ask for approval of possible indictments, legal sources said. The grand jury hearing the CIA leak case normally meets on Wednesdays and is scheduled to expire on Friday unless Fitzgerald extends it. ....

Lawyers said Fitzgerald has sent several signals in recent days that he is likely to bring indictments in the case.

So, the Whitehouse might get a heads up tomorrow, before the Grand Jury votes on Tue/Wed.
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Oh, and this mantra is being repeated by the Republicans.

I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars.

This is from my homestate senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson whose campaign motto has become "At least I'm not as crazy as Cornyn." If I could I would ask her, didn't your party try to impeach a president for perjury? Just when exactly did your perception change?
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And has anybody else noticed the mash pieces that the press has been running on Fitzgerald. Here's today's winner by the NYTimes. Son of a doorman, smart as a whip, avowed to uphold truth and justice, able to leap tall.... Oh yeah, that last one's not him.

I just find it politically odd that there have been a number of these pieces in the major press outlets, kind of a preemptive attempt to stave off a later Republican smear. The guy may be all that, I just find it sort of... odd, that some of the mainstream press is raising this guy up. Sure his indictments are going to be good for business, but I don't think that's it. I think they want him to win. Maybe to assuage their guilt at having been complicit in the prewar WMD lies. If Libby and Rove are convicted, the NYTimes can point to them and say "sure we made mistakes, but we were misled by crooks." What do you think?
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There's also another piece today sliming Cheney/Libby. This one from the NYTimes and focusing on the "misrepresentation" of intelligence in the lead up to Iraq blaming a significant portion of this on Libby. It also contains quotes from that recent Wilkerson speech(Powell's ex-aide) where he named a Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal, and little tidbits from the upcoming Scowcroft piece in the New Yorker, which, I think, will be much more interesting and more politically significant in it's criticisms of Cheney and the Iraq policy.

Question: If the Bush admin decides that Libby and Cheney are going down, will they try to pin the whole Iraq mess on them? Just riffing.

UPDATE: Newsguy made mention of this article by Lawrence O'Donnell in the comments for this post. O'Donnell points out that it's not up to Fitzgerald to indict, but it is actually up to the grand jury. This is the paragraph that everyone is talking about.

A typical Washington, D.C. grand jury is about 75% African American. Fitzgerald’s is slightly more than that. This is not the kind of group Karl Rove feels at home with. He has no professional experience trying to appeal to a group like this. He has been so unsuccessful at it that his boss’s job approval rating with African Americans is now 2%, which, factoring in the margin of error, could actually be zero. To make matters statistically and demographically much worse for Rove and Scooter Libby, only 12 of the 23 grand jurors have to agree to indict them.

Saw an ugly little rant on one of the righty blogs. Kind of a nice little soft racism piece I'm not gonna reprint or link to. You know, Bell Curve, lesser decision making abilities. Just ugly. I mention this only because I wonder if any defender of the White House will attempt some soft version of this, "They weren't tried by their peers" or "no one on the grand jury can relate to what it's like to be in that position." I doubt it, I'll bet almost everybody runs away from those who are indicted, but let's just put the ugly out there, so we can hang 'em if they try.

Thanks to Marisa for the link to the O'Donnell piece.

UPDATE 2: There's another unflattering Libby piece in Newsweek. It also isn't particularly friendly to Cheney or Rumsfeld, but, in particular, to Libby. It paints him as going around regular channels in a rather obsessive way to shape the WMD intel. I don't doubt he did that, but I don't think he was the only one.

This makes four big unflattering Libby stories in three major press outlets in the last three days.

If I were one to speculate,(which means I'm about to speculate) I would guess that the White House core believe that Libby is going down, and they are trying to tie every rock they have to him. I mean, somebody has to tell those reporters specifics about Libby's behavior. Perhaps the White House thinks it can rid itself of the WMD lies by pinning them all to Libby.

Are you buying it?