Scooter & Blimpie Heading to the Big House

Politics International Politics
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The question of whether or not a violation of the Espionage Act was committed is still open. Regardless, Fitzgerald is not regarded as a partisan, and to try to turn this into Republican vs. Democrat would be a mistake.

Once again, National Review Online gets it right.
nationalreview.com/editorial … 281820.asp

[quote]
Please spare us the excuses warmed over from Democratic talking points in the 1990s: the prosecutor is out-of-control, there was no underlying crime, etc., etc. It is the responsibility of anyone, especially a public official, to tell the truth to FBI agents and grand juries. If Libby didn’t, he should face the consequences. Fitzgerald’s indictment is not a Ronnie Earle-style partisan production, held together with scotch tape and malicious intentions.[/quote]

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My guess is Scooter’s only real option is to plea bargain. The alternative is to drag all the neoconservatives’ dirty laundry out into public view in trial and he’ll probably choose doing time over that.

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Who’s prosecuting the case? If Fitzgerald is, then I wonder if he would accept a plea because his case appears to be so strong (perhaps the biggest advantage of a slightly underreaching indictment is the strength of the evidence).

If Fitzgerald is not prosecuting, then only a partisan Republican would offer a plea - given the apparent strength of the evidence in the indictment and the slightly underreaching indictment itself. From the analyses I’ve read, Scooter’s likely defense is “I forgot;” it seems likely a prosecutor would march both Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to the stand to refresh his memory (as well as the relevant media players).

As melodramatic as it sounds, a Smith-Wesson solution to the dilemma you sketch is more likely than a plea bargain, imo. (caveat: the prosecutor may deem that certain gulity pleas are worth a full disclosure by Scooter on account that it’s more valuable to history than a brainshot former neocon.)

EDIT: I forgot a presidential pardon. I guess Scooter could tell the prosecutor to go to hell, take his medicine, and then get off scot-free by getting a presidential pardon. A pardon has to be pretty likely, given the actors.

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I see - it’s the Martha Stuart defence. “I did nothing wrong but the big bad scary prosecutor scared me into lying about it”.

:smiley:

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I still am confused as to why Libby would then give Miller a pass to reveal that he was her source. Why do it a year ago and then re-offer this again right away when contacted by Miller’s lawyer? He would have had every right to refuse to do so, why not then protect himself if he had something dirty to hide? Why then would Bush administration officials allow him to reveal himself as the source if that was a major crime? Why not cover this up as everyone alleges that it is doing?

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It’s all about the roots of the trees in Arizona.

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Fred, here’s your homework assignment. Read. [color=green](Mod edit: Message not the messenger please.)[/color]

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What I find fascinating is the heavy reliance by Republican commentators on CNN and elsewhere on how the Administration was justified in responding to Wilson’s op-ed piece in the NY Times by any means available.

What next? Will the Bush Administration feel it is justified in shooting American soldiers who might testify about the abuse of Afghan or Iraqi detainees? Not sure that even that sort of GOP-leadership action would reach the extent of harm already suffered by the United States from GOP officials outing one of the top operatives dealing with weapons proliferation issues for the CIA.

Reminds me of one of the few possibly truthful statements that have come out of Bush’s mouth:

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Why don’t you apologists for the Administration just admit it, someone high up in the administration has been indicted for a crime(s) (as several on this list have been predicting for some time).

Furthermore, we don’t know the whole story, and never will - but between the lines, and between you and me - probably more dirt under the carpet or skeletons in the closet, and this indictment is just the surface of things. I’d betcha there’s even more underhandedness than this, we’ll just never know about it. I’m not dumb, it happens on both sides of the aisle. Republicans are just getting their come-uppance (msp?).

Bodo

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I can’t help wondering how much additional damage was done to the United States with that crew still running about the White House. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to treason being committed by top GOP officials.

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Because there is something WORSE they want to keep under wraps, and sacrificing Libby causes the least damage. What do you think it is? Fred? Spook? Mofangongren? Others?

Bodo

who just loves a good conspiracy story

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The context

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Bodo:

First of all, no one has been charged with the crime of unmasking a secret service agent. Why not?

Second, Libby has been indicted. That means there is sufficient proof that a trial is necessary. That does not mean he is guilty.

Third, if there was all this evidence of a coverup, why then has Fitzgerald not indicted anyone else?

Fourth, Libby could have refused to allow Miller to testify. For all the talk about noble reporters, they have all given up their sources most readily to avoid jail. Why would Libby sign a statement A YEAR ago allowing her to testify and then to do so once again?

Fifth, Libby is being indicted for inconsistencies in his statements to Fitzgerald. He will have to clear those up. Too bad for him but there you are. He should have been more careful in his statements. Let’s see what the final verdict is. Many legal pundits have not given the prosecution a very strong hand on this because first, there is no crime and the second is that not being able to recall specific dates and times will have to be shown to be a deliberate pattern to commit perjury and obstruct justice. Easier said than done. And with the benefit of the doubt laying with the defendant, I think this is far from a slam-dunk case.

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[quote=“fred smith”]
First of all, no one has been charged with the crime of unmasking a secret service agent. Why not?[/quote]

Law Enforcement 101:

Because the people with all the answers presumably lied under oath and obstructed the investigation into that question.

Fitzgerald will now proceed to use the leverage of thirty years in prison and a 1.5 million dollar fine to pry the answer to that underlying question loose.

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Well, I bet there are people at the Dept. of Treasury who want to know about this. Has the Bush administration also been decreasing their own protection by exposing the names of the secret service detail?

Now, if it is a CIA covert operative you’re asking about, then that’s another issue. It’s hard to get at the juicy (and required) intent issues under the law covering exposing of covert agents when you have people perjuring themselves and lying to FBI agents. “Obstruction of justice” is one phrase that keeps coming up in the Libby indictment. I also like the arguments raised by former Nixon lawyer John Dean, given that exposure of sensitive information should certainly apply to Libby.

We still know he was running about trying to spread info among the press about a key CIA agent, and we have plenty of info that it was in response to Wilson. We know that top-level GOP officials will sucker-punch a man’s wife at the expense of national security. From the chronology of statements, it also seems pretty inexplicable that he would claim he heard about Plame from reporters when, in actuality, he had heard of it from Cheney.

That may be coming.

What else was Libby going to do? Eventually even Miller would have broken, and he would have eventually been exposed as even worse than he already has been. So far, Libby is a perjurer who apparently has no qualms about exposing key weapons-proliferation experts at the CIA at the expense of us all. Did he really need to keep Miller in jail even longer?

Read the indictment. It’s not like he was lying over coffee with Fitzgerald – man can’t stop spouting lies even under oath in front of a grand jury… can’t stop the lies pouring out of his mouth even with an FBI agent in front of him. Absolutely has no respect whatsoever for the American legal system or the law – and neither do the GOP leaders who currently pretend this case isn’t important. Libby endangered our national security by destroying the value of a key weapons-proliferation intelligence officer, and he’s already lying about it. Let’s just hope the next election is about values.

“Careful” is a nice word for accidents, such as the sort he may have while trying to restore normal bowel functions after his first fortnight in federal prison. “Deliberate lying sack of crap” is one slightly more apt phrase for Libby.

I assure you that the indictment is chock full of real crimes. Please take a moment and review it.

These perjury cases are tried to conviction all the time by federal prosecutors. When you show up to testify, it’s simply not a good idea to start lying. Ditto for when the FBI comes knocking.

Considering the low standards within the Bush administration for what is a “slam dunk case,” I think you ought to read the indictment.

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Note also that the investigation is ongoing. The Libby indictment is just the first step.

We haven’t heard anything else (excepting rumors) because Fitzgerald is a principled guy who doesn’t go in for strategic “leaks” for political purposes.

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Read the indictment. It’s not like he was lying over coffee with Fitzgerald – man can’t stop spouting lies even under oath in front of a grand jury… can’t stop the lies pouring out of his mouth even with an FBI agent in front of him. Absolutely has no respect whatsoever for the American legal system or the law – and neither do the GOP leaders who currently pretend this case isn’t important.[/quote]
What ever happened to “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law”? I guess it goes out the window when Democrats are baying for Republican blood.

The sad thing is that the flipside of the coin is that getting even an indictment against a Dem requires DNA evidence.

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[quote=“spook”]"More than Valerie Plame’s identity was exposed when her name appeared in a syndicated column in the summer of 2003.

A small Boston company listed as her employer suddenly was shown to be a bogus CIA front, and her alma mater in Belgium discovered it was a favored haunt of an American spy. At Langley, officials in the clandestine service quickly began drawing up a list of contacts and friends, cultivated over more than a decade, to triage any immediate damage. . . . [/quote]
Sadly, I have to admit that Spook might have a point or two there. It would be nice to know if the “small Boston company” had already been exposed or not; if not, then the whole Plame affair might actually have done some damage. Likewise if any of her “contacts” were damaged.

Her school on the other hand – who gives a rat’s ass if some college finds out it gave a degree to someone who eventually became a CIA employee? :unamused: I can just imagine the other conversations that might have gone on when her name hit the papers:

[quote]“Oh, good heavens! Remember little Valerie who went to pre-kindergarten at our Tiny Tots Daycare? She became a lackey spy for the running-dog imperialists!”

“For shame! Surely we indoctrinated her better than that! Which political commisar was in charge of her class collective?”[/quote]

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Please don’t ban me for miscapitalizing “spook”.

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Closer perhaps than this other, famous, “slam dunk case” though.

[quote]Remember That Mushroom Cloud?
Published: November 2, 2005 New York Times
The indictment of Lewis Libby on charges of lying to a grand jury about the outing of Valerie Wilson has focused attention on the lengths to which the Bush administration went in 2003 to try to distract the public from this central fact: American soldiers found a lot of things in Iraq, including a well-armed insurgency their bosses never anticipated, but they did not find weapons of mass destruction.

It’s clear from the indictment that Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff formed the command bunker for this misdirection campaign. But there is a much larger issue than the question of what administration officials said about Iraq after the invasion - it’s what they said about Iraq before the invasion. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, may have been grandstanding yesterday when he forced the Senate to hold a closed session on the Iraqi intelligence, but at least he gave the issue a much-needed push.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George Tenet, to name a few leading figures, built support for the war by telling the world that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, feverishly developing germ warfare devices and racing to build a nuclear bomb. Some of them, notably Mr. Cheney, the administration’s doomsayer in chief, said Iraq had conspired with Al Qaeda and implied that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee did a good bipartisan job of explaining that the intelligence in general was dubious, old and even faked by foreign sources. The panel said the analysts had suffered from groupthink. At the time, the highest-ranking officials in Washington were demanding evidence against Iraq.

But that left this question: If the intelligence was so bad and so moldy, why was it presented to the world as what Mr. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, famously called “a slam-dunk” case?

Were officials fooled by bad intelligence, or knowingly hyping it? Certainly, the administration erased caveats, dissents and doubts from the intelligence reports before showing them to the public. And there was never credible intelligence about a working relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

…however, there has been only one uncirculated draft report by one committee staff member on the narrow question of why the analysts didn’t predict the ferocity of the insurgency. The Republicans have not even agreed to do a final report on the conflict between the intelligence and the administration’s public statements.

…[/quote]