White House Expecting At Least One Indictment, Says WaPo
All right, folks, those of you who are still holding out for Wilson to be indicted…well, let’s just say, if you’re right, I will hereby call each and every one of you a genuis, because things sure don’t look that way. The WaPo is reporting that Fitzgerald has been interviewing neighbors to see if they knew Valarie Plame was undercover – to say that Wilson is the target of those questions would be a very hard sell, indeed:
In a sign that Fitzgerald continues to gather evidence, FBI agents interviewed at least two of Wilson’s neighbors in the Palisades section of Northwest Washington on Monday night. In interviews yesterday, Marc Lefkowitz and David Tillotson said they told two FBI agents they had no clue that Plame, whom they knew by her married name, Valerie Wilson, worked for the agency until Novak’s column appeared.
“They wanted to know how well we knew her, which is very well,” Tillotson said. “Did we know anything about her position before the story broke? Absolutely not.”
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Scooter…but Karl, does it toll for thee?
I’m braced for Libby to get indicted,and I’d probably give you fifty-fifty odds on Rove. The “tough sell” on the prosecutor’s side will be to demonstrate that inconsistencies in the testimony of Libby and/or Rove were the product of malicious intent, not just lapses of memory.
Fitzgerald seems like a straight arrow, just like Starr before him, but it’s arguable that in both cases the nature of the special prosecutor’s job led them to focus on process to the exclusion, or even the detriment, of the final outcome. Certainly I’m not going to be happy if one of the President’s key advisors goes down as a result of perjury committed in defending himself against a charge that had no merit in the first place. Already, I’m not happy about the amount of time and energy the administration has spent defending itself, at the expense of more important matters. But then, I’m just not a very cheerful guy.
That point has been played out already. The matter of Plame being “undercover” has been a non-issue for forever and a day. She was not undercover for sufficiently long for the Espionage Act not to apply. Further, thus far we have NO evidence that Cheney (or anyone in the administration, for that matter) saying Plame was “undercover”, only discussion of her working for the CIA.
utron, your points are exactly the reason I suggested quite some time ago that perhaps it was time for Karl Rove to step aside (the distraction factor) – see here. This is what I said on July 2nd:
…Rove: I love the guy, and I appreciate what he’s done for the party and the administration, but he’s starting to suck a lot of oxygen out of the room, and if he becomes a distraction, and if he’s the super political genius he is rumored to be, he should be the first to realize he needs to get out of the way. Am I suggesting he resign? No, not yet…but if the smoke of the Plame case turns into fire, and he’s playing the role of the gasoline, I’m not going to be in a very forgiving mood…