The Case Against Karl Rove (Ongoing...)

The NY Times has a good news / bad news story about the case against Karl Rove.

(a)  Fitzgerald is no longer looking at some of the more dramatic charges, such as conspiracy or lying to the President;

(b)  Fitzgerald is focusing on Rove's disclosure of his conversation with Matt Cooper of Time, and the case is stronger than I had estimated based on common sense or the Isikoff story in Newsweek.

From the Times:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - The prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case has narrowed his investigation of Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, to whether he tried to conceal from the grand jury a conversation with a Time magazine reporter in the week before an intelligence officer's identity was made public more than two years ago, lawyers in the case said Thursday.

The special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has centered on what are believed to be his final inquiries in the matter as to whether Mr. Rove was fully forthcoming about the belated discovery of an internal e-mail message that confirmed his conversation with the Time reporter, Matthew Cooper, to whom Mr. Rove had mentioned the C.I.A. officer.

...

At the heart of the remaining investigation into Mr. Rove are the circumstances surrounding a July 11, 2003, telephone conversation between Mr. Rove and Mr. Cooper, who turned the interview to questions about a 2002 trip to Africa by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, who was sent by the C.I.A. to investigate claims that Iraq had sought to be buy uranium ore from Niger.

In his testimony to the grand jury in February 2004, Mr. Rove did not disclose the conversation with Mr. Cooper, saying later that he did not recall it among the hundreds of calls he received on a daily basis. But there was a record of the call. Mr. Rove had sent an e-mail message to Stephen J. Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, which confirmed the conversation.

No news yet, but here we go:

One lawyer with a client in the case said Mr. Fitzgerald could be skeptical of Mr. Rove's account because the message was not discovered until the fall of 2004. It was at about the same time that Mr. Fitzgerald had begun to compel reporters to cooperate with his inquiry, among them Mr. Cooper. Associates of Mr. Rove said the e-mail message was not incriminating and was turned over immediately after it was found at the White House. They said Mr. Rove never intended to withhold details of a conversation with a reporter from Mr. Fitzgerald, noting that Mr. Rove had signed a waiver to allow reporters to reveal to prosecutors their discussions with confidential sources. In addition, they said, Mr. Rove testified fully about his conversation with Mr. Cooper - long before Mr. Cooper did - acknowledging that it was possible that the subject of Mr. Wilson's trip had come up.

It is now known that Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury have questioned Mr. Rove about two conversations with reporters. The first, which he admitted to investigators from the outset, took place on July 9, 2003, in a telephone call initiated by Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist.

...

In February 2004, when Mr. Rove testified about his conversations with reporters, he recalled the Novak conversation, but no other interviews with reporters - an omission that Mr. Fitzgerald has investigated as a possible false statement or perjury. Mr. Rove said he had forgotten the discussion with Mr. Cooper, the lawyers said.

Mr. Fitzgerald did not learn of the Cooper conversation until months later when a search of Mr. Rove's e-mails uncovered the e-mail that he had sent to Mr. Hadley. "Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming," Mr. Rove wrote in the message to Mr. Hadley that was first disclosed in July by the Associated Press.

"When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger," Mr. Rove wrote. "Isn't this damaging? Hasn't president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out on this."

It is not publicly known why Mr. Rove's e-mail message to Mr. Hadley was not turned over earlier, but a lawyer in the case said that White House documents were collected in response to several separate requests that may not have covered certain time periods or all relevant officials. Mr. Rove had no role in the search for documents, which was carried out by an administrative office in the White House.

Mr. Rove corrected his testimony in a grand jury appearance on Oct. 14, 2004, after which Mr. Luskin said Mr. Rove had answered all questions truthfully.

A quick note - That last line should have a date of Oct. 14, 2005, or Oct 15, 2004.

Well.  "Mr. Rove had no role in the search for documents, which was carried out by an administrative office in the White House" suggests that either this is a far-reaching cover-up, or a plausible screw-up.

Now, timing is everything - under the perjury statute, a person can correct their testimony during the term of the grand jury, as long as they were not in imminent danger of discovery.  So, did Karl Rove come in under his own power, or was the jig nearly up?

As to timing:  Per TIME (and Cooper's original account), Matt Cooper was subpoenaed in May 2004.  One would think, since DoJ guidelines require subpoenas to reporters to be quite narrow, that this subpoena related to Lewis Libby.  In any case, Cooper gave a deposition on Aug 23, 2004, and a week later, got a new subpoena related to a second official, now known to be Karl Rove.

So, if Fitzgerald knew enough to subpoena Cooper's evidence about a conversation with Rove in late August, what do we take from this Times report that "the [email] message was not discovered until the fall of 2004"?

This certainly suggests that Fitzgerald had independent evidence of the conversation between Cooper and Rove.  But from whom?  Might Hadley, as recipient of the email, have found it to be memorable?  But if Hadley remembered, why did the author of the email forget?  Was Rove really that much busier than Hadley?

Also troubling is this unconvincing speculation as to the delay:

...a lawyer in the case said that White House documents were collected in response to several separate requests that may not have covered certain time periods or all relevant officials.

Please.  The document request of Jan 22, 2004 was on target with it request for "records created in July by the White House Iraq Group", of which Rove and Hadley were members.

In Rove's favor - he disclosed his brief talk with Novak immediately.  Presumably, his lawyers argued that, since media titans such as Russert and Novak cooperated, it was not plausible to think that Rove expected Cooper to hold out and protect him - does Matt Cooper really look like the "go to jail" type?

And presumably, Fitzgerald did not uncover compelling evidence that contradicted the "I forgot" theory.  But if that email was discovered *after* Fitzgerald knew about Cooper, I can see where Fitzgerald might have been suspicious, especially when coupled with Libby's memory challenges.

Also, the Times is quite specific that Rove did not mention the Cooper conversation when he testified in Feb 2004.  However, per TIME we see that Rove's third grand jury appearance was October 15 2004.  However, this AP story said the following:

Cooper's contact with Rove did not come up in Rove's first interview or grand jury appearance, but he volunteered the information and provided the email during a second grand jury appearance.

The date of his second appearance continues to elude me, but its significance has gone up a bit.  And yes, this contradicts the Times report that he corrected his testimony in an October 14/15 appearance.  Maybe the AP was being spun a bit?  On the other hand,  since the Times is confused about dates, they have confused me.

MORE:  I am close to giving up on the anniversary issue - from the Times archive, we find this: 

By DAVID JOHNSTON (NYT) 898 words

Published: October 16, 2004

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, testified on Friday to a federal grand jury investigating whether it was anyone at the White House who had illegally disclosed the name of a C.I.A. undercover officer to a newspaper columnist, a lawyer for Mr. Rove said.

  ''He answered fully and truthfully every one of their questions,'' the lawyer, Robert Luskin, said.

The Luskin paraphrase in the current story - "Mr. Luskin said Mr. Rove had answered all questions truthfully" - might have been torn from the archives.

Well, I still want a correction.

UPDATE:  A very good job by the Anon Lib, who provides complementary evidence that the Cooper-Rove chat was revealed pretty late in the process - apparently, Fitzgerald was surprised to learn, during Matt Cooper's August 2004 deposition about his talk with Libby, that Cooper had another source.

Left unanswered - didn't the second subpoena to Cooper name an official, and how did Fitzgerald get a name within a week?  The apparent answer, after checking the court briefs at Fitzgerald's website - Cooper's second subpoena did not name an official.

An alternative theory is that this story is self-serving spin served up by Rove's team.  Self-serving?  Well, yes, because of the good news / bad news elements mentioned at the top.  Armed with this new story, Rove's defenders can go forth and respond to critics with the news that Karl just had a little memory glitch.  That will distract us from contemplating more ghastly scenarios (mine is sketched out in this comment).

FILED UNDER:  "Where Are We Headed?":  Special Counsel Fitzgerald's DoJ website has supplanted the Ella Fitzgerald website at the top of the Google rankings.

This too shall pass (As Karl himself said a few weeks back).  Check again in five years. 

Comments

[cathyf]

TS9 -- is it possible that the Men In Black weren't on Fitz's errand? There is supposedly a regular FBI investigation into how Joe Wilson came to be blabbing classified info all over town, and whether any laws were broken.

The whole "specialness" of the special prosecutor is based upon the notion that the regular prosecutor has an inherent conflict of interest in investigating the White House, since the president is the nations chief law enforcement officer. Obviously there is no such conflict of interest when investigating Wilson or Plame or the CIA's plumbing.

Although I have to say that I wonder -- it looks to me like in real life the FBI and DoJ might have more conflict problems when investigating an MSM golden-haired child than they do investigating a president that the MSM doesn't like. I keep hoping I'm wrong about that, though...

cathy :-)

[TM]

I just don't see how Fitzs' case has any credibility and so I don't get why he did a last minute half-ass neighbor query

If someone has a great answer to that, I have a follow-up - why did Fitzgerald call Joe Wilson the day Judy Miller testified (IIRC - it was late September, not back in '63...)

Clarice - it seems pretty clear that the defense can call more reporters and ask more questions than the DoJ could.

I want Andrea Mitchell on the stand to tell us whehter she told Tim.

And I want Nick Kristof deposed, to see if he had used Ms. Plame as a source in some unrelated column.

Now, a judge might wonder how a Kristof deposition relates to Libby's alleged lies under oath. I sort of do, too.

But in the expansive fishing-trip defense, his attorney's may say, look, the gist of Libby's defense is that he was hearing it from reporters. If he got the Russert call wrong, but folks like Kristof did, in fact, know, then we have the classic "false but accurate" defense - Libby "lied" about Russert, but had the right idea (wrong reporter - oops).

Of course, there is still the matter of his being surprised by Russert's revelation... one step at a time, here.

[clarice]

I'd like to see Kristof and Pincus on the stand to explain with a straight face why it took them so long to back off from Joe's story.

Why they didn't "correct" the record even after his July letters to them saying he'd been misquoted by them.

How they met Wilson and vouched for his credibility.Who else was at the Fourthof July party at the Wilsons,

Whether they knew Valerie was with the agency and whther or not she, too, was a source.

And who else they gave that information to.

(Certainly, one would think they told their editors at a minimum)

Even without them on the stand, Libby should be sllowed to explore with Cooper and Russert, their conversations about the case with others--something Fitz never did apparently..

On another point--Michael Ledeen has a good piece on NRO about the French forged Niger documents. He says they were prepared in 1999 when the French thought Clinton was going to invade and simply recycled them to stop Bush from doing so.

And James Lewis has this at American Thinker:http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4970

[clarice]

I'd like to see Kristof and Pincus on the stand to explain with a straight face why it took them so long to back off from Joe's story.

Why they didn't "correct" the record even after his July letters to them saying he'd been misquoted by them.

How they met Wilson and vouched for his credibility.Who else was at the Fourthof July party at the Wilsons,

Whether they knew Valerie was with the agency and whther or not she, too, was a source.

And who else they gave that information to.

(Certainly, one would think they told their editors at a minimum)

Even without them on the stand, Libby should be sllowed to explore with Cooper and Russert, their conversations about the case with others--something Fitz never did apparently..

On another point--Michael Ledeen has a good piece on NRO about the French forged Niger documents. He says they were prepared in 1999 when the French thought Clinton was going to invade and simply recycled them to stop Bush from doing so.

And James Lewis has this at American Thinker:http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4970

[clarice]

I'd like to see Kristof and Pincus on the stand to explain with a straight face why it took them so long to back off from Joe's story.

Why they didn't "correct" the record even after his July letters to them saying he'd been misquoted by them.

How they met Wilson and vouched for his credibility.Who else was at the Fourthof July party at the Wilsons,

Whether they knew Valerie was with the agency and whther or not she, too, was a source.

And who else they gave that information to.

(Certainly, one would think they told their editors at a minimum)

Even without them on the stand, Libby should be sllowed to explore with Cooper and Russert, their conversations about the case with others--something Fitz never did apparently..

On another point--Michael Ledeen has a good piece on NRO about the French forged Niger documents. He says they were prepared in 1999 when the French thought Clinton was going to invade and simply recycled them to stop Bush from doing so.

And James Lewis has this at American Thinker:http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4970

[Reader]

Clarice

Who is James Lewis? Is he a credible reference?

[clarice]

He is a regular contributor to The American Thinker. If you want to know more of his background, you can write the editor and ask for more details. You can also type his name in the search function at the site to see theother articles he has written for it.

[TP]

TM
Is it possible that Libby called Russert to complain and that, in the course of the conversation, Russert said something to him that clarified the entire political aspect of Joe Wilson and how he had gone to Niger. Is it also possible that Russert does not have a clue as to what he said that hit Libby like a ton of bricks and gave Libby this "It was if I had heard the whole story for the first time" feeling.

[clarice]

Kaus thinks the Libby part of the conversation he's hiding it Libby's complaint that he thought Matthews coverage was motivated by anti-Semitism.. Hmmmhttp://www.slate.com/id/2129634/&#mystery2

[TM]

Is it also possible that Russert does not have a clue as to what he said that hit Libby like a ton of bricks and gave Libby this "It was if I had heard the whole story for the first time" feeling.

It's deja vu all over again!

It strikes me as possible that Russert said something that Libby misinterpreted. E.g., if Russert mentioned Wilson's wife at all, Libby may have assumed Russert knew the truth and was hinting around for a confirmation.

But the recovered memory portion of hte indictment is tougher.

On anti-semitism - it's an interesting theory; it certainly explains why they won't mention it, and Chris Matthews is in the old articles as an object of neocon ire.

But I just did not connect to either side of that argument, so I have no idea how the different players felt.

I do see Mickey wrote some articles on it at the time, so he may have lots of sources for gossip about who wanted to stick a knife in whom.

I have a related idea, stolen from Clarice - Libby asked Russert (or ranted to Russert) about Wilson being part of the Kerry campaign. I bet Russert does not want to dwell on that, either.

[Jeff]

Read Fitzgerald's press conference. I still don't see how you all are going to get Libby around his claim that he heard the news from Russert as though for the first time, when he had been discussing it with other prominent administration officials just days before. In the real world, it is unbelievable that Libby would have completely forgotten his conversation with Cheney a little bit less than a month earlier, to the point where his memory was not even jogged by the purported Russert conversation. But at least a lawyer might be able to get a client off the hook legally that way. But there are going to be administration officials testifying about conversations with Libby about Wilson's wife that are multiple and much more recent. Ari Fleischer is going to be a star witness. I understand that Libby's lawyers appear to be jettisoning the faulty memory defense and are going to go after the credibility of the reporters. Fine with me. You still have to deal with all those administration officials and their conversations with Libby. From the indictment it looks to me like he can be convicted on that basis alone, at least on some of the counts, even if Russert emerges with a damaged reputation.

[clarice]

If so, I bet not either..LOL..

Well, won't that 6th Amendment argument by Libby's lawyers (we have to get more out of the reporters on cross to fairly defend our client) be a joy to watch in action? LOL

It's always been my thought that in demanding a full investigation the press thought they could make the charge of wrongdoing, never have to testify and leave the Administration smeared with no damage to themselves..Caught their rears in the swinging door, I think.

[clarice]

My response was to TM...

[Jim E.]

I reserve the right to re-post this in a fresh thread, since no one’s gonna read this here.

Unlike TM and others on the comment-threads, I’ve avoided coming up with a master theory of the leakage of Wilson’s wife. Until now, that is. (Drum roll, please…)

Try this on for size:
1. Novak had ONE source in the CIA, or a source somehow affiliated with the CIA, who told him that low-level covert agents, unbeknownst to either Tenet or Cheney, sent Wilson to Niger. (I happen to think Andrea Mitchell got the same information from the same source given what she said on CNBC July 8, 2003.)

2. Novak also had a SECOND source from the WH who simply told him that Wilson's wife helped send Wilson to Niger.

3. Novak put two-and-two together and realized that Wilson's wife was a covert agent who helped send Wilson to Niger.

In this scenario, no individual leaker broke the law because reporters were leaked info piecemeal. The information about Wilson’s wife was only illegal once Novak put it together. If, for example, Rove and Libby were talking about Wilson's wife while Hannah and Fietz, for example, were talking about low-level covert agents, no single leak was necessarily illegal. Sound plausible? If so, maybe Fitz was unsuccessful (due to Libby’s convenient amnesia regarding his June 12 meeting with Cheney) in trying to prove that the info was leaked piecemeal on purpose, which I assume would be a crime.

Well, that’s the theory. (Cue symphonic crescendo and final choral “Laaaaaaahhhh.”)

Any takers? Any flaws with it?

I’ll suggest the significant flaw in my own theory: someone actually told Novak that her name was Plame, which suggests that one person fed him too much info all at once. But that kind of makes sense in a way. After all, Libby repeatedly pushed leads upon Judy Miller and she was too dense to connect the dots and publish anything. Fed up with Miller’s inability to do their dirty work, they finally gave all of the info to Novak on a silver platter. They might have figured by that late date they had leaked so much info to so many reporters (and were continuing to leak in order to create a cloud*) that they could claim they heard it from reporters in the first place. Flaw explained away!

* For example, according to the indictment, “Official A” (aka Rove) told Libby on July 10 or 11 that Novak was going to be writing a story on Wilson’s wife. Since they already knew their story was going to get out via Novak, why would Libby subsequently continue to leak to both Miller and Cooper on July 12 if not to cloud the waters?

[cathyf]

Jeff:

I still don't see how you all are going to get Libby around his claim that he heard the news from Russert as though for the first time,

Well, I dunno, back when I was in the fourth grade, Mrs. Althouse taught us that you could identify simile by the presence of "like" or "as." She also taught us that taking similes and metaphors literally was bound to leave you looking mighty foolish. Metaphors, of course, are much harder to identify, so one of my 11th-grade classmates won the "laughingstock of the day" award when she thought that Swift really seriously wanted to carve up Irish children for chow. Perhaps Fitz fell into the "smart guy trap" -- he successfully figured out that Libby doesn't literally think that Judy Miller is a tree, but missed the easier-to-identify simile.

cathy :-)

[TP]

If you Google "as if i had heard it for the first time" you get some interesting common usage of the phrase in every day language. Essentially, it means "i heard it many times before but the poignancy of this time made it seem like the first time". "I had heard "Layla" a thousand times before but hearing it in acoustic form was as if I had heard it for the first time". "When I went to complain to Russert about Matthews' raw treatment of the VP office and Russert asked me if i knew that Wilson worked for John Kerry, it was is I had heard it for the first time." Libby could be assuming that Russert knew the whole story if he supplied a tidbit Libby did not know.

[cathyf]

Jim E., there are several plausible variations on this. How about...

1) Novak knew who Plame was, and didn't think too highly of her, because of some contact with her or a close colleague on some earlier occasion. Perhaps he had contact with Mr. and Mrs. Wilson when they were together at some social occasion, and Joe impressed him negatively.

2) The "no partisan gunslinger" told Rove that Wilson was an a**hole, and that the VP didn't send him, the low-level apparatchiks at the CIA cooked up sending the lying weasel to Niger.

3) Novak, in his own mind, connected "asshole lying weasel" and "CIA apparatchik" and thought, "gee, that sounds like Joe and Valerie Wilson... Oh, (light bulb goes pop) THAT Joe Wilson."

4) Novak got pissed at Harlow for lying to him and decided to play a little dumb when Harlow told him not to publish.

I live in a small town. And while it's not true that everybody knows everybody's business, it's always a good bet that there are people here whom you don't know or don't know well who know way more about your business than you think they do. We joke in our office that between the boss's wife and the office manager, we are related to every single resident of the town. Well, the axis of the DC media and high federal officials is a lot like a small town. Novak claimed from the very beginning that Plame's identity was "no big secret." We have Andrea Mitchell, who claims that she was not the recipient of any White House leaks, but she still came this close to figuring out that Valerie sent Joe.

cathy :-)

[dogtownGuy]

---that he heard the news from Russert as though for the first time, when he had been discussing it with other prominent administration officials just days before.

Well, seeing as he is not on the hook for spilling "the out" beans to Russert, doesn't matter he spoke to Cheney about it...in that...the council has a defense case made in heaven. He, Libby, has one set of information from Cheney...and BAM he gets another set from well informed reporters.

Just think. Your speaking to a reporter, and suddenly he says something (he may not even know he said it) that is more than you had ever even known.

Judy is the golden goose.

[clarice]

TP--intersting point re linguistics.

Cathy, I don't think Novak is part of the Georgetown crowd which is largely Ivy League educated liberals in government and the press these days.

But as out of that loop as he is, he smelled a set up when he saw it and asked around to military and intel people with whom he is in the loop--I still think Tenet was his source, but if not him someone like that.(heck, he coulda just asked Vallely or McInerney it appears).

[dogtownGuy]

"It would be difficult at this point for the news organizations to argue that their reporters need to protect confidential sources. In addition to discussing their sources with Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury, the reporters have each made those conversations public — Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper in published, first-person accounts of their talks with Mr. Libby and their testimony, and Mr. Russert in numerous television interviews."

One of Judy principle reasons as jailbird was she was unable to get assurances from Fitzgerald to limit his scope to avoid "other sources". Forgotten tidbit. Cooper made a weasly statement that left lingering "other sources" floating around.

Ever wonder why this seemingly easy investigation took 2 years?

2 years and possibly no indictments. 2 years with the inability to find out how reporters had independent knowledge of V.Plame, and a Niger trip, and a talking envoy. 2 years.

Lets back up. What did that referral say? Something like this...

"CIA Director George Tenet has requested a Justice Department investigation into charges that the White House leaked the name of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who traveled to Niger last year to investigate claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium there, according to reports."

Sort of predetermined. But then can CIA demand the NYTimes be investigated? or the Washington Post? Sort of hard to press Kristof when no WH official spoke to him. Sort of hard to get there when reporters are protecting other sources. NOT hard if you hand down an indictment, any kind of indictment...in order to get people to talk FINALLY.

[TP]

The thing that is interesting in the indictment timeline is the amount of time that passes between the Kristof article (May 6) and Libby's request to the State Department for information (May 29). You would think that libby would have been nosing around earlier than that with sources in the Washington Press Corps that could tell him what was going on. Is it possible he had other sources and was looking for confirmation from the government reports.

[MJW]

Jeff : Read Fitzgerald's press conference. I still don't see how you all are going to get Libby around his claim that he heard the news from Russert as though for the first time, when he had been discussing it with other prominent administration officials just days before.

I prefer to read the indictment.

Regarding the allegation that Libby lied about his reaction to Russert, I have several observations.

First, there's no allegation that he lied about where he first learned about Plame. This is, I think, the dog that didn't bark (to use a favorite metaphor on this site). Unless the FBI and GJ are idiots, they must have at some time directly asked Libby, "How did you first learn that Plame was a CIA employee?" And since there's no false statement or perjury charge related to this, we must assume he answered truthfully.

Given that assumption, how much affect does a claim that he was surprised by what Russert said have on the GJ's investigation?

Second, though we don't know what Libby said to the FBI, we do know what he said to the GJ. His testimoy was:

. . . . And then he said, you know, did you know that this – excuse me, did you know that Ambassador Wilson's wife works at the CIA? And I was a little taken aback by that. I remember being taken aback by it. And I said – he may have said a little more but that was – he said that. And I said, no, I don't know that. And I said, no, I don't know that intentionally because I didn't want him to take anything I was saying as in any way confirming what he said, because at that point in time I did not recall that I had ever known, and I thought this is something that he was telling me that I was first learning. And so I said, no, I don't know that because I want to be very careful not to confirm it for him, so that he didn't take my statement as confirmation for him. . . . . So then he said – I said – he said, sorry – he, Mr. Russert said to me, did you know that Ambassador Wilson's wife, or his wife, works at the CIA? And I said, no, I don't know that. And then he said, yeah – yes, all the reporters know it. And I said, again, I don't know that. I just wanted to be clear that I wasn't confirming anything for him on this. And you know, I was struck by what he was saying in that he thought it was an important fact, but I didn't ask him anymore about it because I didn't want to be digging in on him, and he then moved on and finished the conversation, something like that.

Taking a cue from Syl's analysis, there's another way of looking at this which seems reasonable. That is, that Libby wasn't "a little taken aback" that Plame worked for the CIA; he was taken aback that Russert knew it. And when he speaks of "first learning" it, he meant from a non-official source. This interpretation may at first seem to be a stretch, but there are several facts in its favor. In his testimony, Libby emphasizes that because he was hearing it for the first time, he didn't want say anything to Russert that might be taken as a confirmation. He also claims that he later told Cooper and Miller that other reporters were saying Plame worked for the CIA. This is entirely consistant with the view that Libby carefulley diffentiated between what he learned through official sources and what he learned through outside sources.

Third, the charge that Libby lied when he claimed to be surprised by what Russert told him seems somewhat at odds with the allegation that Russert never told him the thing he claimed to be surprised about. Either Russert didn't tell him Plame was with the CIA, in which case the claim he was surprised is a trivial part of the lie that Russert did tell him; or Russert did tell him, in which case the perjury charge is spurious.

(I hope TM starts another Plame Leak thread soon -- this ones getting a little long in the tooth.)

[topsecretk9]

(I hope TM starts another Plame Leak thread soon -- this ones getting a little long in the tooth.)

Yes, but it would be great if TM reached 500! I think that would be a record, wouldn't it?

[MJW]

In Mickey Klaus's article on the anti-semitism theory, he says:

If that was Libby's complaint, it would help explain why NBC wanted to keep quiet about its exact contents. Not only does it potentially bring up a wild, hard-to-refute issue that the network would rather not have to deal with--but Libby's jag is also something you wouldn't forget, or make up, which would make Russert's testimony extremely convincing at trial. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may have wanted to keep it secret so it would have as much of an impact as possible, and Russert may be trying to honor a request from the prosecutor.

If (a big if) this is true, one must wonder at what point Russert decided to give up his job as an NBC reporter and start working for the special prosecutor's office. Also, depending on how Fitzgerald made the request, it might run afoul of Gregory v. United States, 369 F.2d 185 (D.C.Cir. 1966). This decision (which unfortunately I couldn't find online) held that it was improper for a prosecutor to encourage witnesses to withhold information from the defense.

[kim]

You cannot say the 'N' word in much discourse, and you cannot sanely discuss anti-semitism. It is taboo.
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[kim]

Taboo, taboo, taboo.
====================

[kim]

You wanna be gladdened, listen to Ella let it out on 'Lady, Be Good'.
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