Stop This Wheel From Rolling

I have been advised that I will enjoy the Raw Story interview with Marcy Wheeler, now famous as one of the livebloggers covering the Libby trial at firedoglake, and whom I have praised many times in the past.  I certainly liked the opening:

BB: I didn’t realize how serious the loophole in Fitzgerald’s strategy was and how profoundly it affected the course of the investigation. But at the same time he probably couldn’t have moved forward without promising to limit the investigation to only known leakers. Talk about that, if you can.

MW: Armitage is the perfect example because people on the right always say how dare Patrick Fitzgerald didn’t find the Bob Woodward/Armitage’s connection. But had he done what he needed to do to find that, he would have needed to subpoena every single journalist who spoke to Libby, Rove, Armitage, Fleischer, Bartlett, Hadley, Condi. And you’re beginning to get into the range of things. They were all potential leakers and probably to some degree were involved. There’s no way you would’ve been able to subpoena all of that.

Oh, good point (where is my darned "eyeroll" key?).  But I have a different idea - since Armitage had confessed to leaking to Novak, and since the original INR memo which mentioned Valerie Wilson's connection to her husband's trip had been circulated at the senior levels of the State Dept in early June, why not ask to see Armitage's phone records and appointment calendar for June?

That may have seemed too complicated for Special Counsel Fitzgerald, but when the AP tried that incredibly subtle approach, guess what they found:

Then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage met with Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003, the same time the reporter has testified an administration official talked to him about CIA employee Valerie Plame. Armitage's official State Department calendars, provided to the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, show a one-hour meeting marked ``private appointment" with Woodward on June 13, 2003.

Yup, those folks on the right sure do have unrealistic expectations.  So what is the guess on the left - did Fitzgerald ask Armitage about the Woodward appointment and get a, hmm, not a lie, a flawed memory?  Or did Fitzgerald forget to check Armitage's calendar?  Let's drag Christy Hardin Smith in for her swooning view of Fitzgerald's unrelenting investigatory technique.

Here, methinks Ms. Wheeler has been relying on the NY Times, or her own trial coverage:

John Hannah was a huge bust for the defense. They had a great witness, John Hannah, saying if Libby took 2 hrs on July 8 to meet with Judith Miller there’d be no way he’d forget it.

Oh, please.  Libby didn't forget it - it is all over his grand jury testimony.  What he remembered was the double-secret declassification of the NIE by Bush and Cheney so that Libby could leak the NIE to Miller, and Hannah never said anything different.   Here is Ms. Wheeler's liveblog:

F If he gave someone an hour or two, it was something Libby thought important.

TYOI WRT me, yes.

"Something" equals "wife"?  Really?  Couldn't have been the NIE, despite all the machinations preceding that leak?  Please.

More prescience:

BB: So predictions? Verdict?

MW: I think Wells is going to make a very concerted effort at jury nullification. In his closing statement he’s going to harp on: Rove leaked, Ari [Fleischer] leaked, Armitage leaked and they’re not doing time, they’re not even charged. 

Well, predictions are always hazardous, especially about the future.  However, Jeralyn Merritt had predicted that the jury nullification gambit would be set aside in favor of reasonable doubt and I had agreed (in her comments).  Check the reporting, make the call (hint - the defense was all reasonable doubt).

And let's close with this gem on the freedom of blogging:

And I’ve said this before. I wouldn’t want to give up the ability to say, ‘I’m going to speculate wildly. It is speculation, but here’s my basis for it.’ And I mean, we figured out that Armitage was the Novak/Woodward source in March and we were able to do that because we were able to do things that journalists wouldn’t do.

Uhh, waddya mean "We"?  To her credit Ms. Wheeler did accept the evidence of her own eyes when faced with a redacted document.  Having been dragged kicking and screaming to this point, however, her supporting hypothesis fell wildly short of the mark - her guess was that Armitage leaked the info about Ms. Plame only as an example of the outrageous lengths to which Cheney and Company were prepared to go to shame Joe Wilson. Here, she attempts to imagine the Armitage-Woodward exchange:

Dick, Pincus' article said the CIA envoy was an Ambassador. Do you know who it is?

Yeah, Bob, it's Joe Wilson, the guy who took on Saddam during the Gulf War. He used to be stationed in Niger--facilitated the transition from military rule in 1999, too--so he's got a great relationship with the people named in the Niger documents. And he knows a lot about the uranium business.

Oh geez. He would know better than anyone. So how did Cheney's office manage to bury the intelligence?

Well, they're saying that Wilson's wife, who works at the CIA as a WMD analyst, suggested him for the trip. They're trying to suggest he wasn't qualified.

For comparison (OK, I am bitter in expectation of a Libby conviction - there, I said it!), here was my own thinking as of Nov 2005:

And, hypothetically of course, as the seniors at State retold their tale, the tidbit about the whole pointless Wilson exercise being orchestrated by his CIA wife was not a talking point - it was a punchline.

Listen to the tape of Armitage yukking it up with Woodward and make the call.

Grr. 

Comments

[hit and run]

Yikes Boris. The hit man analogy hits the nail on the head. You hit a home run with that one. You'd think that would hit the dems upside the head with a 2x4, but will it hit home with them? A hit or miss proposition at best. I like the word hit. But gotta run.

[Carol Herman]

FROM CAROL HERMAN

Perhaps, you've noticed? This trial had LIBERAL BLOGGERS inside the court house. But unlike FIRE, it didn't catch on.

DECODER RING: Drudge has his pulse on mainstream America. And, he says this trial is not being followed by anyone not part of the "in crowd." So, it doesn't register on the scale where most Americans notice.

Hmm? With the first time in American history we have LIVE BLOGGERS at a trial, and what does DRUDGE notice? LACK OF AUDIENCE.

NO AUDIENCE!

To borrow from Podhoretz' line today, where he "advises" the left that listening to Hollywood only supplies them with VOTER REPELLENT ...

I though the REAL NEWS was onto something.

And, I get my real news from Drudge.

Sure, partisans have fun fighting; if you think of carville and bagala as entertainment, go ahead. See if I care.

Meanwhile, the DOWNWARD trend is going to get more noticeable ... not less so ... ahead.

Can people who run blogs make money? Glenn Reynolds pockets about $40,000 each month. Money he doesn't have to share with anyone else on his faculty; where he also earns small change in comparison, doing his day job. He's a lawyer who teaches.

While Russert is a lawyer who lies for a $5,000,000 annual living. Gee, the left really pays off it's top wage earners, huh?

But Glenn Reynolds doing well.

Which means there's a REAL INTERNET. And, then there are the dogs. That FIRE up. And, go away.