More Fitzmas Miracles to Come?
John Dean, who knows a thing or two about crimes and cover-ups in the highest level of government, has written a truly fascinating analysis of the Libby indictment and Fitzgerald press conference.
Dean, who immediately before Fitzgerald indicted Libby predicted that no one would be indicted and Fitz would close up shop, had this to say:
Now, however, one indictment has been issued -- naming Vice President
Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the defendant, and charging
false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. If the indictment is to be
believed, the case against Libby is, indeed, a clear one.
Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will be issued. In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted.
Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney.
Dean does a close reading of the indictment and notes that a lot of irrelevant and extraneous stuff is in there, UNLESS there's more to come. Dean thinks Fitzgerald is trying to prove a violation of the Espionage Act and a conspiracy between Libby and Cheney. It's definitely worth a read.
Tweak This
A new batch of Mike Brown e-mails have been released and they're even more damning than the first. Here's the most unbelievable. Brown gets the following e-mail from FEMA's man on the ground in the Superdome in New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde:
Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical . Here some things
you might not know.
Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no
food or water. Hundreds still being rescued from homes.
The dying patients at the DMAT tent being modivac. Estimates are many will
die within hours. Evacuation in process. Plans developing for dome evacuation
but hotel situation adding to problem. We are out of food and running out of
water at the dome, plans in works to address the critical need.
FEMA staff is OK and holding own. DMAT staff working in deplorable
conditions. The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can
get them out.
Phone connectivity impossible.
More later
Brown's response, in toto?
"Thanks for update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"
Tweak? People are dying with no food or water, and are drowning and you ask if you just need to "tweak" things?
Wow. This is almost criminal. In fact, it may be, as it looks like Brown clearly lied under oath during his testimony before Congress based on this information. Perjury seems to be spreading in this Administration. Wonder what Alito will say about Griswold under oath during his hearing?
We're Part of the 65%
For those Republicans who insist that the Democrats are just playing to their base with things like the closed Senate session to force a serious investigation on whether this Administration manipulated and misused intelligence in order to get us involved in a disasterous conflict that has cost over 2,000 Americans their life, polls like this recent CBS Poll (which is amply supported by other polls) show how horribly deluded they are.
Regardless of what happened last November (and, yeah, I'm looking at you Diebold. Actually, now that the Plame cover-up has been exposed and the degree of the Administration's deceit on the matter is made public, you don't need a conspiracy theory to believe that things would have been different last November if the Administration had come clean), we're in a different place now. And those on the right are part of a shrinking 35% and we're on the side with 65%.
To those on the right who refuse to acknowlege this obvious fact, I offer these truths: Your President is horribly unpopular right now. (And he's becoming more and more unpopular in red states too, like North Carolina.) A senior White House official was just indicted for acts directly related to his official work, with more to come. Your House majority leader, already horribly ethically challenged, was just indicted. Your Senate majority leader is under investigation by the SEC and has told several lies to the public about his stock ownership. More and more of your members of Congress will become enveloped by the Jack Abramoff scandal.
So you can continue to mouth the talking points and say how its all gonna be allright, it's just the liberal fringe making noise. But if you don't wake up soon, November 2006 may be a real shock to the system.
Worth Noting
I can't argue with this posting called the "Starr Standard" from the Carpetbagger blog about Cheney and Plame compared with Starr and Clinton:
Seven years ago, Ken Starr prepared a lurid report for Congress detailing
his case against Bill Clinton. At first blush, it wouldn't appear to have any
relevance to the Plame scandal affecting the Bush White House, but I was
reviewing the Starr report recently and something jumped out at me.
After he laid out the "narrative" of Clinton's alleged transgressions,
Starr wrote a section he called "Grounds."In it, Starr details what he described as "acts that may constitute grounds for
an impeachment." There were 11 in all, most of which dealt with Clinton's grand
jury testimony and remarks during a deposition in Paula Jones' civil suit. But
the last of the grounds for impeachment went
a little further.
* Beginning on January 21, 1998, the President misled the American people
and Congress regarding the truth of his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky.
[…]
The President himself spoke publicly about the matter several times in the
initial days after the story broke. On January 26, the President was definitive:
"I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm
going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss
Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These
allegations are false."
The President's emphatic denial to the American people was false. And his
statement was not an impromptu comment in the heat of a press conference. To the
contrary, it was an intentional and calculated falsehood to deceive the Congress
and the American people.
Remember, when Clinton made those remarks, he wasn't under oath; he was
answering a reporter's question. For Starr, it didn't matter. Here was a
constitutional officer lying to the country, on national television, about a
subject that was under a federal investigation. Starr said this was, quite
literally, an impeachable offense.
With this in mind, if there was evidence that a constitutional officer in
the current White House had lied to the country, on national television, about a
subject that was under a federal investigation, under the Starr standard, it too
would constitute an impeachable offense.
Well, it just so happens….In particular, I'm thinking about Dick Cheney, who claimed on Meet the Press in 2003:
"I don't know Joe Wilson. I've never met Joe Wilson. A question had arisen.
I'd heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa,
Niger in particular. I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with
the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the
questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, 'What do we know
about this?' They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said,
'This is all we know. There's a lot we don't know,' end of statement. And Joe
Wilson — I don't who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever
saw when he came back."
Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment against Scooter Libby highlights just how
little of what Cheney said was true. Despite his denials, Cheney requested and
received a briefing on Wilson's trip to Niger from the CIA.
Cheney also told Libby about Plame working at the CIA and may
have advised Libby on how to deal with questions about Wilson during a July
12, 2003, plane trip on Air Force Two.
Am I saying that Cheney's intentional and calculated falsehoods on Meet the
Press are grounds for impeachment? No, I'm saying that they're grounds for
impeachment using Ken Starr's standards.
Is Cheney a constitutional officer? Yes. Did he lie to the country? Yes. On
national television? Yes. About a subject that was under a federal investigation
at the time? Yes.
Don't blame me; Ken Starr is the one who created the standard. I'm just
wondering if it only applies to Democrats.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Republican Mind.
What if November 2, 2004 Was November 2, 2005?
Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the 2004 Election. E.J. Dionne has a great column today that I'll reprint in full below, but basically he makes the point that, regardless of what happens with Libby, Rove and Cheney, this Administration's cover-up and lies in the Plame case worked, as it got Bush reelected:
Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?
In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby
last week, Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified
when subpoenas were issued in August 2004, and "we would have been here in
October 2004 instead of October 2005."
Note the significance of the two dates: October 2004, before President Bush
was reelected, and October 2005, after the president was reelected. Those dates
make clear why Libby threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors, in the special
counsel's apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation.
As long as Bush still faced the voters, the White House wanted Americans to
think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had
nothing to do with the leak campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq,
former ambassador Joseph Wilson.
And Libby, the good soldier, pursued a brilliant strategy to slow the
inquiry down. As long as he was claiming that journalists were responsible for
spreading around the name and past CIA employment of Wilson's wife, Valerie
Plame, Libby knew that at least some news organizations would resist having
reporters testify. The journalistic "shield" was converted into a shield for the
Bush administration's coverup.
Bush and his disciples would like everyone to assume that Libby was some
kind of lone operator who, for this one time in his life, abandoned his usual
caution. They pray that Libby will be the only official facing legal charges and
that political interest in the case will dissipate.
You can tell the president worries that this won't work, because yesterday
he did what he usually does when he's in trouble: He sought to divide the
country and set up a bruising ideological fight. He did so by nominating a
staunchly conservative judge to the Supreme Court.
Judge Samuel Alito is a red flag for liberals and red meat for Bush's socially conservative base. Alito has a long paper trail as a 15-year veteran of a court of appeals and a strong right-wing reputation. This guarantees a huge battle that will serve the president even if Alito's nomination fails: Anything that "unites the base" and distracts attention from the Fitzgerald investigation is good news for
Bush.
That is why Senate Democrats -- and one hopes they might be joined by some
brave Republicans -- should insist that before Alito's nomination is voted on,
Bush and Cheney have some work to do.
The Fitzgerald indictment makes perfectly clear that the White House misled
the public as to its involvement in sliming Wilson and talking about
Plame.
Bush needs to tell the public -- yes, the old phrase still applies -- what
he knew about the operation to discredit Wilson and when he knew it. And he
shouldn't hide behind those "legalisms" that Republicans were so eager to
condemn in the Clinton years.
The obligation to come clean applies, big-time, to Cheney, who appears at
several critical points in the saga detailed in the Fitzgerald indictment. What
exactly transpired in the meetings between Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case?
It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue
official. Did Cheney set these events in motion? This is a question about good
government at least as much as it is a legal matter.
Fitzgerald has made clear that he wants to keep this case going if
doing so will bring us closer to the truth. Lawyers not involved in the case
suggest that the indictment was written in a way that could encourage Libby,
facing up to 30 years in prison, to cooperate in that effort.
But there is a catch. If Libby, through nods and winks, knows that at the
end of Bush's term, the president will issue an unconditional pardon, he will
have no interest in helping Fitzgerald, and every interest in shutting up. If
Bush truly wants the public to know all the facts in the leak case, as he has
claimed in the past, he will announce now that he will not pardon Libby. That
would let Fitzgerald finish his work unimpeded, and we would all have a chance,
at last, to learn how and why this sad affair came to pass.
Amen.
And it's time reporters pressed Bush on a "no pardon" pledge, particularly with Rove's status still very much up in the air.
Wild About Harry
Minority Leader Reid has just invoked Rule 21 and taken the Senate into closed session over the failure of the Senate to investigate the Administration's manipulation of Iraq intelligence.
That's the way you link the Libby indictment to the bigger picture.
And also link it to what life will be like in the Senate if the Republicans succeed with the "nuclear option" if Democrats filibuster Alito.
Atta boy, Harry. Just like his namesake, President Truman, Reid's not "giving them hell. [He] just tells the truth and they think it's hell."
