Breaking News
Yahoo news is flashing that Libby was indicted. CNN says:
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, indicted by grand jury on charges of obstruction of justice, making false statements and perjury in CIA leak probe.
October 28th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
What a glorious day.
October 28th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
You’re kidding, right?
Dems were obviously looking for a Monica Lewinsky story, and instead they got a Martha Stewart story. If Libby does any time he’ll get out of jail and get a part on a show with Donald Trump.
October 28th, 2005 at 4:01 pm
More is coming out, and it’s looking more and more like a big nothing.
Fitzgerald: “We’re not saying that Libby knowingly outted a covert agent.”
Fitzgerald again: “But … very rarely do you bring a charge in a case that’s going to be tried in which you ever end a grand jury investigation. I can tell you that the substantial bulk of the work of this investigation is concluded.”
October 28th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
Les:
What was it that they got Clinton on again? Oh yeah, perjury and obstruction of justice. So this is closer to Martha Stewart than Monica Lewinsky exactly how?
October 28th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Uhm, because that was the president and not some staffer?
October 28th, 2005 at 5:22 pm
Uncle beat me to it. Fitzgerald got a lowly assistant the public has never heard of, not the president or other higher-ups. Plus, unlike Clinton Bush won’t be sleeping on the couch for the next three months and getting marriage counseling from Jesse Jackson.
The Dem blogs have been beating this to death for weeks, gleefully rubbing their hands together and talking about “Fitzmas.”
Bubba was talking about Bush and Cheney going down for treason.
Al Franken was on the Today show this week talking about Rove and Cheney being executed.
What really happened was that – like Stewart – Bushco didn’t go charged with the original alegation – knowingly revealing an undercover agent – but obstruction and perjury related to the investigation. That’s a big let-down for the Dems.
PS I’m not condoning perjury. It’s a serious offense. It’s just not anything like the charge that was being hailed as the end of the Bush administration.
October 28th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Les..obstruction of justice and perjury are “a big nothing”?!? Clearly someone outed Plame and clearly that person worked at the Whitehouse. Whether we catch that person, its still a big deal.
October 28th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
Maybe he can cop a plea like Sandy Berger did.
Chris Matthews needs to go back on the meds big time. He has been foaming at the mouth all week. Funny that I don’t remember him being too concerned about Berger sneaking national security-related documents out of the National Archives and destroying them so the 9-11 Committee couldn’t review them.
October 28th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
Les…there is no issue of “getting” Bush or Cheney. Somebody outed Plame. I don’t know who that person is, however that person clearly works in the WH from what I’ve seen so far. Perhaps Fitzgerald will get this person, perhaps he won’t. That person might end up being Bush or Cheney, though I doubt it. Whoever that person ends up being (i.e. Rove, Libby, the WH towel boy, whomever) should be brought to justice to pay for their crimes.
October 28th, 2005 at 6:48 pm
It’s all about “getting” Bush. Just like “getting” Clinton was revenge for Nixon. That’s what the MSM said, so it must be true…
October 28th, 2005 at 7:43 pm
The only crime they found in this whole investigation is one that occured after the investigation started. They should have first demonstrated that 1) Plame was covert and covered by the act in question 2) her cover was blown by Novack’s article. If they can’t show 1 & 2, the investigation never should have occured. Not to make excuses for Libby. He earned his lumps if he did as Fitzgerald said.
If anything, this administration should be admired for how it conducted itself during this grand jury investigation. Just recall back to have Kevin Starr was demonized, investigated, his wife was openly attacked, the president of that administration perjured himself and suborned perjury from a witness. To this day, the left despises Starr.
There is a wide divide between class and crass. It is easy to act classy when you are riding high. The truth comes out however when things aren’t going your way. Just compare these 2 administrations and how they acted while being under investigation and the difference is clear.
October 28th, 2005 at 8:45 pm
“Les…there is no issue of “getting” Bush or Cheney. Somebody outed Plame.”
Great. Now if only we knew who it was and whether they did it intentionally, which is the standard in the law. Unintentional outings aren’t illegal, and as Fitzgerald noted today, it’s very difficuly to prove intent.
It’s also possibly Plame was outed by David Corn or even Joe Wilson, depending on who you believe, and whether you’re talking about who told Judith Miller vs. who told the whole world in print.
This case isn’t as open and shut as whether Bill got a BJ from Monica. Or as interesting. 🙂
October 29th, 2005 at 10:59 am
Manish, perjury and obstruction of justice are not “a big nothing,” but Scooter Libby is, and the fact that the basis of the entire investigation was shown to be bogus doesn’t reflect well on the process. In the end, all you got for Fitzmas was a stocking mostly full of coal, with a few hard candies in the top that Santa had ripped off from a local restaurant.
October 29th, 2005 at 7:26 pm
I’m not so sure. Repeatedly lying to a grand jury investigating the leaking of one our country’s CIA agents, seems to be pretty serious to me. If you read the text of the indictment, you wouldn’t be planning on a not-guilty verdict either – it’s pretty damning.
In some ways our White House has the worst of both worlds: an indictment charge against one of its top aides, and a continuing investigation into Karl Rove.
The only BJ is the one Libby may be forced to attend to in prison.
October 30th, 2005 at 1:59 am
Uncle/Les:
Yeah, but it wasn’t some Martha Stewart staffer that got nailed, either, it was Martha Stewart himself. And the knock on the Martha Stewart charges has always been that they didn’t get her on her “actual” crime, but on trumped up charges. Intentionally or not, Les seemed to imply that the crime was what more closely resembled Martha Stewart, not who they indicted. And in fact, you underscore that with your later remarks comparing this to Stewart:
Again, this differs from the Clinton case how? Surely you’re not arguing that obstruction and perjury were what Ken Starr was aiming for, are you? They were trying to get Clinton for a lot more, but the Lewinsky affair was the only thing they could get to stick. So in terms of who has been charged (so far), this is like neither the Stewart case nor the Clinton/Lewinsky case. And in terms of what the charges actually were (as related to the actual subject of the investigation), this is almost exactly like the Clinton and Stewart cases.
And as for Bubba and various other Dem bloggers, probably wishful thinking. As much as I’d love to see Cheney or Rove go down over this, I’d be shocked if it happened. The idea that they were completely uninvolved and unaware pushes the limits of credulity, but actually proving this beyond reasonable doubt is another matter.
Agreed, however the consequenses of this transgression are orders of magnatude worse than Clinton’s BJ. Nobody’s life was put at risk in Clinton’s dalliance, and an entire anti-proliferation operation wasn’t subverted by Clinton’s willie. Which is why the partisan nature of the responses to the Plame outing have so disappointed me. National security issues such as this ought to transcend partisan politics.
Xrlq:
I’m not so sure about that, given that he’s only two degrees of separation away from the president himself…
October 30th, 2005 at 10:14 am
Not to deny that Bill Clinton is scum, but the problem with the Starr investigation was that while it started as an investigation into a particular alleged crime (Whitewater), it didn’t stop when that crime had been thoroughly investigated and just prosecute those that could be indicted in connection with that investigation. (Notably not including anyone named “Clinton”.) Instead, it continued on, spending tens of millions of dollars to investigate every allegation ever thrown at the Clintons. How many of you think your record is so clean and so clear that a staff of top-notch lawyers working for several years couldn’t find some technicality to charge you with? Investigating an alleged crime is proper; investigating a particular person becomes persecution.
Fitzgerald did not do that; he only investigated one alleged crime, and followed up by investigating discrepancies in the statements collected during that investigation. In that 9-page indictment of Libby, I see two things lacking: Any claim that the CIA ever told anyone on the White House staff that Plame’s job was classified. And any claim that Plame had been out of the country on a covert mission within 5 years of her outing. So it appears that the original “crime” wasn’t a crime, as two out of three elements of the statutory definition were lacking: knowledge of the classified status, and the 5 year limit. So stop talking about this “outing” as hurting national security.
Now, obstructing justice and perjury are serious crimes in themselves. They make it more difficult and sometimes impossible to get to the root crime. On the other hand, you keep asking someone the same questions over and over again for two years and if they are trying to tell the truth you will get some discrepancies. Memory is not a fixed and constant thing. When someone tells the exact same story again and again, it’s a story they made up, memorized, and are regurgitating word for word.
I cannot tell whether this is what happened with Libby, or if he really and deliberately lied. However, I suspect that like the Martha Stewart case, the long-term effect of this indictment will be to obstruct future investigations. The lesson people will take from these cases is to say nothing to investigators, so there’s nothing to trip them up…
October 30th, 2005 at 1:28 pm
I’ve met Arnold Schwarzenegger, so depending on how you play that parlor game, there’s only two degrees of separation between me and the President, as well. I suppose I may have exaggerated a little when I described Libby as “nothing,” but my point is that he is far more expendable to the Administration than the other guy Fitzgerald was thinking of indicting, namely Karl Rove. Query how much public scrutiny this whole investigation would have received if it had been universally agreed from the start that the Espionage Act charges were bogus, and that the only person who would end up indicted for anything is “Scooter” Libby. Even if we understood that he’d be indicted for something other than calling himself “Scooter,” a serious indictment in itself.
October 30th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
tgirsch:
“Again, this differs from the Clinton case how?”
During the Paula Jones sexual harassment trial Clinton perjured himself when he said he hadn’t had sex with any other women on his staff. In fact, he had had sex with Monica Lewinsky.
During the Fitzgerald investigtion into whether someone had intentionally outed an undercover agent, Libby allegedly perjured himself about where he discovered that Plame was a CIA agent. It still has not been determined that he was guilty of intentionally outing an undercover agent. (See the Fitzgerald quote at the top of this thread.)
So there’s that. FWIW, I think using the courts to bring down administrations is destructive. I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think presidents should be above the law, but having some rinky dink prosecutor tying the chief executive in knots isn’t healthy for the country.
October 30th, 2005 at 10:08 pm
What a great Freudian slip by me. 🙂
markm:
#1, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Maybe the indictment didn’t mention illegal activity related to the leak because there was none; maybe it didn’t mention it because there was none by Libby.
#2, The five years and out of country limitation only concerns one possible violation of law. But there are at least three other possible violations that have no such constraints. And even in this case, it’s one of those things that doesn’t pass the sniff test: what was done may not technically have violated that law, but that points out a problem with the law rather than demonstrating that nothing wrong was done.
Why? Was Plame involved in an anti-Nuclear-proliferation operation? (Yes, she was.) Did the outing at least seriously undermine if not destroy that operation? (Yes, it did.) Are such operations not important to national security? (I sure as hell hope your answer is “yes.”)
Xrlq:
I didn’t realize you were the Lt. Governor’s top adviser! Learn something new every day… 😉
No, a Libby indictment isn’t the holy grail, but it’s not a dixie cup, either. And I’d say it’s a lot closer to the grail than to the cup (unless Zoot has been setting alight the grail-shaped beacon again…).
But yeah, if the Libby indictment is as far as it gets, it probably means that as usual for this administration, nobody will really be held accountable.
Les:
I can think of another difference between this case and the Clinton case. In the Clinton case, it took them four years to dredge up anything they could make stick, instead of a couple of months. 😉
As far as fixing the problem, I’m not sure how, either. Maybe some limit on what charges the independent counsel can bring, e.g., requiring that any charges be directly related to the incident being investigated. But I can see how even this could potentially be abused.
October 30th, 2005 at 11:01 pm
No, but my guess is that if you ran a poll among people who read blogs, or even among journalists who don’t, you’d probably find more people who have heard of Xrlq (either me or my Chinese twin) than who can name Cruz Bustamante’s top advisor. I sure as hell can’t, and I’m reasonably up on California politics. If I could, my first question to him would be whether he was the one who advised Bustamante to use the N-word in that speech he delivered to a group of black entrepreneurs a few years back.
Libby himself will be, and at this stage, there’s no evidence anyone else should be. “The buck stops here” is a ceiling, not a floor, i.e., unless the scandal starts with the President himself, it’s never a foregone conclusion that the buck should get “here” in the first place.
October 31st, 2005 at 3:06 am
I couldn’t name Al Gore’s top advisor when he was the Veep, but I do know that the Chief of Staff to the Vice President is a pretty important role. Heck, more people could probably name the President’s deputy chief of staff than his chief of staff, and whom do you think is more important? Just because they got someone no one had ever heard of doesn’t downplay the seriousness of the matter.
October 31st, 2005 at 11:09 am
Sure it does. For all you or I know, Al Gore may have changed his top advisor more often than he changes his underwear. Like I said, Libby’s expendable. Rove’s not. Enjoy your stocking (mostly) full of coal.
October 31st, 2005 at 2:08 pm
Xrlq:
For interfering with the investigation, and nothing more, it seems.
Don’t you mean there’s no evidence as to who else should be? Or are you arguing that Plame outed herself? One would think that someone ought to be held accountable for outing an undercover agent, no matter what the circumstances are.
October 31st, 2005 at 2:10 pm
Manish:
No, you fool, everyone knows that a person’s important is only determined by how many people can name them!
October 31st, 2005 at 2:36 pm
“Or are you arguing that Plame outed herself?”
Not speaking for XRLQ, but maybe someone just figured it out. Joe Wilson was in Who’s Who in America, and included his wife’s maiden name, Plame, in that entry. Maybe different people knew different things, and with enough reporters buzzing around all the facts came together. Wilson was hardly low profile – he wrote a NY Times op-ed criticizing the Bush administration shortly after his return from Niger.
Even if someone intentionally outed Plame, it’s not clear the law was broken. The law says that the outing has to occur within five years of the agent’s last overseas assignment, and according to Joe Wilson’s own book, it had been more than five years since Plame had been assigned abroad.
October 31st, 2005 at 2:38 pm
PS Here’s a scan of the Who’s Who entry
October 31st, 2005 at 3:43 pm
Les:
The Who’s Who entry did little more than tie Plame to Joe Wilson. It certainly didn’t tie Plame to the CIA, which is precisely what Novak’s story did. Two entirely different fish.
And what’s with this obsession about the five year window? #1, even if that particular law (the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) wasn’t violated, there are still others (e.g., Espionage Act) that may have been. (And if that one law is the only one preventing the outing of undercover agents, our intelligence operatives better be damn worried!) #2, as mentioned repeatedly above, just because something isn’t technically illegal doesn’t make it okay.
Anyway, as to your “someone just figured it out” hypothesis, that seems exceptionally unlikely given the timing of events. And anyone smart enough to “just figure it out” would presumably also be smart enough to realize that lives were being put at risk by releasing the information.
I’m sorry, but I have to think that if this happened under a Democratic administration rather than a Republican one, the screeching from Right Blogistan and from the Limbaughs and Hannitys would be deafening. Personally, I don’t give a shit who’s responsible — right, left, or independent — outing an undercover agent is inexcusable. Especially for an agent involved in an operation aimed at blocking WMD proliferation. What laws may or may not be on the books, Joe Wilson’s character, and how long she was in country or out of country are all, to my mind, irrelevant to that fact.
Again, as stated above, if nothing technically illegal was done in outing such an agent, then that tells me the damn laws need reform. If our intelligence officers can have their covers blown with no substantial consequences, then it’s no wonder our intelligence can be so ineffectual.
October 31st, 2005 at 4:32 pm
“If our intelligence officers can have their covers blown with no substantial consequences, then it’s no wonder our intelligence can be so ineffectual.”
They seem highly ineffectual in this instance. That’s the case Glenn Reynolds has been making: who the hell at the CIA thought Wilson was qualified in the first place, and who the hell allowed him to take on such a high profile by writing an op-ed in the NYT after returning from his CIA mission to Niger? It’s possible this whole controversy is CIA maneuverings, though CIA incompetence is looking more and more likely all the time.
The CIA is said they won’t investigate until the legal matters are finished. As Tom Mcguire said, “Is that how it works when our national security is threatened and lives are on the line – the CIA waits a few years until the trials are over, then assesses the damage?”
October 31st, 2005 at 5:42 pm
I’m arguing that Plame was not covert in any meaningful sense of the word, and in any event had not been operating outside the country within the previous five years, therefore, that charge is caca. The charge against Libby for obstructing this bogus investigation is not. If he did it, he should go to prison. If anyone else put him up to it, that person should, too. I’m just not convinced anyone else did.
October 31st, 2005 at 6:24 pm
Xrlq:
Oh, I get it, she wasn’t really covert. Well, hell, let’s start printing names all over the place, then. After all, if these people don’t pass the Xrlq “meaningfully” covert test, where’s the harm?
November 1st, 2005 at 12:34 am
Go ahead, with the caveat that you don’t know how strict the Xrlq test is – except that anyone who publishes his/her identity in a Who’s Who collection and tells most of his neighbors what he/she does for a living definitely doesn’t meet it. That, plus the fact that > 5 does not equal
November 1st, 2005 at 1:46 am
As indicated above, the Who’s Who guide merely listed the name, not the occupation. Bottom line is, the CIA gets to decide what a “meaningful sense” of covert is. Not me, and not Xrlq. That they asked for an investigation ought to tell you where they stand on this.
And of course, Scooter Libby perjured himself and obstructed investigators to keep them from unearthing the dark truth that there’s nothing to unearth?
Finally, enough with the five year thing already. If I drive 65 mph in a 45 mph zone, I haven’t violated the law that says I can’t go over 15 in a school zone when children are present. That doesn’t mean I haven’t violated the law, just that I haven’t violated that law.
November 1st, 2005 at 1:47 am
And hey, as long as it’s not technically illegal, who cares what operations were undermined?
November 1st, 2005 at 11:07 am
That’s the law everyone was talking about. What other criminal statute do you think Libby, or anyone else involved, violated? And why on earth was any investigation launched into allegations that anyone had gone over 15 in a school zone where children are present, given that anyone who was awake could have told you that it wasn’t a school zone, and no children were present? And if Libby or anyone else involved really did drive 65 in a 45 mph zone, why isn’t he being charged for that? It’s not as though Fitzgerald hasn’t had enough time or resources to put together his case.
In this context, there is no such thing as “not technically illegal.” Laws governing covert agents, classified info, etc. are themselves highly technical, so if the law says she was technically “covert” as a legal matter even though she clearly was not as a factual matter, then there is your technicality. If she was “technically” not covert as a matter of law, while she was also not covert in any meaningful sense (i.e., whether or not she was considered “legally covert,” her identity and her role in the CIA were already known by far too many people for any future covert missions involving her to be feasible), then there’s nothing technical here at all.
Meanwhile, I have to be more than a little amused by all the liberals suddenly caring so much about the integrity of covert CIA missions. Yet, for some strange reason, 100% of the blame for this supposed outing of a supposedly covert agent conveniently goes to a Republican administration for responding to her husband’s lies about the trip, and not to the husband of the “spy” in question for telling those lies in the first place, knowing full well he’d make a public figure of himself and his wife in the process? Is this a new arguing tactic for Democrats, to tell inflammatory lies against your opponent, which your opponent can’t refute without (allegedly) breaching security?
November 1st, 2005 at 4:48 pm
I’ve mentioned a couple above. But you can google as well as the next guy. It runs the gamut from as “minor” as violating confidentiality agreements — which would result in at minimum a loss of security clearance — to violating the Espionage Act.
If he (or someone close to him) isn’t guilty of anything, then why lie?
If there’s anything “sudden” about it, at least in my case, it’s because it’s the first I’ve heard of anyone destroying the integrity of a covert CIA mission, seemingly for petty revenge. Surely, however, you have examples of Democrats prominently defending other Democrats subverting the integrity of covert operations.
#1, If Wilson’s op-ed in and of itself outed his wife and jeopardized a covert CIA operation, then why isn’t Wilson himself being investigated and charged? Oh, yeah, because the Republican-controlled congress is engaged in a partisan witch hunt against other Republicans. Sure.
#2, “He knew what would happen” sounds an awful lot like you’re defending a mafia-style protection scheme.
#3, Sorry to bust your bubble, but this has never been a partisan issue for me. Anyone involved in the outing — Democrat, Republican, or Independent — should be held accountable. And that would include Wilson himself, if he indeed was somehow responsible.
#4, I don’t think you’ll find anywhere that I’ve suggested that “100% of the blame” should fall upon the Republican administration. Whereas you surely seem to be arguing that zero percent of the blame lies there.
#5, I enjoy the hypocrisy of the right concerning what consititues a “lie” based on who said it. Inconsistencies in Wilson’s op-ed are out-and-out lies, while inconsistencies in the administration’s case for war were just run-of-the-mill honest mistakes, move along folks, nothing to see here.
November 2nd, 2005 at 1:01 am
I’m not aware of any law making it a crime to violate a confidentiality agreement, but if there were any violations of the Espionage Act, Patrick Fitzgerald had an opportunity to charge them. He didn’t. Why do you suppose that is?
There can be all sorts of political advantages to lying to the press. Repeating those same lies to an investigator is an extremely dumb thing to do, but it’s not hard to see how someone in Libby’s position might end up doing that.
I don’t think there was a legitimate outing of a genuine spy. If Plame herself even thought she was still a spy, her cover was blown long before Wilson’s dishonest article, and probably was before he made the trip in the first place. So, no, Wilson shouldn’t be charged with “outing” his wife, either. No one should be, because that charge is bogus, which is probably why no one is being charged for it. OTOH, Wilson is clearly guilty of lying to Congress, about the very stuff that prompted this necessary rebuttal you cheaply describe as “petty revenge,” so I am a little surprised no one has the cojones to hold in in contempt of Congress, or something. Perhaps the Republicans are more afraid of making him a martyr than they are of the effects of his serial mendacity if he is simply ignored.
November 2nd, 2005 at 6:18 pm
Possibly because he couldn’t make them stick; possibly because Libby himself wasn’t a guilty party. Who knows? But I wasn’t aware that Fitzgerals had completed his investigation or announced that no new charges are forthcoming.
Then why on Earth did the CIA request an investigation?
As for Wilson’s “dishonest” article, the Butler report is the only thing I’ve seen that disputes Wilson’s claims, and virtually everything I’ve seen about it — including subsequent statements by the Bush administration — actually corroborates most of Wilson’s op-ed.
They haven’t. Why do you suppose that is? 🙂
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:45 am
Because they’re in a pissing match with the Bush Administration.
Then you’re guilty of selective vision. Among the many who must be lying if Lyin’ Joe Wilson is telling the truth – Patrick Fitzgerald.
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:46 am
Did I say “guilty of?” I meant “suffering from.” Blindness is an unfortunate condition, not a sin.
November 3rd, 2005 at 4:46 pm
So even if we concede, just for the sake of argument, that Plame did indeed recommend her husband for the job, this excuses the release of classified information exactly how? Oh, that’s right, it wasn’t really classified, even though it was classified.
As to the indictment itself, I’m less than impressed. If true, then someone is lying, but we can’t say that it’s Wilson. The indictment merely reports what Libby was told, not whether or not those things were verified to be true. Did the independent counsel actually interview the CIA source who fingered Plame as having been the source of the idea? Or did they take Libby’s word for this?
Bottom line here is that Wilson hasn’t been indicted for perjury (or anything else). Maybe he should be, but he hasn’t been.
November 3rd, 2005 at 9:48 pm
Are we talking about laws or morals? Legally, it’s not generally a crime to divulge classified information; only to do so willfully. Morally, it’s scarcely objectionable to divulge information that’s widely known already, particularly if the main point of your conversation is to get across information that is NOT classified, and should not be considered private in any sense (whether Joe Wilson was lying when he said the administration recommended him for the trip).
It’s either Wilson, who had reason to lie to bolster his credibility, or at least two sources who had no incentive to lie. Even if we were to assume that Libby’s CIA source and the Undersecretary of State both lied to Libby for God-knows-what-reason, that doesn’t suggest anything nefarious about Libby’s state of mind; either he was refuting a lie, or he was refuting a true statement he reasonably (albeit mistakenly) believed to be a lie.
I don’t know, but my guess is the former rather than the latter. I can’t imagine any prosecutor worth his salt would take any criminal defendant’s word for anything – let alone a criminal defendant being charged with lying to investigators.
November 3rd, 2005 at 10:44 pm
This is still going on? You two get a room ;-P