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11/04/2005:

"The CIA leak investigation: Bigger fish, deeper water"

...On its own, the public fallout from Libby's indictment on five counts of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice will be minimal. One could even add that the indictment of Karl Rove would make less difference in the court of popular opinion than most followers of the case think. Poll after poll has shown that only about half of Americans have ever heard of Rove. The gravity of his loss would be strategic: Without him, the great orchestra of White House staffers, congressional GOP foot soldiers, and the Washington press corps would be without a conductor. Meantime, only a very few pundits of the right made mention of the shoe that has not yet dropped. Proving again that crazy is not the same as stupid, Ann Coulter told CNN that the extension of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation "is, like, the worst possible outcome." She is right, too.

Where is Fitzgerald's case headed now? The arc of Plame leak coverage in the press underscores the futility of reading too much into any particular leak from the grand jury. As recently as last Friday, the New York Times and Washington Post were diametrically opposed on the very basic question of whether the probe would continue. (The Times said yes, the Post no.) The trouble is that all the leaks seem to be coming from defense attorneys close to the case, and criminal lawyers a) don't know Fitzgerald's theory of the case, only what he has said to them regarding their clients; and b) are duty-bound, wherever possible, to spin any disclosures they make so as to aid their clients.

But there is one point on which every major news outlet, and presumably every leaker, has fallen into accord in the past week or two. Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal put it concisely: "With the grand jury in the CIA leak case expected to vote as soon as today to bring charges against White House officials, the two-year probe appears to be focused on the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the chief architects and defenders of the administration's Iraq war policy." The accent belongs on the last clause. Cheney's office is the Pandora's Box of the Bush administration campaign to invade Iraq. Most of the planning as to both the waging and selling of the war occurred under his direction, along with that of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon.
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