Waiting For The Valerie Plame Wilson Grand Jury: The Big Question Is Whether Dick Cheney Was a Target
All prosecutorial decisions are political. Not necessarily in the partisan sense, but rather, in the sense the prosecutor balances the seriousness of the conduct involved, with the purpose of the laws that might be violated, and his job is to act in the best interest of the United States government.
The leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert identity, if it was part of a plan to discredit her husband's report on his trip to Niger, is directly related to issues of "national security."....
But national security is a very gray area. Was the Bush/Cheney White House operating in the best interest of the country, or did they have a private agenda (oil fields in Iraq)? Did Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby believe they had national security reasons to discredit Wilson's claims, and act accordingly? This is an area where there is no law, and it compounds the assessment of the actions of those involved.
Steve Gilliard and Whiskey Bar to our rescue.
First, Gilliard's take on Dean...
But I also think Dean's assumption is wrong here. Revealing Valerie Plame's name and then lying to the FBI cannot simply be justified by national security. Her name and status alone were state secrets. Someone knew that when they used her name.
I think someone below Rove and Libby may be tagged with the actual crime. But their problem is that they used that information, then lied to the Special Prosecutor about it. Four trips to the grand jury is not a good sign.
You have a conflict: starting the war for national security reasons, but violating a state secret to do so against a domestic critic who was basically a footnote to history?
What you have to never forget is that the CIA pushed this to DOJ. The CIA's general counsel had to make the case to George Tenet that significant damage had been done to the CIA covert operations that they needed to persue this. This wasn't something a judge thought up. The CIA had to make the case internally, and then to Justice. There was no free ride here. Everyone going in knew this would end up at the White House.
I think that mitigates much of the national security defense.
The only reason this has gone this far is very simple, but may never be raised in open court.
People died.
Mr. Fitzgerald and the Judges who have supported his requests to them, I dare say, understand this. Gilliard reminds us with this.
The revelation of Brewster Jennings, not Plame's NOC status, is the real intelligence disaster. No one outside of CIA may ever know what kind of intelligence disaster that became. I think, in the end, that is the driving factor. A priceless US intelligence asset was destroyed because of politics.
Billmon agrees:
Ultimately, as Dean notes, these are all matters of prosecutorial discretion. But my own sense is that if Fitzgerald believes Karl Rove, Scooter Libby or any other government official deliberately used classified information as a weapon to retaliate against a critic -- what's more, one who broke no laws and violated no secrecy agreement by speaking out -- he'll go after them with every legal weapon at his disposal. I think, or at least, hope, Fitzgerald understands that when an administration turns the vast national security powers of the U.S. government against its own citizens, for purely political purposes, it sacrifices any claim to privilege or protection.
Certainly, everything Fitzgerald has done up until this point suggests he not only believes crimes were committed, and that those crimes are within his authority to prosecute, but that he is also convinced they are well within his discretion to prosecute.
More prosaically, I think the fact that Fitzpatrick's office has created its own web page is a strong sign that indictments are coming -- but not for the reason most widely held. Yes, a web page will come in handy for posting indictments, press releases about indictments, etc. But I think the documents already posted there may be the real tip off. They constitute a not-so-subtle reply to the conservative lie du jour -- that Fitzgerald has strayed far beyond his "original" mandate to investigate alleged violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
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What the special prosecutor is doing, on the other hand, is challenging a cozy insider-trading racket that's done far more to housetrain the corporate media and shield an out-of-control classification regime from reform than it has to serve the American people's right to know. If Fitzgerald reaffirms the post-Watergate principle that Big Brother can go to jail, it will do more to advance the cause of civil liberties than a baker's dozen of Washington pseudo-journalists. On the other hand, if he backs down now, it's easy to imagine future administrations finding other official secrets to use against their critics, all in the name of national security.
Unlike Dean, I prefer to be optimistic until proven otherwise. Fitzgerald isn't the Great White Hope, and I don't expect him to reveal all. But if he can knock the cabal out -- or at least punch the crap out of it -- with the modern equivalent of Al Capone's tax evasion conviction, I'll take it. Capone, after all, emerged from prison a broken man, his mind rotted away by syphilis. We could do worse.
Indeed we could do worse, or better; if by better is meant Atty Fitzgerald follows the letter of the law wherever the hell it leads him. Of course by most indicators, we can count on it.