The New York Times, free from the shackles of Judith Miller's imprisonment, reports that Patrick Fitzgerald is unlikely to issue a report on his investigation. The paper speculates that this means he is about to bring indictments. But the old Special Prosecutor law is no longer in place, and a report is not required, nor some say, authorized.
It's still anybody's guess if there will be indictments, and we are still a week away from the grand jury's expiration. But if no indictments come out of the last two years and there is no report, those who have been counting on seeing Rove being frogmarched into a federal courthouse will cry cover-up.
The facts of the case has by now become so distorted that it may be impossible t sort them out for the public mind. Fitzgerald has a sequence of events and hours of testimony to go through, yet the central figures in the story--Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame--are curiously immune from any speculation.
Does this case rally hinge on the "outing" of Plame? Why? This article in The Weekly Standard questions whether there was ever a crime committed.
The website for EPIC includes a biography of Wilson under the June 14, 2003, event that concludes with this sentence: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has four children."
Wilson also peddled his story to John Judis and Spencer Ackerman at the New Republic. And as in the whispered "telephone" game that kids play around the campfire, the story became more distorted the more it was told. In the New Republic's version, Vice President Cheney received the forged documents directly from the British a year before Bush spoke the "16 words" in the January 2003 State of the Union. Cheney then
had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union. "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former ambassador tells TNR.
It should be clear by now that the only one telling flat-out lies was Joseph Wilson. Again, Wilson's trip to Niger took place in February 2002, some eight months before the U.S. government received the phony Iraq-Niger documents in October 2002. So it is not possible, as he told the Washington Post, that he advised the CIA that "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." And it is not possible, as Wilson claimed to the New York Times, that he debunked the documents as forgeries.
That was hardly Wilson's only fabrication. He would also tell reporters that his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Niger and, as noted in the New Republic article, that Vice President Cheney's office had seen the report of his findings. Both claims were false.
I still see that Libby and possibly Rove will be receiving a letter from the special counsel soon. But I'm beginning to wonder if the letters will inform of indictments for obstruction and perjury, which would tell a lot about the facts in the case.
It seems that this is all about Joseph Wilson and his anger at administration attempts to discredit him. Fitzgerald's best hope for indictments isn't that it was illegal to discredit Wilson, but that lying about discrediting Wilson may be.
Comments