NYT: Prosecutor Weighs Charges Against Rove in Leak Case

[DeepModem Mom]

Prosecutor Weighs Charges Against Rove in Leak Case
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: April 28, 2006

WASHINGTON, April 27 — Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, is expected to decide in the next two to three weeks whether to bring perjury charges against Karl Rove, the powerful adviser to President Bush, lawyers involved in the case said Thursday.

With the completion of Mr. Rove's fifth appearance before the grand jury on Wednesday, Mr. Fitzgerald is now believed to have assembled all of the facts necessary to determine whether to seek an indictment of Mr. Rove or drop the case.

Lawyers in the case said Mr. Fitzgerald would spend the coming days reviewing the transcript of Mr. Rove's three hours of testimony on Wednesday and weigh it against his previous statements to the grand jury as well as the testimony of others, including a sworn statement that Mr. Rove's lawyer gave to the prosecutor earlier this year. The lawyers were granted anonymity so they could speak about the internal legal deliberations in Mr. Rove's case.

A lawyer with knowledge of the case said that Mr. Rove had known for more than a month that he was likely to make another appearance before the grand jury, and that he had known since last fall that he would be subject to further questions from Mr. Fitzgerald before the prosecutor completed his inquiry....

***

Mr. Fitzgerald must specifically decide whether Mr. Rove misled the grand jury in testimony he gave in 2004 about his conversations with reporters about Valerie Wilson, the intelligence officer at the heart of the C.I.A. leak case....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/washington/28leak.html

[johnfunk]

1. Is that a frogmarch I hear in the distance?...

:evilgrin:

[hang a left]

2. If it is supposed to take two to three weeks.....I am thinking

rove just might have some company.

[caledesi]

6. Great minds think alike.....that's my take too. nt

[deadparrot]

3. It's gonna be a long 2-3 weeks.

I've got my last week of classes, then a week of exams.

And now, I'll be waiting for this, too. Gah. :banghead:

[Peace Patriot]

4. It's interesting reading about this in the NYT, whose reporter Judith

Miller is closely associated with the Bush junta's outing of Valerie Plame and its destruction of a covert, CIA WMD counter-proliferation network. We know that her editors approved of her lies about Iraq WMDs--they gave her front page footage on which to promote Bush's war by funneling disinformation to the American people from the likes of Ahmed Chalabi (to whom the Pentagon was shoveling cash). And she claims to have had a special "embed" contract signed by Donald Rumsfeld himself, to accompany the U.S. troops who were "hunting" for the WMDs in Iraq that everybody knew weren't there. She was having clandestine meetings with Scooter Libby in June and July 2003, in the lead-up to the Plame/Brewster-Jennings outing--at which Libby was passing her classified disinformation, to help promote Bush's lies. Those meetings landed her in jail, in this Treasongate case, as a martyr for the rotten kind of journalism that the NYT has come to represent to the thinking public--the kind of "journalism" that promotes lies and war and death. She was finally given permission by the Bush junta to disclose what she talked about with Libby--her "get out of jail free card." She was apparently so close to the junta that she could almost have been in their employ--and her all the time parading as a reporter, and her editors all this time never questioning what she was printing or where she got it from.

Reading this polite, cleansed account of Karl Rove's legal jeopardy, one gets the feeling of reporters walking on eggshells. And what the hell is this about?: "The lawyers were granted anonymity so they could speak about the internal legal deliberations in Mr. Rove's case."

"...were granted anonymity..."? What's with the passive tense? WHO "granted" these lawyers--whom the judge has already threatened with a gag order--"anonymity"?

-------------

Here's a time-line on the coincidence of dates between the Plame/Brewster-Jennings outings, and the highly suspicious death of the Brits' chief WMD expert, David Kelly, including his connections to Judith Miller:

Late May 2003: David Kelly begins whistleblowing anonymously to the BBC about the "sexed up" pre-war intelligence on Iraq WMDs.

Mid-June 2003: Libby passes classified disinformation to Judith Miller, to bolster the case of Iraq WMDs, and the discuss Valerie Plame.

Late-June 2003: Kelly is mysteriously outed to his bosses, is interrogated at a "safe house" and threatened with the Official Secrets Act.

July 6, 2003: Joseph Wilson publishes his article ripping apart the Bushites' Niger/Iraq nuke allegation.

July 7, 2003: Tony Blair is informed that Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things"--COULD say, not had said. (Hutton report.)

July 8, 2003: Another meeting between Miller and Libby.

July 14, 2003: Covert CIA agent, and WMD expert, Valerie Plame is outed by Novak, in a newspaper column.

July 17, 2003: David Kelly sends an email to his old colleague Judith Miller, stating that he thought the controversy surrounding him would soon blow over; he was looking forward to his daughter's wedding in the fall and returning to Iraq; but also stating his concern about "the many dark actors playing games."

July 18, 2003: David Kelly is found dead, under highly suspicious circumstances; his office and computers are searched.

July 22, 2003: Brewster-Jennings, the entire CIA counter-proliferation network, is outed by Novak, putting all of its covert agents and contacts at risk of getting killed, and disabling all projects.

July 24, 2003: Judith Miller writes the news article about Kelly's death for the NYT, omitting her close connections to Kelly (she had used him as a major quoted source in her book, "Germs"), and not mentioning his last email to her. (The email was later released by his family, not by Miller.)

-----------------

This was the summer in which the "hunt" for WMDs in Iraq--and the failure to find any--was the biggest news. There were reports in the Arab press of foiled U.S. efforts to plant WMDs in Iraq--although I haven't seen any followup on those, and the Iraqis who reported on it are probably dead by now, or in hiding. It's certainly the sort of trick that the Bush junta would get up to--trying to plant the weapons there. Did David Kelly, or someone in the Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation network, foil that scheme? Is that why the Bush junta went to such lengths to destroy the Brewster-Jennings network--in what appears to be a panic, in the week of July 7-14? And what do Judith Miller (old bud of Kelly's; "embedded" in Iraq, "hunting" for phantom WMDS) and the New York Times (publishing her tripe) have to do with all of this?

Keeping all this in mind, NOW read this article on Karl Rove's legal pickle, with SOMEBODY (oh, hey, it was the NYT itself) "granting anonymity" to Rove's lawyers, and filling inches with this dollop of uncontested propaganda: "Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Mr. Rove, said Mr. Rove would be cleared. 'We're confident at the end of this that Mr. Fitzgerald is going to find that Karl has been totally truthful and not only has done nothing wrong but has done everything right,' Mr. Corallo said."

As I said, interesting, entertaining even--if the whole thing were not so tragic, and had not cost so many lives: the NYT, colluders with the criminal Bush junta on the Iraq war, trying to report on this investigation of the lies, deceit and cruelty of the warmongers--in that phony, neutral, passive tone (Rove's lawyers "...were granted anonymity...") in which the "nation's "paper of record" likes to clothe itself.

[rodeodance]

5. thanks for your 'journal'--

......This was the summer in which the "hunt" for WMDs in Iraq--and the failure to find any--was the biggest news. There were reports in the Arab press of foiled U.S. efforts to plant WMDs in Iraq--although I haven't seen any followup on those, and the Iraqis who reported on it are probably dead by now, or in hiding. It's certainly the sort of trick that the Bush junta would get up to--trying to plant the weapons there. Did David Kelly, or someone in the Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation network, foil that scheme? Is that why the Bush junta went to such lengths to destroy the Brewster-Jennings network--in what appears to be a panic, in the week of July 7-14? And what do Judith Miller (old bud of Kelly's; "embedded" in Iraq, "hunting" for phantom WMDS) and the New York Times (publishing her tripe) have to do with all of this?

[caledesi]

7. PP - Excellent post. The only thing I take issue with is the idea

that WMDs can be "planted." According to Scott Ritter, there is no way anyone could do this. I can't remember everything he said now, but basically there are "imprints" on WMDs that identify country of origin etc.