When Will The Plame Case Break Open?

[Stevendsmith]

This week? Next week? Next month? This summer?

Is this sucker gonna get deep-sixed?

I'm on the egde of my seat, and posts like this from Kevin Drum only make it worse for me.

"...the Valerie Plame investigation looks set to bust open fairly soon and may take the Vice President's office down with it."

http://www.calpundit.com/archives/003287.html


Bring. It. On

[Jacobin]

1. The prosecutor looks like he is onto a trophy

:-)

Sure roadmap to an "of counsel" position in the high six figures in a DC lawfirm.

:-)

I'm thinking he's gonna nail someone big.

:bounce:

[Stephanie]

2. I was just going to post on this same question!

I am anxiously awaiting the FROG MARCH!

I didn't post because a news search produced NO NEWS. But last week we heard that Libby and Hannah were about to be indicted.

Does the fact that no indictments have yet been issued indicate that one of them might be willing to rat out the boss?

Faced with a possible ten year sentence, maybe they will turn on DICK. Please let it be so!

[Stevendsmith]

3. I think about the frog march constantly!

Please, please, pretty please!

[Stephanie]

4. I found this interesting item in my search - from Mother Jones

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/02/02_705.html

Sale claims that the FBI is pressuring Hannah (a ten-year prison sentence lurks for an unlucky convictee in this case) to get to Libby -- and Libby, of course, is Cheney. Juan Cole at his Informed Comment website explains in part:

"Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC , which helps underpin Cheney's dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war...

It is possible that Wilson posed a special danger to Hannah, since Hannah was at the center of the "cherry-picking bad intelligence" effort that led Cheney to maintain that Saddam and Bin Laden were Siamese twins and that Iraq was floating in biological and chemical weapons and within 3-5 years of having an atomic bomb. (All of these positions, which Cheney has repeatedly alleged, are completely false and were known to be in 2002 by anyone not wearing ideological blinders). Hannah had
fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came--Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of it."

Cole, who seems to know, says Sale is still digging with more to come.

[madrchsod]

5. fritzgerald

has just about taken the illinios state republican party apart. the only state wide official left is judy barr topinka,the state treasurer she`s the only person left they could find to be the head of the party. frizgerald does`nt care ,if you are dirty, you are going down...

[Fenris]

6. Never - they deep sixed it long ago

[Stephanie]

9. Not true

We found out last week that the grand jury had heard many key admin figures in testimony. We found out that indictments are pending on Hannah and Libby. This is really happening.

[peekaloo]

10. Toadie Blankley issued a dour prediction

a couple of weeks ago on 'The McLaughlin Group' that the indictments would be soon and BIG. hmmmmmmm.

btw Skilling of Enron is supposed to get hit this week......is Big Dick watching his empire beginning to crumble??????

[Stephanie]

11. In case you missed it last week:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26979-2004Feb9?language=printer

Bush Aides Testify in Leak Probe
Grand Jury Called McClellan, 2 Others
By Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 10, 2004; Page A01


A federal grand jury has questioned one current and two former aides to President Bush, and investigators have interviewed several others, in an effort to discover who revealed the name of an undercover CIA officer to a newspaper columnist, sources involved in the case said yesterday.

<snip>

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a felony to disclose a covert agent's identity if the person making the disclosure knew the covert status of the employee and revealed it intentionally.

Officials interviewed by the FBI include Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser; McClellan; Matalin; Levine; White House communications director Dan Bartlett; former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Cathie Martin, a Cheney aide, according to the sources.

[snippy]

16. Interesting that only three relatively low level people are mentioned

as having testified before the grand jury.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that he talked to the grand jury on Friday. Mary Matalin, former counselor to Vice President Cheney, testified Jan. 23, the sources said. Adam Levine, a former White House press official, also testified Friday, the sources said.

A federal grand jury will not call a target of the investigation to testify unless a target letter has been issued to that person. I would like to know who else has testified and whether anyone has received a target letter yet.

The article also mentions that testimony might be sought from Novak and other journalists.

Several sources involved in the leak case said the questioning suggests prosecutors are preparing to seek testimony from Novak and perhaps other journalists. "There's a very good likelihood they're going to litigate against journalists," one source said.

If they litigate against the journalists, this is going to take a long, long time.

[spanone]

7. Maybe, after the election?????

[Festivito]

8. Republican Plame blame.

It was intimidation against truth and it should color all Republican speech.

[robertpaulsen]

12. How high up the ladder can Fitzgerald go?

If Libby knew, Cheney had to know, regardless of who initiated it. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing strange "suicides" in the coming months. Even more than the 9/11 commission or the WMD "independent" commission, this is our best chance to show the public now what traitors they are.

[Stephanie]

13. It's gotta go to Cheney

I really, really think so.

After all the chatter last week, it's strange that it's so silent this week. Something's going on. Deals are being done. People are trying to stay out of jail.

Whoever rats out Cheney wins my eternal gratitude.

[snippy]

14. I think it goes to Cheney, Rove, and Card.

I also think someone will take the fall to protect these three.

[Lori Price CLG]

15. Scooter fking Libby: bye-bye. And, his little dog Cheney, too!

:)-Lori