Big updates today on the Republican scandal front.

First, was this from the guy who’s taking the blame for President Bush lying to send us to war :

Intelligence analysts never told President Bush before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein’s rule posed an imminent threat, CIA Director George Tenet said Thursday in a heated defense of agency findings central to the decision to go to war.

The urgency of the Iraqi threat was Bush’s main argument for the war. But the president said Thursday he still would have invaded Iraq if he’d known no weapons stockpiles existed ? adding a new element to the much-debated question of whether the United States went to war based on faulty assumptions.
. . .
He made clear that analysts differed among themselves all along on important aspects of Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear programs and spelled out those disputes in an October 2002 intelligence estimate given to the White House.

In short, CIA analysts issued reports that drew no definite conclusions about Saddam Hussein, but Bush presented the intelligence to Congress and the American people as unquestionable facts. This means Bush is either a liar or a dumbass. Which one do you think it is?

Secondly, is the story is about some fingers being pointed in the Bush Administration officials’ leaking the identity of a CIA agent to punish a political rival (link via Kos):

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer’s identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, were the two Cheney employees. “We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,” one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president’s office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah “that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time” as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.

The case centers on Valerie Plame, a CIA operative then working for the weapons of mass destruction division, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and as a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad in the early 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, he was head of African affairs until he retired in 1998, according to press accounts.

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration in March 2002 to check on an allegation made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address the previous winter that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from the nation of Niger. Wilson returned with a report that said the claim was “highly doubtful.”

Interesting…so they’re trying to get a pee-on to name names, huh? Let’s hope it works….

Finally, there’s an update in the hacking into senate computers that some are calling Watergate.com :

One of senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s key staffers will resign Friday because of an investigation into how Republicans gained access to senate memos concerning opposition to President Bush’s judicial nominees.

Manuel Miranda, who worked for the Tennessee Republican on judicial nominations, has been on leave since late last month because of the investigation into how senate memos stored on a computer server shared by Judiciary Committee members ended up in GOP hands.
. . .
senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, began the investigation in November after Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., protested what they said was the theft of the memos from their servers. The memos, concerning political strategy on blocking confirmation of several of President Bush’s judicial nominations, were obtained and reported on by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it against the law to knowingly receive stolen goods? If this guy was alone is pilfering these documents (which is highly doubtful), it’s still not as if the Republican leadership refused to take advantage of the stolen documents.

Here’s my advice to anyone who’s considering a job with a high ranking Republican politician : don’t do it! In the end, if your boss is going to lie (Bush), cheat (Cheny), or steal (Frist) you’re going to be the one who ends up taking the blame.