I’m sorry, what was that you were talking about? Something about indictments?

Will a nasty political fight to make people forget that the White House is full of criminals? Stay tuned to find out. Same Bush-time, same Bush-channel.

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers writes in with the best theory about what happens next that I’ve read anywhere :

Let’s just take the Espionage Act. Fitz clearly said that Plame’s position was classified, he implied strongly that it related to national security, and as Josh Marshall pointed out in a recent post, the indictment itself states that both Cheney and Libby knew the precise division of the CIA where she worked, which by definition made her covert. So right there - as soon as he tells that to Miller - you have a prima facie violation of the Espionage Act.
. . .
So why not charge it? Because Fitz has Libby nailed on the 5 counts from today’s indictment. Just nailed. So he’s bringing Libby in on those charges, they’re going to talk some turkey, and Fitz is going to see if Libby will talk, maybe about VP, maybe about Official A (who’s clearly Rove), or maybe about the VP’s moles at State and in the CIA. Offer some carrots - maybe no jail - but if Libby refuses, then Fitz brings down the espionage or intelligence act charges. Libby has nowhere to go, and Fitz knows it. In my view, he’s going to try to exploit that opening before wrapping this thing up.

We’ve all been assuming that Fitzgerald sought whatever indictments he could prove, but what if yesterday’s indictments were just another strategic move by the prosecutor? After all, if he’s planning to keep the investigation open, why not keep a bargaining chip or two on hand?

A number of people have mentioned in passing that this was the first indictment of a White House official in 130 years. In case you were curious, here’s the last time :

In the United States, the Whiskey Ring was a scandal, exposed in 1875, involving diversion of tax revenues in a conspiracy among government agents, politicians, whiskey distillers, and distributors.
. . .
The Whiskey Ring was seen by many as a sign of corruption under the Republican governments that took power across the nation following the American Civil War. General Orville E. Babcock, the private secretary to the President, was indicted as a member of the ring and escaped conviction only because of a presidential pardon - for this reason, President Ulysses S. Grant, although not directly involved in the ring, came to be seen as emblematic of Republican corruption, and later scandals involving his Secretary of War William W. Belknap only confirmed that perception. The Whiskey Ring scandal, along with other alleged abuses of power by the Republican party, contributed to national weariness of Reconstruction, which ended after Grant’s presidency with the Compromise of 1877.

Yeah, sounds about right to me. Now the ball’s in the Democrats court to replay that “emblematic of Republican corruption” card. If you don’t hit them now, they’ll just keep trying to get back up.

Here’s a fairly predictable comment to my entry that was cross-posted over at the Huffington Post :

Two years of investigating … this is it folks.

NO “illegal outing”
NO “conspiracy”
NO “treason”

Better luck jousting windmills with the Guiliani Administration.

Fitzgerald did a pretty good job responding to that misguided defense :

FITZGERALD: I’ll be blunt.

That talking point won’t fly. If you’re doing a national security investigation, if you’re trying to find out who compromised the identity of a CIA officer and you go before a grand jury and if the charges are proven — because remember there’s a presumption of innocence — but if it is proven that the chief of staff to the vice president went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how he learned this information, how he passed it on, and we prove obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements to the FBI, that is a very, very serious matter.

And I’d say this: I think people might not understand this. We, as prosecutors and FBI agents, have to deal with false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury all the time. The Department of Justice charges those statutes all the time.

When I was in New York working as a prosecutor, we brought those cases because we realized that the truth is the engine of our judicial system. And if you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost.
. . .
Any notion that anyone might have that there’s a different standard for a high official, that this is somehow singling out obstruction of justice and perjury, is upside down.

If these facts are true, if we were to walk away from this and not charge obstruction of justice and perjury, we might as well just hand in our jobs. Because our jobs, the criminal justice system, is to make sure people tell us the truth. And when it’s a high-level official and a very sensitive investigation, it is a very, very serious matter that no one should take lightly.

Or to put it even more simply : Why aren’t there any conspiracy, treason, or espionage charges? Hmmm…it’s probably because somebody was committing perjury, making false statements to investigators, and obstructing justice.

Duh.

History repeats itself?

(Hat tip, Hunter.)

Considering that Libby consistently told the same false story to the grand jury and the FBI, I can’t help but think that he’s been set up to be the Administration’s sacrificial lamb. After all, according to the indictment “Official A”, Judy Miller, “the Under Secretary of State”, the “White House Press Secretary”, and “the Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs” all knew that Libby’s story about learning of Plame’s status from Tim Russert was without merit. Why would Libby be reckless enough to make his claims when any one of these people would have been able to discredit him? It defies logic to assume that Libby spoke to the FBI or the grand jury without discussing what he would say with his sources and/or fellow leakers. That being the case, did White House officials reassure Libby that they’d buttress his story only to later turn against him? If that turns out to be true, I’d expect Libby’s plea agreements to be…interesting, to say the least. There’s a damn good reason Fitzgerald says he’s “not quite done”. If Libby feels burned by the Administration, I think we can expect more fireworks.

For those who missed it, Fitzgerald threw this lump of coal into your “Fitzmas” stocking :

QUESTION: A lot of Americans, people who are opposed to the war, critics of the administration, have looked to your investigation with hope in some ways and might see this indictment as a vindication of their argument that the administration took the country to war on false premises.

Does this indictment do that?

FITZGERALD: This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer’s identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person — a person, Mr. Libby — lied or not.

The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction.

And I think anyone’s who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.

They will be frustrated and, frankly, it would just — it wouldn’t be good for the process and the fairness of a trial.

Dammit. Nothing about the Niger forgeries. Nothing about the Downing Street Memos. Nothing about the politicization of intelligence. It’s just the leak and the cover-up.

Josh Marshall has a great catch from the indictment.

On or about June 12, 2003, LIBBY was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson’s wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Divison. LIBBY understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA.

This is a crucial piece of information. the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) is part of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, i.e., not Directorate of Intelligence, the branch of the CIA where ‘analysts’ come from, but where the spies come from.

This is even worse when taken with Josh’s earlier reaction to the indictment :

If you read the recitation of events which takes up, roughly, the first half of the indictment, one thing is made very clear: Libby was in communication about what he was doing with all sorts of people at the White House while he was doing it.

There’s a reason Fitzgerald continually referred to “national security” in the press release, indictment, and press conference. This affair has harmed our nation and the White House is complicit.

One can only hope that these loose ends are tied into a noose…

From the OSC’s press release, the indictment in a nutshell :

Prior to July 14, 2003, Valerie Wilson’s employment status was classified. Prior to that date, her affiliation with the CIA was not common knowledge outside the intelligence community. Disclosure of classified information about an individual’s employment by the CIA has the potential to damage the national security in ways that range from preventing that individual’s future use in a covert capacity, to compromising intelligence-gathering methods and operations, and endangering the safety of CIA employees and those who deal with them, the indictment states.

“When citizens testify before grand juries they are required to tell the truth,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “Without the truth, our criminal justice system cannot serve our nation or its citizens. The requirement to tell the truth applies equally to all citizens, including persons who hold high positions in government. In an investigation concerning the compromise of a CIA officer’s identity, it is especially important that grand jurors learn what really happened. The indictment returned today alleges that the efforts of the grand jury to investigate such a leak were obstructed when Mr. Libby lied about how and when he learned and subsequently disclosed classified information about Valerie Wilson,” he added.

Contrary to conservative claims, there was a leak of classified information that could endanger national security. Regardless of the legal culpability, anyone who helped cover this up is a traitor to this country. The Administration’s moving goalposts in regards to firing conspirators, the media’s faux ignorance about which officials were leaking Plame’s identity, and everyone who pretended that divulging classified information isn’t a big deal….you’re all guilty of treason in my eyes.

More here.

With all the rumors swirling around on the eve of the Plame indictment(s), it’s hard to know what to believe. Is Rove off the hook? Will Fitzgerald seek another extension? Is the investigation being expanded? Considering how long this thing has been going and how much it’s been built up over the last two weeks, I think the effect of whatever happens tomorrow will be anything but vague. Anyone who excapes indictment will be immediately exonerated in the court of public opinion. Those caught in the grand jury’s trap will be thrown under the bus by the Republican establishment and explained away with a revised version of the “few bad apples” defense. If either Libby or Rove escape indictment, liberals will be universally pissed, whereas if anyone beyond those two is implicated, the Republican cries of political bias will be deafening.

Personally, I’m tired of this whole damn thing. If I had it my way, every one of the main players in the Administration would be indicted in this conspiracy, but the longer this drags on, the more I doubt anyone beyond a sacrificial lamb or two will face any legal trouble. These guys had more than enough time to shred notes, delete emails, get their stories straight, and practice the “I don’t remember” defense to face any real trouble. And if someone does get indicted, the President can issue a few pardons whenever it’s politically safe to do so.

In other words, the chances of this actually bringing down the Bush Administration are pretty slim. They’ve had numerous “accountability moments” over the years and somehow figured out a way to bounce back from every one. We’ll know in less than twelve hours whether or not this trend is reversing. I’m not getting my hopes up….