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Lewis Libby Indicted...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements in a five-count indictment returned on Friday by a grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's identity.

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Libby Is Quiet Force Who Helped Shape Iraq Policy...

Libby is known for a reluctance to being quoted in the press, but his private conversations with reporters caught the interest of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, lead investigator of the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.

Plame's diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of outing his wife to discredit him for accusing the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war in a New York Times opinion piece on July 6, 2003.

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Originally posted by pleco

I wonder how high up the ladder they will go...I wonder how loyal these people are...

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Fitzgerald expands probe, believes he can get Rove on more serious charges, lawyers say
Jason Leopold


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In one of the boldest moves yet in the 22-month investigation into the outing of a covert CIA agent to a handful of top reporters covering the White House, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is extending his probe and pursuing much more serious charges against senior White House officials, specifically President Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, lawyers directly involved in the case told RAW STORY Friday.

While many people were left confused by news reports that said Rove wouldn't be indicted Friday, the lawyers said that Rove remains under intense scrutiny and added that Fitzgerald is betting on the fact that he can secure an indictment against Rove on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, the misuse of classified information, and possibly other charges, as early as next week.

“This investigation is not yet over,” one of the lawyers in the case said. “You must keep in mind that people like Mr. Rove are still under investigation. Rather than securing an indictment on perjury charges against Mr. Rove Mr. Fitzgerald strongly believes he can convince the grand jury that he broke other laws.”

The lawyers said that in the past month Fitzgerald has obtained explosive information in the case that has enabled him to pursue broader charges such as conspiracy, and civil rights violations against targets like Rove. Specifically, the lawyers said Fitzgerald is focusing on phony intelligence documents that led to the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity: the documents that claimed Iraq was attempting to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger.

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Originally posted by H. Humbert

Bush, Rove, Cheney, and that whole cadre decided long ago that Libby would have to take the fall on this. (What do you think they were doing with all that time Miller spent sitting in jail? Going over their options and getting their stories straight.) Libby gave Miller permission to speak only after they had their game plan set. He will say he acted alone, spare everyone else, and then wait for Bush to pardon him at the end of his term.

As much I as wish this will lead to bigger fish, I just don't see any more ending up in the frying pan.

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

To: All
You know...i was thinking about all this..these
indictments, Mr Libbys not guilty plea, the
inevitable trial that the Dims are slathering for..
that Joe Wilson is doing a happy dance over..
as they all contemplate the show trial; they
dream of...Rove on the witness stamd,..maybe Cheney..
who knows..even Bush himself! the rhapsodise about...

and the expression: "Be careful what you wish for!"
comes to mind...Remember, everything so far, that
has been presented..has all been from a prosecutorial/persecutional POV...In the Trial
Libby, and his lawyers, will be able to present
an opposing point of view, and be able to Supeona
their *own* list of witnesses, friendly and hostile.
Does anyone, upon thinking about it, doubt that
Joe Wilson, and Valerie Plame, will find themselves
being handed supeonas, and under oath in from of
a *criminal* court? That Plame's superiors(s) aren't
facing supeonas? That witnesses from Niger & the UK
may be flown in to testify as to the extent of
Wilsons "investgation", and the UK info on the
Yellowcake? That those people who knew of Plames
CIA status, her possible exposure over 5 yrs ago
to foriegn Intelligence agencies brought out??...
The connections between Wilson, Plame and numerous
"stars" in the Democrat Party? Their political
donations? The friction between the Administation
and the CIA, who are supposed to serve at the
pleasure of the President???

Yes..There are serious ramifications for those
that would attack the presidents abilty to
prosecute a war, durng a time of war.

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From the beginning of all of this, my gut tells me that Plame and Wilson orchestrated the "outing."

There were and are WMD in Iraq, most moved to Syria while the Democrats insisted GWB waste valuable time appealing to the U.N.

Just as the forged Texas National Guard document poisoned the well for the Dem/Libs to continue to crucify GWB's youth, a forged yellowcake document poisoned the well, but in this case to discredit the truth. You can bet your ass Iraq was looking to build nukes.

The part of the Big Picture I don't get is why the GWB Administration made retractions, and hardly defended itself.

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Our 27 Months of Hell (by Joseph C. Wilson IV)...

After the two-year smear campaign orchestrated by senior officials in the Bush White House against my wife and me, it is tempting to feel vindicated by Friday's indictment of the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Between us, Valerie and I have served the United States for nearly 43 years. I was President George H.W. Bush's acting ambassador to Iraq in the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, and I served as ambassador to two African nations for him and President Clinton. Valerie worked undercover for the CIA in several overseas assignments and in areas related to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

But on July 14, 2003, our lives were irrevocably changed. That was the day columnist Robert Novak identified Valerie as an operative, divulging a secret that had been known only to me, her parents and her brother.

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New Cheney Aide Tied to False Iraq Reports...

Vice President Dick Cheney replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as his national-security adviser on Monday with an aide [John Hannah] identified by a former Iraqi exile group as the White House official to whom it fed information on Iraq that turned out to be erroneous.

The Bush administration relied on some of the information from the Iraqi National Congress (INC) to argue that Saddam Hussein had to be ousted before he could give banned biological or chemical weapons to al-Qaida for strikes on the United States.

But no such weapons were discovered after the March 2003 invasion, and U.S. intelligence agencies and the independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks found no evidence of operational cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida.

[...]

The White House also announced that David S. Addington, who's been Cheney's legal counsel, would assume Libby's duties as chief of staff. Like Hannah, Addington has played a quiet, though influential, role in the vice president's office.

Addington reportedly helped draft an opinion by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales stating that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to some detainees in the war on terrorism.

"This was somebody who worked very hard to make sure the advice of senior military officials and national-security professionals on the question of interrogation policies was ignored," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch. "The result was an unmitigated disaster for the United States."

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The Coverup Worked...

No one really noticed, but Patrick Fitzgerald made an unassailable point last week about the timing of the indictment that his CIA leak investigation has produced so far.

"I would have wanted nothing better," he said, "that when the subpoenas were issued in August of 2004, witnesses testified then, and we would have been here in October of 2004 instead of October of 2005."

Give or take a nuance and some garbled syntax, the prosecutor was in effect showing that the quixotic pursuit of a nonexistent right or privilege by some news organizations is one reason President Bush was reelected last year.

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Originally posted by vrwc

Enjoy the fantasy.Over 2 years investigation and the alleged crime being investigated hasn't been solved.Libby isn't even accused of it.
Perpetual investigations are a poor substitute for a political agenda.Or is the left just afraid to tell the public what their agenda really is? vrwc

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