What, exactly, was the purpose of going after Joe Wilson?

The tacit assumption by everyone, everywhere has been that they wanted to discredit him for stating that there was no Iraqi attempt at yellowcake purchases.  They were mad and wanted to strike back at him.

But it has always puzzled me why they went after him through his wife.  Why not just call him a partisan Democrat who was working to defeat the President and be on with it?

I've seen it suggested, by Josh Marshall in particular, that the idea was that they were challenging Wilson's manhood by basically saying his wife got him the "boondoggle."  The sexual smear has always been a signature Rove move.

But its not about that.  It really makes no sense to me.  I particularly don't care about it and I think the vast majority of people could care less.  Basically the theory is that Wilson got his great free trip to malaria-infested West Africa.  Its laughable.  But if the motive was not revenge, what was it?

Let's look at the real contents of the slur--reverse engineer what is going on by looking at what it was the White House Iraq Group, headed by Vice President Cheney, was trying to convince top-opinion making journalists was the truth.  Joe Wilson's wife sent him to Africa.  Joe Wilson is lying when he says that Dick Cheney sent him to Africa.

This scandal is not about getting back at Joe Wilson.  Its about who sent Joe Wilson to Africa.  And we know how Joe Wilson got sent to Africa.  The Vice President's office sent him there by asking the CIA to look into the Niger uranium purchases allegations.   Where did those allegations come from?  From a forged document. 

So what we have here is the Vice President's office trying to convince the world that it did not send Joe Wilson to Africa on the basis of information in a forged document.  That is to say, they were trying to cover up the fact that the Vice President had asked the CIA to look into the allegations.  Put another way, the White House Iraq Group did not care that Joe Wilson said he found no evidence of attempted uranium purchases.  They cared that he had said that an inquiry by the Vice President's office was the origin of his trip.

Let's look at their current behavior.  Last night on Hardball Chris Matthews pulled out what he described as a "poop sheet" that was sent out by the Republican National Committee to Republican senators.  What was it about?  Joe Wilson.  They are still going after him--even when they are on the verge of indictment for smearing him in the first place.  Why?  It seems insane on its face.  Joe Wilson's allegations are now totally old news.  Everyone knows that there were no Iraqi yellowcake purchase inquiries  The only open question is: Who sent Joe Wilson to Africa?  And the Administration is still trying to say through its proxies, that they did not send Wilson to Africa.  

Now why would they want to that?  Why would the White House Iraq Group care that they were associated with an attempt to learn whether or not Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium?  And why would they still be fighting that battle?  Because anyone pulling on that thread might come up with something much, much bigger.

What could that be?  I'll leave the obvious connecting of dots to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

For the last week, Chris Matthews has been way, way, out in front of the CIA Leak story, tonight suggesting that Fitzgerald was going to bring charges relating to false testimony before the war in front of Congress.  All week, he’s been talking about how huge the end result of this might be.  Is he just banking on a big bang in hoping that the charges are the worst possible in order to make himself look good?  Or does he truly have some information we don’t have.  Remember Matthews is one of the six journalists contacted by the White House in the Wilson work up operation.  Since he was involved, I am certain he had his own private lawyer in the case.  That lawyer, if he was worth anything, would be trying to keep tabs on the whole thing.  Matthews could ask questions of that lawyer as to what was going on in the grand jury, and that person might have a better idea than most as to what was going on.  Matthews’ lawyer would have to respond to any direct question Matthews had about the case—otherwise the lawyer would be violating the attorney’s duty to communicate with the client.  

So what is the reason Matthews is so far in front of everyone else in network news on this?  I’m having trouble finding an answer.

Just got done watching Hardball.  Tweety was going nuts, really on fire.  He was either seized by prophecy or chugging gallons of Kool-Aid.  They were suggesting that Fitzgerald may bring charges for bring false information to Congress in the run-up to war.  Much as my hear would sing to hear the Special Prosecutor say those words, I cannot bring myself to believe that we will see that level of justice in the case.

Just up, as of a few hours ago, the Department of Justice's newest website, that of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.  One would think he'd be putting up a website because he figures that he is going to have stuff to post to it.

From the L.A. Times this morning we see an obvious Administration plant: (Registration Required)

Scooter had a plan to counter Wilson and a passionate desire to do so," said a second person, a former White House official familiar with the internal deliberations. Like other former White House staff, this person spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing criminal investigation.

After Wilson published a book criticizing the administration in April 2004, during the closely fought presidential campaign, Libby became consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair to Cheney, former aides said. He ordered up a meticulous catalog of Wilson's claims and public statements going back to early 2003.

The intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan or its rationale, former aides said.

You see, very few people agreed with his counterattack plan.  But since he is the Vice President's Chief of Staff, the most powerful position in government, they were unable to stop this madman.  Obviously Cheney and Bush were completely intimidated by his insane scheme--what would happen if Scooter did a "work up" on them.

Bush and Cheney have continually been victimized by rogue elements in the military and the government from the beginning of this presidency.  Thank God we have Patrick Fitzgerald to stop them.

The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on.
King Henry IV, Part III, Act II, Scene II

As we have moved through the last two weeks, we are starting to see something this nation hasn't seen for almost twenty, if not thirty years--a political scandal with the potential to take down the Administration.  Much has appeared to be inexplicable--as rumors have flied around this small town we call home, the confusion has grown.

That's why it may seem strange to say that in reality, this investigation has proceeded as almost every single one before it, and that the results of the investigation are pretty predictable after all.

As anyone who has ever watched an episode of Law and Order knows, what a prosecutor does is successively bring the force of fear of punishment upon those who are most vulnerable until those people begin giving him information on other who are less vulnerable to this pressure.  Usually a prosecutor starts at the level of those who have committed the overt acts which constitute the traceable events of crime.  They are generally at the lower levels of the group of people who have committed the acts involved, and have been used as cut outs to insulate those above from having to do the work associated directly with the illegal acts from which the higher-ups have profited.

The technique is simple--threaten those at the bottom of the conspiracy with something worse than those who lead the conspiracy can threaten them with.  When those at the bottom are desparate men with little to lose, the job of the prosecutor is difficult.  But when the actual doers of the criminal acts have familiies and have invested heavily in moving up in society, the job is somewhat easier.

And that is exactly what we have here.  The doers in this case, as Joe Wilson pointed out long ago, were David Wurmser and John Hannah.  Sure enough, we learned over the last week that the first two persons to receive target letters and to begin cooperating with prosecutor Peter Fitzgerald. 

In tonight's NY Times we learn that Rove and Libby have apparently recieved their target letters.  Over the weekend the lawyers for the two will engage in plea negotiations with Mr. Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald will offer them plea bargains for testimony against the chariman of the White House Iraq Group, the ad hoc body set up by the President to convince a reluctant nation to go to war against Iraq, and the group responsible for leaking the name of Valerie Plame.  The chairman was Vice President Dick Cheney. 

What are the odds that Rove and Libby will turn on Cheney?  Slim, brother, slim.  Unless they are dead-to-rights guilty, they will risk a trial.  Only when the chance of a conviction of a serious crime looms large at trial will one or the other speak.  Thus it may be some time before even the slightest chance either will provide testimony incriminating Cheney occurs.

Bush in clear, obvious freefall.  Take, for example, his approval rating in his home state of Texas:

Not a typo folks, 42%.  10 percentage points in one month. 

Wow . . .

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government's foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

Can this Administration be so compromised that nobody fears it any longer?

Chris "I kiss Bush's ass" Matthews has this to say:

If there was law-breaking, it came out of the vice president and his people's determination to protect themselves against the charge that they led us into a corrupt war, a war based on false pretenses.

That's how hot this thing is.

If there are indictments, they're going to be probably in the vice president's office, they're probably going to come next week and they are going to blow this White House apart.

It's going to be unbelievable.

Apparently he's channeling Cindy Sheehan.

On a more calm note, Howard Fineman, usually a reliable voice from the Right, has this to say:

George W. Bush rose to power on the strength of a disciplined, aggressive, tightly focused, leak-proof spin machine — one that took issue positions and stuck to them, divided the world (including the media) into friends and enemies, and steamrollered the opposition with ruthless skill while the candidate remained smilingly above the fray. Sure of his social skills but not of his speaking ability (let alone his ability to speak extemporaneously), Bush (and Karl Rove) learned to stick to their bullet-item talking points, to operate through surrogates, all the while steering the initial course they had set for themselves.

But the machine they built may have run amok — at least that seems to be what Fitzgerald is examining, as he looks at the leaking of Plame’s identity and of other classified information.

In essence, the Bush-Rove campaign machine was redeployed in the service of selling of the Iraq war and, later, in defense of that sale. Did they go over the line in doing so? We’re about to find out.

In the meantime (and in another twist on the poetic justice them), the very discipline of the machine itself — its short internal supply lines, the consistently followed talking points, the focus on feeding friends and obliterating enemies — could be helping Fitzgerald. Tightly knit groups rise together, but they fall together. If the inner circle is small, it takes only one insider “flip” to endanger the rest.

If the cowed media of the last five years is saying all of that, what can there be out there?

Here's the full text of the DeFrank article everyone's buzzing about.  Am I wrong but does it say that Bush was angry at Rove less about the leak and more that he, quote, "felt Rove and other members or the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their attempt to discredit Plame's husband..."  WTF? 

The New York Daily News ran a story saying the following:

An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.

"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."

A Presidential Counselor?  Woah, that's like one of five people, total, including Rove.

Classic Scotty response from today's gaggle:

QUESTION: Thanks. Is it true that the President slapped Karl Rove upside the head a couple of years ago over the CIA leak?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Are you referring to, what, a New York Daily News report? Two things: One, we're not commenting on an ongoing investigation; two, and I would challenge the overall accuracy of that news account.

QUESTION: That's a comment.

Wonder how long this no comment policy can last.  Can Scotty stay on the wagon?

U.S. News and World Report now reporting that Cheney resignation rumors are a' flying:

Sparked by today's Washington Post story that suggests Vice President Cheney's office is involved in the Plame-CIA spy link investigation, government officials and advisers passed around rumors that the vice president might step aside and that President Bush would elevate Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

I promise never to be bad again if I can have this one wish. 

Raw Story fingers John Hannah as the Cheney aide cooperating with Fitzgerald.

Prosecutor Peter Fitzgerald has been quiet as a mouse.  Until today.  The story in Tommorow's Washington Post is so detailed that the only place where it could have come from is the U.S. Attorney:

As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney's office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that shows Cheney's long-running feud with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame.

[W]ith the case reaching a climax -- administration officials are braced for possible indictments as early as this week-- it is increasingly clear that Cheney and his aides have been deeply enmeshed in events surrounding the Plame affair from the outset.  

Lawyers in the case said Fitzgerald has focused extensively on whether behind-the-scenes efforts by the vice president's aides and other senior Bush aides were part of a criminal campaign to punish Wilson in part by unmasking his wife.

In a move people involved in the case read as a sign that the end is near, Fitzgerald's spokesman yesterday told the Associated Press that the prosecutor planned to announce his conclusions in Washington, where the grand jury has been meeting, instead of Chicago, where the prosecutor is based. Some lawyers close to the case cited courthouse talk that Fitzgerald might announce his findings as early as tomorrow, though hard evidence about his intentions and timing remained elusive.

The special prosecutor has personally interviewed numerous officials from the CIA, White House and State Department. In the process, he and his investigative team have talked to a number of Cheney aides, including Mary Matalin, his former strategist; Catherine Martin, his former communications adviser; and Jennifer Millerwise, his former spokesman. In the case of Millerwise, she talked with the prosecutor more than two years ago but never appeared before the grand jury, according to a person familiar with her situation.

A former CIA official told investigators that Cheney's office was seeking information about Wilson in May 2003, but it's not certain that officials with the vice president learned of the Plame connection then.

Doubt that its Fitzgerald leaking?  Look at the detail offered:

Senior administration officials said there was a document circulated at the State Department -- before Libby talked to Miller -- that mentioned Plame. It was drafted in June as an administrative letter and addressed to then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who was acting secretary at the time since Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage were out of the country.

As a former State Department official involved in the process recalled it, Grossman wanted the letter as background for a meeting at the White House, where the discussion was focused on then growing criticism of Bush's inclusion in his January State of the Union speech of the allegation that Hussein had been seeking uranium from Niger.

The letter to Grossman discussed the reasons the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) did not believe the intelligence, which originated from foreign sources, was accurate. It had a paragraph near the beginning, marked "(S)," meaning it was classified secret, describing a meeting at the CIA in February 2002, attended by another INR analyst, where Plame introduced her husband as the person who was to go to Niger.

Attached to the letter were the notes from the INR analyst who had attended the session, but they were written well after the event occurred and contained mistakes about who was there and what was said, according to a former intelligence official who reviewed the document in the summer of 2003.

We get more than documents, we get motiviations of players, the pargraphs, all of it.

So why is Millerwise being strangely singled out?  I've never heard of her before.  Now she gets a mention in the Post and they are talking to
"a person familiar with the situation."  And she doesn't have to appear before the grand jury.  Hmmmm. . . .

She left Cheney's office in January 2005 to go to the CIA.  Could it be that she is a White House official who has been talking to Fitzgerald, as RAW STORY indicates the NY Daily News will report tommorow?  Only time will tell.  I bet its a pretty short time, though.

So why is the leak happening now?  Simple.  Indictments are coming and Fitzgerald is holding them like a sword of Damocles over the heads of those who will be indicted--the better to get a deal.  No time to think, as indictments are expected tommorow.  Fitzgerald plays hardball.

Josh Marshall, who usually has the best intuition in the business, muses about the dark matter in the Plame universe:

. . . one thing seems more and more clear to me. This isn't a judgment made on particular reporting, more a sense or just intuition. So let me just briefly share it with you.

I think there's a whole part of the Times' story that we're not yet aware of. Let me try an analogy. If my memory is correct, when astronomers plot the location of black holes in space, they can't see them directly. It's impossible. No light escapes from them; so there's nothing to see. You can tell where they are by plotting the effects of their gravitation pull on nearby stars and celestial bodies.

There's something similar going on here.

When you read the Times Sunday article plus Miller's apologia, there's too much there that is simply inexplicable in terms of what we already know. Going into this mess Miller's reputation was already severely checkered and her journalistic judgment very much in question. And yet Sulzberger and Keller (the first in the van, the second following with an odd passivity) staked the reputation of the Times itself on her.

Simple poor judgment doesn't explain that for me. Something else is up.  

I wrote to Josh regarding what that thing is composed of.  Like astronomers, I can't tell what it means, but I think I can tell you what its composed of:

Josh:
Everyone’s speculation about this case revolves around what we know from the reporters, not from the internal records of the wrongdoers themselves.  That’s why we have this strange situation.  It appears that there is some evidence of a crime, but nothing worthy of a Special Prosecutor going all the way to the Supreme Court to compel the testimony of some of biggest names writing and appearing in and on some of the biggest news outlets in the country.  We do know that the judges who looked at the cases thought it sufficiently grave to grant the Special Prosecutor the leeway to go as far as he has.  We also know that the attorneys for some of the putative targets have felt it necessary to leak information certainly damaging to their own clients and to bring those clients again and again before the grand jury in a last ditch attempt to protect their clients or others within the Administration.  This is not the behavior of attorneys who are holding really good hands.  Finally, we have seen how truly sad the spin machine’s response to these damning allegations has been.  Amateur hour, at best.  The whiny denials were pathetic shadows of the bold posturing we are used to seeing from this group.  

All of this leads to the conclusion that Patrick Fitzgerald either has a great hand, or is the best bluffer in the business.  The fact that not a whisper has leaked from his camp indicates that he is a mixture of both.  Some very important people are suddenly very, very afraid of what he might be holding.  All of our speculations should therefore be informed by the fact that Fitzgerald has more than what the targets of the investigation can leak regarding their own testimony—he has at least some of the records of the principle alleged wrongdoers, which are what remains to be seen in this case.

Why is it that people who should know better continually insist that votes for various incarnations of government in Iraq by majorities of Iraqi voters who show up in the voting booth are going to stop the insurgency?  All of the earlier handovers of power, or votes on provisional governments have done nothing.

``Fitzgerald is putting together a big case,'' Washington attorney Robert Bennett, who represents Miller, said on the ABC-TV program ``This Week'' yesterday.

And who might be at the center of the Big Case? 

Fitzgerald, 45, has also questioned administration officials about any knowledge Bush may have had of the campaign against Wilson. Yet most administration observers have noted that on Iraq, as with most matters, it's Cheney who has played the more hands-on role.

One lawyer intimately involved in the case, who like the others demanded anonymity, said one reason Fitzgerald was willing to send Miller to jail to compel testimony was because he was pursuing evidence the vice president may have been aware of the specifics of the anti-Wilson strategy.

And both U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan and an appellate-court panel -- including David Tatel, a First Amendment advocate -- said they ruled in Fitzgerald's favor because of the gravity of the case.

D.C. is on the edge.  The grand jury expires in the next two weeks and only one thing is on everyone's mind.  Cabbies, people you meet at parties--all want to know:  Who will be indicted?

What's going on here?  There appears to be a secret that nobody wants to get out.  Take this CNN headline: 

Miller Testified Again Before Grand Jury: New York Times Reporter Disclosed Conversation With Second Source.

Yet when one reads the article, there is only discussion of a previously undisclosed conversation between her first source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and herself.  So whose the other source? 

Now take that tidbit and then look at the alleged terms of the deal between Miller and Special Counsel Peter Fitzgerald from Judy Miller's press appearance after leaving jail:

Q. Your source's lawyer has said that had you asked, you wouldn't have had to spend any time in jail; he would have been more than willing to give you the explicit waiver you say you now accepted.

MILLER. No. Since I was not a party to those discussions, I'm going to let you refer those questions to my lawyer. I can only tell you that as soon as I received a personal assurance from the source that I was able to talk to him and talk to the source about my testimony, it was only then and as a result of the special prosecutor's agreement to narrow the focus of the inquiry to focus on the way - on that source, that I was able to testify. I testified as soon as I could. And I will ask you to please address the questions to which I was not a party to my lawyers.

What is this narrowing of the focus?  The narrowing was to contacts between Miller and Libby:

For his part, Fitzgerald promised to limit his questioning of Miller to the Libby contacts regarding Plame.

So we seem to be dancing around a second source--one who Miller did not want to talk about.  But the indications are that she is now talking?  Why?  Probably because the Special Counsel has something new on her--the fact that she previously did not disclose that she had notes from the earlier meeting with Libby.  What we know backs this up as Lou Dobbs indicated that NY "Times editor Bill Keller tells me that she does face legal jeopardy."  

Let's look a bit closer at the notes issue:

But after she testified, Miller discovered that she had additional notes from the June 2003 conversation with Libby.

That was well before Wilson on July 6, 2003 published an opinion piece in The New York Times accusing the White House of twisting intelligence on Iraq, but after reports of his mission had begun to surface.

A column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times on May 6, 2003 may have been the trigger for the interest by Cheney's office, the sources said.

Kristof's column contained the first public mention of Wilson's mission in Niger, though Wilson was not identified by name. It also mentioned for the first time the alleged role of Cheney's office in seeking an investigation of the uranium deal, prompting the CIA to dispatch Wilson.

Remember, she claimed she had no notes and then all of a sudden had them.  So whose she protecting?  Rove?  Can't be, he's already been connected to the issue by Time's Matthew Cooper.  So it must be someone higher than Rove.  Whose higher than Rove? Hmmmm. . . .

On ABC's rightly-detested, Bush-worshipping The Note, the following appears:

As for the other story that dominates every steak-laden table at the Palm and all fajitas-fueled conversations at Lauriol Plaza, per usual, the questions about special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald outnumber the answers.

Could Fitzgerald's apparently solo trip to the court house yesterday mean that he is seeking or receiving an extension of the grand jury? What questions will Karl Rove be asked? [OTHER QUESTIONS REDACTED BY ABC NEWS MANAGEMENT.]

What does OTHER QUESTIONS REDACTED BY ABC NEWS MANAGEMENT mean?

And who the hell is willing to wait 45 minutes to sit at Lauriol Plaza?  The food just ain't that great folks.  (Does that make me a Beltway Insider?)

It looks like there are blind trusts and then there are those HCA stock holdings controlled by your brother outside the trusts?  Whoops!