What's Up Patrick J. Fitzgerald?

[michelle]

Since we're all waiting to see what special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has
up his sleeve, I'm starting this thread. It has been stated that his investigations
will be finished and released in October. Please post any information that comes your way here. Here's one to start with:

washingtonpost.com
N.Y. Times Reporter Released From Jail
Miller to Testify In CIA Leak Probe
[snip]:
New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released from jail late yesterday and is scheduled to testify this morning before a federal grand jury investigating whether any government officials illegally leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media, according to lawyers involved in the case.

Lawyers involved in the case believe today's testimony could mark the end of an investigation in which more than a dozen Bush administration officials have testified before a federal grand jury or have talked to FBI agents involved in the nearly two-year-old probe. Bush was interviewed as part of the investigation.

Read the rest at:
tinyurl.com/75wfj

[michelle]

BUSH IN COURT MONDAY [OCT 3RD]? COULD IT BE SO, COULD IT BE TRUE?!
I just got this last night:

To all receiving this, click the link, go to the left
hand column
and select Monday, then click on Judge Keys to verify
this email. www.ilnd.uscourts.gov/DAILYCAL/eventskd.htm

Well, things are looking up. I checked with CM on
the Illinois
thing for Monday, this is the Bush, Resident of the
White House.
There are many other names with other judges that day,
and some look
familiar. I am wondering if many are senators or
congressmen. Now
with Judith Miller doing her thing, and Tom Delay etc,
this is all
very nice stuff! I am a bit later, sending out the
Bush into to my
list with AH. I sent it to a bunch already from this
address today.
YES, Yes, Yes!!!!!!!!!! Take care


Honorable Arlander Keys Courtroom
2230
(AK)

1:03-cv-04786 Butler v.
Doe
09:00
Magistrate Status Hearing
1:05-cv-00665 Abdelaziz v.
Corbett 09:00
Status
Hearing
1:05-cv-03354 Smith v. The Board of Trustees of th

09:00 Status Hearing
1:91-cv-02914 USA v.
Bush
09:00 Notice
of Motion
1:02-cv-09306 Malone v.
Neuman 10:00
Settlement
Conference

Actually all that week there are cases USA v whoever.
How we all want this! I'll guess we'll have to wait and see.
Michelle

[Anwaar]

Guardian Snip;

The scandal threatens the White House directly. Another journalist, Time magazine's Matt Cooper, has named Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, as his source for revealing Ms Plame's identity. Rove and Libby, two of the most powerful behind-the-scenes figures in the administration, have said they revealed that Mr Wilson's wife worked in the CIA and had been instrumental in sending him on the fact-finding mission. But lawyers for both officials insist they did not break the law, as they did not provide her name, and did not know she was undercover.

Critics say identifying her as Mr Wilson's wife was tantamount to naming her.

Read More : www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1582376,00.html

[michelle]

As stated, Judith Miller never wrote an article concerning the Plame leak. Her going to
jail for defending freedom of the press is just 'bunk'! Based on that argument, if I or
anyone else received an anonymous tip and didn't report it then we could be threatened with jail. This just doesn't hold water. Who is Judith Miller protecting? That's the question.

A quote from the above Guardian article says, "Miller's reputation had already been battered by stories she had written in the run-up to the Iraq invasion about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Those reports, based largely on unnamed administration and Iraqi exile sources, were later proved to be wrong, and led to intense criticism that she had been too unquestioning of, her contacts."

Is Ms. Miller a shill for the Bush administration? And why didn't Robert Novak receive any attention back in 2003?

[Anwaar]

Miller Walks: The Plot Thickens

Published on Friday, September 30, 2005 by the Huffington Post

by Arianna Huffington

Snip:

Was Miller’s sudden eagerness to find a get-out-of-jail excuse prompted by Fitzgerald’s planning to ask for an extension of the grand jury?

Or was it prompted by Fitzgerald’s gearing up to charge her with criminal contempt?

If all it took for Miller to feel properly released was a phone call, why did she wait 85 days to make it?

And so we don’t forget what this story is really about, and given that the aluminum tubes crap that Miller put on the front page of the New York Times was being heavily promoted by Cheney, how much of that bogus information came to Miller via Libby?

And here are a few questions for the Times:

Had a Plame/Wilson story been assigned to Miller or not?

What, if anything, did she say about the story to anyone at the paper at the time… and what did they say back?

Why did the Times hold back the story about Miller’s release and let multiple other news sources scoop them? Were they trying to miss the evening news cycle and avoid the overnight thrashing their spin has rightly received?

So, as the image of Judy as a principled, conscience-driven defender of the First Amendment gives way to the image of Judy wearing her "new" waiver as a fig leaf allowing her to get out and sing, the big question remains: What is she hiding?

© 2005 Huffington Post

The rest here : issuesinfocus.blogspot.com/2005/10/miller-walks-plot-thickens.html

[michelle]

IS JUDITH MILLER PROTECTING DICK CHENEY? WE ALL KNOW THAT CHENEY IS THE
VENTRILOQUIST FOR OUR TALKING 'DUMMY' PRESIDENT:

As CIA leak probe passes Rove, Cheney is eyed, lawyer says
10/01/2005 @ 6:00 pm
Filed by RAW STORY [SNIP]:

Excerpted to highlight Cheney's role from an article Saturday in the New York Times. The Times' reporters remark: "Ms. Miller's grand jury appearance increased anxiety in the White House and throughout Republican circles about how the investigation might end."

A lawyer who knows Mr. Libby's account said the administration efforts to limit the damage from Mr. Wilson's criticism extended as high as Mr. Cheney. This lawyer and others who spoke about the case asked that they not be identified because of grand jury secrecy rules.

Read the article at: rawstory.com/news/2005/As_CIA_leak_probe_passes_Rove_1001.html

[jay paulson]

If you want to find out when and why martial law is going to be declared in the fascist states of america, read the following :

Global Research Feature Article
Martial Law and the Avian Flu Pandemic
by Michel Chossudovsky
October 4, 2005

at:
GlobalResearch.ca

Who's going to benefit from the declaration of martial law: Patrick or George?--In any case, we're all going to lose!

[michelle]

As the noose tightens at the White House, the State Department memo may be the key piece of Plame evidence.

Remember The Memo
By Michael Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 10.03.05

Think it’s fair to say that the combination Sunday of the Walter Pincus-Jim VandeHei piece in The Washington Post and George Stephanopoulos’ bombshell on television’s This Week felt like a tug on the noose around the White House’s neck?

The Post article noted that Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor looking into the Valerie Plame investigation, could bring conspiracy indictments against Karl Rove and Scooter Libby -- even if he fails to pin down evidence that they violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Stephanopoulos did them one better: He said to George Will on This Week that a source told him that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney “were actually involved in some of the discussions” about how the White House should deal with Joe Wilson and Plame, his wife.

OK, before we go any further, let’s pinch ourselves: I still think it will be awfully difficult for Fitzgerald to bring indictments against high-level officials. Bureaucratic layering is such that high officials typically have five or six degrees of separation from controversial actions, so that they can say “my hands were clean” and some underling the media have never heard of can take the fall.

It’s kind of like in The Constant Gardner: The pharmaceutical company doesn’t need to order an actual hit; it merely has to let out word that so-and-so is a problem, and by the time the word gets to the sixth sociopath down the line, the comment is understood to mean murder. But no executive ever said, or perhaps even ever intended, any such thing.

So for now we still need to assume that, whatever happened, neither Rove nor Libby nor anyone else in the Bush White House intended for Plame’s name to get out there. And remember, we’re not exactly dealing with Murray Kempton on the journalistic end of this transaction (for those of you who don’t know, he’s the epitome of journalistic probity and rectitude). Bob Novak may have burned a source or made a more innocent error. So Plame’s name might have appeared in print through some fault of his.

But the argument against all my buts is the memo.

You are probably familiar with the memo story, which The New York Times broke in mid-July. The Times published Joe Wilson’s op-ed on July 6, 2003. By the next day, as he was getting aboard Air Force One to travel with the president to Africa, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had the key memo in his hand.

The memo, prepared the previous month, was chiefly about the State Department’s skepticism that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from Niger. But one paragraph, marked “S” for secret, included Plame’s name, although it did not specifically identify her as a covert operative. (For the record, Rove’s attorney has maintained that Rove never saw the memo until Fitzgerald’s office showed it to him.)

To quote from a Washington Post piece by VandeHei and Mike Allen from July 16: “A key mystery in the leak case is how senior administration officials first learned of Plame's identity and her relationship to a key critic of President Bush's Iraq policy, before her name appeared in news reports.” One of Fitzgerald’s earliest moves was to subpoena phone records from that Air Force One trip.

Bush, of course, was on that plane. It hardly stretches credulity to think that Powell showed his boss the memo -- if not because of the Plame mention then because the memo stated his department’s view that Wilson’s trip had been unnecessary to begin with because the State Department’s internal probe had already shown that the Iraq-Niger connection was a fabrication.

And this, I suspect, is where Stephanopoulos’ source circles back in to the story. If Bush saw that memo seven days before Novak’s story appeared, might Bush himself have been involved in discussions about Wilson and Plame?

Again, there’s usually insulation built in between higher-ups, especially the president, and any decision or action that might remotely be considered controversial. And, again, I still think the likelihood of high-level prosecutions is less than 50 percent. But if those prosecutions come, the State Department memo will likely be a key document.

And the more important point is this: We’ll learn that the normal layers of insulation were ignored because the administration, and perhaps the president himself, felt it could get away with ignoring them. Certainly it had no reason at that point to think that the media, which helped it make their phony case for war, would get nosy. It’s equally obvious that it had no reason to fear the feeble Democrats. The one thing the administration didn’t count on was an honest prosecutor who cared more about evidence and the law than about partisanship. That, for this White House, was an inconceivable circumstance.

Michael Tomasky is the Prospect’s executive editor.

Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Michael Tomasky, "Remember The Memo", The American Prospect Online, Oct 3, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to [e-mail].

www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10375

[michelle]

Breaking! Plame Indictments Imminent
10/05/05

The D.C. rumor mill is thrumming with whispers that 22 indictments are about to be handed down on the outed-CIA agent Valerie Plame case. The last time the wires buzzed this loud — that Tom DeLay would be indicted and would step down from his leadership post in the House — the scuttlebutters got it right.

Can it be a coincidence that the White House appears to be distancing President Bush from embattled aide Karl Rove? “He’s been missing in action at more than one major presidential event,” a member of the White House press corps tells us.

If the word on the street is right a second time, we have a bit of advice for Rove: Go with vertical stripes, they’re way more slimming.
www.radarmagazine.com/the-wire/2005/10/05/index.php#wire_003399

Update: Ooh, look: a very convenient distraction!:
Espionage Case Breaches White House
Accused Marine Worked in Vice President's Office
abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1187030&page=1

[Anwaar]

This Plame case is an iceberg, more below the surface than above. Read the fllowing explosive report;

21 Administration Officials Involved In Plame Leak

Read more : www.thinkprogress.org/leak-scandal

[dana]

A propos the article Michelle posted above, Remember the memo

Excerpt: "The Post article noted that Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor looking into the Valerie Plame investigation, could bring conspiracy indictments against Karl Rove and Scooter Libby -- even if he fails to pin down evidence that they violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act".

Citizenspook blog was established in late July of this year in order to clarify the legal aspects of the Plame affair: Constitutional law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (1982) in relation to Title 18 US code statutes 793 and 794. Citizenspook makes a very convincing argument for the applicability of the latter, rather than the IIPA. And he's not alone. If this is the legal route Fitzgerald has taken, the repercussions could be enormous, as statutes 793 and 794 apply to acts of espionage [ie, treason], carrying penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment [plus fine] and death or life imprisonment, respectively.

This is legal research that anyone who is interested in the Plame case ought to know [ see below ].

The whole affair is still up in the air at this point, but there may be reason to hope that the Bush admin. will finish in flames. From that point we'll have the upper echelon to deal with — but each achievement in its own time ...

There may be reason for hope.


Treasongate, parts 1 & 2
citizenspook.blogspot.com/2005/07/treasongate-controlling-law-big.html
citizenspook.blogspot.com/2005/08/treasongate-controlling-law-part-2.html

See also
Espionage act of 1917
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act

Plame affair
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_Affair

[michelle]

Thank you so very much for this information dana. Opened my eyes to their renaming of the war on terrorism! So many of us had the wrong reasoning on that one. I've been banking on Fitzgerald every since I heard of his investigation. From what I've read of him he is a man of high integrity and takes it personally when lied to! Here's to 794!!!! I wish for the perps all that they deserve.
Thanks again,
Michelle

[dana]

Espionage update:

Prosecutor in Leak Case Is Exploring Range of Crimes
By David Johnston
NYT, October 8, 2005

[ snip ]

"Recently lawyers said that they believed the prosecutor may be applying new legal theories to bring charges in the case. One new approach appears to involve the possible use of Chapter 37 of the federal espionage and censorship law, which makes it a crime for anyone who "willfully communicates delivers, transfers or causes to be communicated" to someone "not entitled to receive it" classified information relating the national defense matters. Under this broad statute, a government official or a private citizen who passed classified information to anyone else in or outside the government could potentially be charged with a felony, if they transferred the information to someone without a security clearance to receive it".

[ snip ]


Full text
www.nytimes.com/2005/10/08/politics/08leak.html?pagewanted=print



See also:

The New York Times says "espionage"
www.markarkleiman.com/archives/valerie_plame_/2005/10/the_new_york_times_says_espionage.php


The Espionage Act - at last!
bluemassgroup.typepad.com/blue_mass_group/2005/10/the_espionage_a.html

[jay paulson]

Lot of talk past few days in MSM and on Internet about indictments, impeachment, the "Bush presidency unraveling" and so on. Lowest popular support in history of the country. Maybe he's on the way out--and if he is, will his successor be a bigger criminal or a lesser one than Bush?

Might be good to remember the the nation is held prisoner to the neocons. Could be a good cop-bad cop routine going on here with all the talk of indictment, impeachment and so on.

One day at a time...

[michelle]

10/13/05
Jay,

Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald may be
digging into more than we know. There is
talk that he has asked for an extension.
Perhaps he is trying to rid ourselves of a
criminal successor........Michelle

From: firedoglakeblogspot.com
10/09 to 10/15/05
[Snips]:

Sources close to the investigation
have also confirmed that special
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is trying
to determine Vice President Cheney's
role in the outing of Mrs. Wilson,
more specifically, if Cheney ordered the leak.

A source close to the Plame case is saying
that Fitzgerald met alone with Judge Hogan
yesterday, presumably to ask for an extension
of the Grand Jury.

BushCo. sphincters to be set on "pucker"
for a little while longer.

READ THE REST: tinyurl.com/7p3cf