In the Operation Safe Roads, the investigations of Rod Blagojevich, and patronage investigations in Chicago, Fitzgerald’s team has followed a clear pattern of looking at the evidence, prosecuting people on the front line and then moving upwards towards the ultimate target. In Operation Saferoads, Fitzgerald went after George Ryan’s chief political aide Scott Fawell. Fawell was relatively easy to convict, but wouldn’t flip on Ryan for nothing. So Fitzgerald went after his fiancee and got Fawell to talk in order to get her leniency.
In the Blagojevich investigations there are a series of underlings who are being prosecuted for a number of issues, the primary two being running a hiring racket for political cronies in Illinois state government and a hospital expansion racket with Blagojevich fundraisers. While the ultimate outcome isn’t clear, Blagojevich’s chief fundraiser from his first term has been indicted as has Blagojevich’s wife’s business associate and Democratic donor Tony Rezko. The clear target is the Governor and the method is to squeeze underlings once they are caught to flip.
In the Daley case, Fitzgerald went after Daley’s chief of patronage, Robert Sorich. Sorich was convicted and Fitzgerald made efforts to get him to flip. He hasn’t and doesn’t appear to have given any indication he will.
It seems clear to me that Fitzgerald would like to climb the ladder by leveraging Libby’s sentence for him to flip on the VP. The question as to whether it will work is whether Libby is willing to fall on his sword or if the penalty will be enough to make him flip. Of the three examples above, only in the Ryan case has it worked so far, but I expect it to work in the Blagojevich cases as well. Whether Libby will flip then is largely dependent upon his sense of loyalty and whether he thinks he might be pardoned.
While the national conservative media has tried to make Patrick Fitzgerald as some obsessive loon on a witch hunt, he’s incredibly focused, careful, and deliberate. Much like the Russians as referenced by Fred Thompson in The Hunt for Red October, he doesn’t take a dump without a plan.
Regardless, Patrick Fitzgerald has laid to rest two issues. First, Plame was covert. No matter how many times people claim she wasn’t it’s been clearly documented repeatedly. Second, there was an attempt to cover up that her cover was blown for political reasons. While it may not be prosecutable, it was wrong and the Vice-President needs to be clear about what his role was.
Sorry to disappoint all the Bush-haters, but Fitzgerald just said the investigation is over and no additional charges will be filed.
“I do not expect to file any further charges, the investigation was inactive prior to the trial,” the Chicago-based federal attorney who led the prosecution said. “We’re all going back to our day jobs.”
However, Fitzgerald did concede “If new information comes to light, of course we’ll do that.”
A reporter prompted Fitzgerald on whether he would scale down his recommendations for a sentence if Libby were to offer more information to the prosecution that wasn’t previously known.
“They can contact us,” Fitzgerald responded of Libby and his attorneys.
Dan, a quick look at the blogs doesn’t turn up much disappointment amongst the ranks of “Bush haters” today. Just sayin’…
It’s not exactly a good day for the Bush-lovers when the VP’s Chief of Staff and adviser to the President is convicted of four crimes.
Think about if this happened under a Democratic administration and what you would be saying?
I remember the dreams of fitzmas and of karl rove’s hide, widely predicted in the feverswamps of the left. I’m sure goofballs like olbermann will have their fun tonight and they will put lyin’ joe wilson on the air without asking him why the wash post, a bipartisan senate panel and many others found that his entire story that formed the basis of this prosecution was fraudulent. Ultimately, the public doesn’t care about this trial. Check the ratings. I’m just glad Fitz is coming back to chicago to go after some real bad guys. Yes, it reflects poorly on the Bush administration but relatively speaking, this administration has had a small percentage of the corruption found in the previous one.
In case you’ve forgotten about Joe Wilson, here’s what a Wash Post editorial said:
Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
Read the original document on the trial Dan. Fox News and the Washington Post continue to push stories by Toensig and her husband that are clearly false. Why? I guess the WP isn’t as liberal as you think Dan. However, the notion that Wilson lied about the trip is contrary to the documentary evidence produced in the trial:
http://wid.ap.org/documents/libbytrial/jan23/DX71.pdf
The reasons he was sent was he had contacts with those who ran the government in Niger during the time and knew them well enough to gather the information.
Now, how the only way it is false to say that he debunked the uranium sale is if one says the two other investigations done in Niger were more to do with it them him. He was accurate, there is no evidence that there was any sort of serious effort to buy uranium from Niger. One person he met with suggested the Iraqis seemed to want to talk about something, but nothing was ever mentioned.
Now given his wife wasn’t in a position to send him on a trip to Niger, a place he had served and knew well, the entire argument falls apart that somehow it was obvious his wife would be outed. It’s a lie the WP bought into and despite specific evidence to the contrary, refuse to admit.
This is just another case of Fox News and the wingnut welfare machine claiming something so often that people believe it regardless of the facts.
Now, the last gem is entertaining–what was so corrupt under Clinton? Was there systematized shaking down of lobbyists with Grover Norquist and Abramoff? Was there tampering with US Attorney investigations and then firing those who stood their ground? You do realize Carol Lam was leading one of the largest bribery scandals in US history and was replaced because she wasn’t capturing enough Mexicans. Sure. Right as she was indicting people highly placed in the CIA. Northern Marianas Island prosecutors shoved aside when they got close to the Delay-Abramoff investigation. James Tobin and the NH phone jamming case. and more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/grandolddocket.php
No party has a lock on corruption, but this administration has done everything it can to hide wrongdoing by allies. While we got great conspiracy theories about killing Vince Foster and idiots like Cisneros lying about sex, there wasn’t a clear pattern of tampering with federal investigations.
The Washington Post turned on Wilson because he directly lied to the paper. The Senate report spells it out. http://powerlineblog.com/archives/007135.php. The Post wasn’t influenced by anybody. The paper was Wilson’s biggest booster until it figured out the guy was making stuff up. That’s why they turned on him with such a vengeance.
It’s really not seriously disputed by anyone that Joe Wilson was untruthful.
What is lost here is that the Bush administration brought in Fitzgerald to investigate and ordered everyone to cooperate and not claim privilege, unlike every one of the Clinton investigations. Big difference.
Fitzgerald says the investigation is over and it is unless Libby says it is not. If Libby should indicate a desire to cooperate then I think the pardon bomb will be dropped.
Otherwise a pardon will not come until after November of 08.
So it looks to me like some tough inmate in the Federal Prison System just might be getting a scooter for Christmas
Dan, read the memo I linked to. It points out that his wife didn’t send him on the trip, but provided background on him when asked. That’s why I linked to it.
Furthermore, in his book he’s fully consistent with the story. He got one detail wrong because when told about the documents at a later date, he knew the dates of the supposed transactions were impossible given who appeared on them and who was in power at the time listed.
If you read his book you would understand why the PowerLine post is a joke–he never concluded that there was an attempt. There was a brief discussion between a Niger official and an Iraqi official, but in that discussion nothing was discussed other than they should talk sometime with no allusions towards uranium.
There is no dispute that he spoke wrong once, but that his story largely is now backed up with official documents other than the forgery issue–and even on that he was correct that they had to be forgeries because of who was listed and the date.
Even more bizarre is that the forgery issue should send red flags up given the Italian intelligence officer has disappeared who provided them and there are all sorts of questions about who he was connected to.
how do you explain wash. post. they dealt directly with wilson. His book is meaningless because he had time to clean up his earlier lies.
the paper was cheerleading for him and then turned.
Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
that’s as damning a statement as can be and dead accurate.
what part of this story don’t you understand:
Plame’s Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Report Disputes Wilson’s Claims on Trip, Wife’s Role
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 10, 2004; Page A09
Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.
Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.
Wilson’s assertions — both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information — were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.
The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address.
Yesterday’s report said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched “yellowcake” uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question. Much of the rest of the intelligence suggesting a buildup of weapons of mass destruction was unfounded, the report said.
The report turns a harsh spotlight on what Wilson has said about his role in gathering prewar intelligence, most pointedly by asserting that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, recommended him.
Plame’s role could be significant in an ongoing investigation into whether a crime was committed when her name and employment were disclosed to reporters last summer.
Administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak then that Wilson, a partisan critic of Bush’s foreign policy, was sent to Niger at the suggestion of Plame, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at CIA. The disclosure of Plame’s identity, which was classified, led to an investigation into who leaked her name.
The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson’s bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.
The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame “offered up” Wilson’s name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations saying her husband “has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.
Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.
“Valerie had nothing to do with the matter,” Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. “She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.”
Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: “I don’t see it as a recommendation to send me.”
The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA’s request to her husband, saying, “there’s this crazy report” about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. The committee found Wilson had made an earlier trip to Niger in 1999 for the CIA, also at his wife’s suggestion.
The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because “the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.”
“Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the ‘dates were wrong and the names were wrong’ when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports,” the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have “misspoken” to reporters. The documents — purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq — were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.
Wilson’s reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said.
Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Niger and Iraq — which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that “although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq.”
According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.
Still, it was the CIA that bore the brunt of the criticism of the Niger intelligence. The panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.
The agency did not examine forged documents that have been widely cited as a reason to dismiss the purported effort by Iraq until months after it obtained them. The panel said it still has “not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa.”
—what part of this story don’t you understand:
What part of the document linked above don’t you understand? How does one privilege a news story over a memo by those involved in the process of sending him?
This was clear in 2003 Newsday piece:
A senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked “alongside” the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. “They (the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story) were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,” he said. “There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,” he said. “I can’t figure out what it could be.” “We paid his (Wilson’s) airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you’d have to pay big bucks to go there,” the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses.
Suggesting the WP was a cheerleader is mildly delusional. The WP backed the war from the beginning and celebrated the President’s claims and Powell’s presentation to the United Nations. Worse, the WP is still allowing op-eds to claim Plame wasn’t covert which was confirmed by Fitzgerald.
Here’s Hiatt today:
In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the administration.
He did debunk the uranium claim. There are no reports of contacts between Niger and Iraq. The closest one comes to saying any link exists is on his trip and the ‘argument’ that they might have been pursuing uranium is based on the idea that somehow someone should be able to prove a negative. Two others including the Ambassador in Niger a military expert both reported the same thing as Wilson. And a fourth report has come to light delivered to the White House by the National Intelligence Officer for Africa.
But again, the documents that spurred the entire thing are forgeries tied to Italian intelligence. The implications of those forgeries coming from such sources are far more disturbing than anything Wilson did:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10506
The CIA claimed there weren’t reports circulating. There were:
n an explosive series of articles appearing this week in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, investigative reporters Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo report that Nicolo Pollari, chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, known as Sismi, brought the Niger yellowcake story directly to the White House after his insistent overtures had been rejected by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2001 and 2002. Sismi had reported to the CIA on October 15, 2001, that Iraq had sought yellowcake in Niger, a report it also plied on British intelligence, creating an echo that the Niger forgeries themselves purported to amplify before they were exposed as a hoax.
Wilson didn’t say the VP sent him, he said that the questions were motivated by an inquiry from the VP’s office which did occur. Wilson has specifically written this.
Wilson never said his report was circulated because he only made an oral report, but when asked a hypothetical he gave an answer about how one would usually treat such reports.
Somebody with the initials “DC” has been drinking a li’l too much Kool-Aid…
Give it up, Dan. Libby, Special Assistant to President Bush, is going to jail as the fall guy for the Bush Administration. If he turns, more will likely follow him to Club Fed.
The Wash. Post was a cheerleader for Wilson at first. I was working in Washington reading the voluminus coverage every morning.
That’s why they are so honked off now. They realized they were played.
from this morning’s Post editorial…”The former ambassador will be remembered as a blowhard.”
The kool-aid drinkers are on the left.
But again Dan, they are getting their facts wrong. Them being upset because they think Wilson played them and then not correcting that belief when the evidence leads elsewhere isn’t a stirring defense of the credibility. Wilson wasn’t sent by his wife. His report was passed on and he didn’t find any evidence of Iraqi attempts to buy yellowcake–the same as three other investigations.
*****Was there tampering with US Attorney investigations and then firing those who stood their ground?******
Clinton never had a pressing need to tamper with U.S. Attorney investigations — he fired all of Bush 41’s U.S. attorneys within about a month of his being elected. Then put his own guys in.
===Clinton never had a pressing need to tamper with U.S. Attorney investigations — he fired all of Bush 41’s U.S. attorneys within about a month of his being elected. Then put his own guys in.
As Bush did in 2001. As Reagan did in 1981. As Carter did in 1977. As Nixon did in 1969. As…..
These were all Bush appointees who were fired.
Absolute, blatant lie to say Bush, Reagan, Carter and Nixon summarily fired (via mass mailing) all then-acting U.S. Attorneys on the same day within days of their becoming elected. It made news when Clinton did it back then precisely because it had never been done in that fashion.
First, you pointed out that they were fired within the month. Now, you might argue that sometimes administrations took longer than 1 month, but when parties change, almost all of the US attorneys are replaced—Clinton simply asked for their resignations immediately instead of doing it over a couple months or waiting for their terms to expire.
IOW, the difference between Clinton and other administrations is essentially a distinction without a difference.
What’s most odd is in trying to cover up for your bullshit you claimed I said that the mechanism was the same for each administration. I didn’t. You did when you realized your pants were down around your ankles and you’d attracted a crowd. Being stupid is forgiveable. Being a bad liar isn’t.
Fired. All 93. Within days of taking office. Can you refute that?
I opened with the statement they were “fired”…. You fired back with claptrap innuendo that Nixon, Carter and Reagan all did the same thing….. They clearly did not and Clinton did as your latest response tacitly yet clearly admits.
And it is far far far far far far different to await a resignation and then exercise your constitutionally-granted powers to appoint a replacement than it is to summarily dismiss them en masse to save your own ass from investigation. Clinton’s was the true “abuse of power” that is bantied about so readily by the Looney/Historically-Challenged Left.
I notice the increased invective in your response here — Anything to do with my simultaneous post on the “Elizabeth Edwards is drop dead gorgeous” howler? I think it was rejected, but admittedly I haven’t checked back. Did I strike a nerve? For that I offer no apology.
Peace Out — Wait, one more thing. Nope, my pants are still firmly planted around my hips. How about yours?
All of the administrations did do the same thing. I have no idea why you are contesting this point. The Bush administration ‘transitioned’ all of the US Attorneys in 2001. I have the memo discussing it on the front page. And the Clinton administration followed a similar schedule except the made the notice publicly. Comparing the two is simply dishonest.