Fitzgerald Investigation of Leak of Identity of CIA Agent

Makes the White House look bad, says Parados. Of course it does, The White House has looked bad before. It will look bad again. It looked even worse when the President said: Monica and I were never alone in the Oval Office.

If you do not know by now, parados, that no ADMINISTRATION at any time will comment on an indictment and an ongoing investigation, you have really missed the past headlines. Do I really have to go fishing in the nineties to find:

Sorry, we can't comment on that because it is an ongoing investigation.

And, as for the ridiculous comment that the CIA was compromised, I want someone to quote the charge made by Fitzgerald. The charge did not involve OUTING a CIA Agent as anyone who knows how to read can discover. The charges were strictly focused on perjury and obstruction of justice. Mr. Libby, I am sorry to inform BethEl, WAS NOT CHARGED WITH HAVING OUTED PLAME.

"The disclosure of Ms. Plame's name was an unprecedented and shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, has damaged U.S. national security, specifically the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence-gathering using human sources," the group wrote in the two-page letter.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Johnson, who described himself as a registered Republican who voted for President Bush, said he and other former intelligence officers had been discussing the idea of a letter for months and decided to go forward with it because of a lack of evidence of progress in the Justice Department investigation.

"For this administration to run on a security platform and allow people in the administration to compromise the security of intelligence assets, I think is unconscionable," Mr. Johnson said.

FITZGERALD: Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray?

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

As you sit here now, if you're asking me what his motives were, I can't tell you; we haven't charged it.

So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.

I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge.

This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.

Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community.

Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life.

FITZGERALD: The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It's important that a CIA officer's identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation's security.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - A Time magazine reporter met on Thursday with the special counsel in the C.I.A. leak case to answer questions about her conversations last year with a lawyer for Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, a senior editor of the magazine said.

The reporter, Viveca Novak, met with the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, for more than an hour at the office of Ms. Novak's lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III.

Jim Kelly, Time's managing editor, said Ms. Novak's account of her testimony, in a deposition, would appear in the magazine on Monday.

Mr. Fitzgerald sought to question Ms. Novak about conversations she had with Robert D. Luskin, a lawyer for Mr. Rove, who has been under scrutiny in the investigation into the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity.

Mr. Luskin testified in a deposition last Friday about his conversations with Ms. Novak, said people who had been briefed on the matter. Mr. Luskin said Thursday that he would not discuss the deposition, first disclosed by CNN on its Web site.

What information the prosecutor hoped to learn from Ms. Novak and Mr. Luskin was not publicly known, but lawyers in the case had suggested that the information could be used by Mr. Luskin to help Mr. Rove explain his belated disclosure of a conversation with another Time reporter, Matthew Cooper.

Ms. Novak agreed to cooperate with the investigation, the magazine said. Mr. Cooper waged a lengthy legal battle resisting Mr. Fitzgerald's effort to obtain his testimony, but in the end he answered the prosecutor's questions about his conversations with Mr. Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr., then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

"We thought that Matt Cooper's involvement was it for Time magazine," Mr. Kelly said. "Obviously other people are involved."

Mr. Fitzgerald has focused on why Mr. Rove did not disclose until a second grand jury appearance, in October 2004, his conversation with Mr. Cooper. It was in that conversation, Mr. Cooper said, that Mr. Rove spoke about the C.I.A. officer.

I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge.

This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.
...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.


...I think just the notion that someone's identity could be compromised lightly, to me compromises the ability to recruit people and say, "Come work for us,...

Makes the White House look bad, says Parados. Of course it does, The White House has looked bad before. It will look bad again. It looked even worse when the President said: Monica and I were never alone in the Oval Office.

If you do not know by now, parados, that no ADMINISTRATION at any time will comment on an indictment and an ongoing investigation, you have really missed the past headlines. Do I really have to go fishing in the nineties to find:

Sorry, we can't comment on that because it is an ongoing investigation.

And, as for the ridiculous comment that the CIA was compromised, I want someone to quote the charge made by Fitzgerald. The charge did not involve OUTING a CIA Agent as anyone who knows how to read can discover. The charges were strictly focused on perjury and obstruction of justice. Mr. Libby, I am sorry to inform BethEl, WAS NOT CHARGED WITH HAVING OUTED PLAME.

parados, Remember that Bush said he will remove people in his administration if they are found guilty of a crime.

parados, Remember that Bush said he will remove people in his administration if they are found guilty of a crime.

One possible explanation of why the date is so important is that Luskin could contend it would have been foolish for Rove to try to cover up his role when he knew -- because of Novak's disclosure to Luskin -- that a number of people knew he had talked to Cooper and that it probably would soon become public.

Posner shows himself to be an idiot with this paragraph.

I find it ludicrous that people who don't know Judge Posner would presume to call him an idiot.