Fitzgerald Investigation of Leak of Identity of CIA Agent

Because when he confronted her in the hotel and yelled at her she ran to her room and locked the door.

Ah, thankee Kelticwizard.


It is so different here, for serious cases there are "committal" hearings (though these are now waived in some cases to avoid undue suffering for alleged victims in some crimes). Many, many cases aredismissed at that point, because of lack of convincing evidence.


But it is a magistrate who decides, ie someone legally trained.



Of course, there are issues with ANY system.

Here's an informative link on grand juries. http://www.udayton.edu/~grandjur/fedj/fedj.htm

Fitzgerald Must Broaden Investigation
Posted 10/22/2005 @ 7:55pm
Fitzgerald Must Broaden Investigation
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor, The Nation

"The CIA leak issue is only the tip of the iceberg," Congressman Jerry Nadler told me when I ran into him on the street near our offices on Friday afternoon. He was quick to tell me of a call--led by Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and Nadler, along with 39 of their House colleagues--for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation to be expanded to examine whether the White House--President, Vice-President, and members of the WH's Iraq War Group--conspired to deliberately deceive Congress into authorizing the war. And, as Nadler reminded me, lying to Congress is a crime under several federal statutes.

This is the first call by members of Congress for an expansion of Fitzgerald's probe, amid mounting evidence that there was a well-orchestrated effort by what former State Department aide Larry Wilkerson dubbed last week, "the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis" to hijack US foreign policy and knowingly mislead the Congress in order to get its support for an unlawful war.

"We are no longer just talking about a Republican culture of corruption and cronyism," Nadler says. "We now have reason to believe that high crimes may have been committed at the highest level, wrongdoing that may have led us to war and imperiled our national security." For more on this important call for the investigation's expansion, click here, and then click here to ask your elected reps to support these calls.

BBB, As I've mentioned many times before, I corresponded with Senator Feinstein to vote "no" on this administration's request to go to war with Iraq. She wrote back and told me that she had information that required her to vote "yes." I wrote back and told her I trusted her judgement, and agreed with her decision. After our preemptive attack on Iraq, she said they were lied to by this administration, and that all the democrats that voted "yes" would have said "no."

I hope they hang all of Bushco's administration.

W pals bushwhack CIA leak prosecutor



BY THOMAS M. DeFRANK and MICHAEL McAULIFF
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Why am I not surprised? But to say, " just beats everything in light of the whole right wing conservative party.

The next step by the Bushies is to search his background back to conception in an attempt to find something to smear him with.

Au:

No doubt. But I don't think that is going to work this time.

People are getting smart to Republican smear jobs.

Guys like Rove should be kept under wraps, out of the public eye. When he comes into public view, and the public is told that this is Bush's Official Smearer, the smears lose their effectiveness.

Smears only work when they get people mad at the other guy for something. When it gets to the point that the public is aware that the smearer thinks he can manipulate the public, then the whole process falls down.

kelticwizard




I do not share your the confidence in the 'getting smart" of the American electorate. However, where there is life there is hope. .

Fool me once, shame on me....

In their desperation, this administration will make some stupid moves to try to deflect Fitzgerald's findings, but after all is said and done, this is the finish for Bushco. There are too many that know Fitzgerald as a straight-shooter who never goes half-cocked like the people in this administration.

Inquiry as Exacting As Special Counsel Is
Inquiry as Exacting As Special Counsel Is
A Tough Investigation Is Also Praised as Nonpartisan
By Peter Slevin and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 24, 2005; A03
CHICAGO, Oct. 23

Patrick J. Fitzgerald's final witness was behind bars, refusing to testify, and no one was budging. Hunting for room to maneuver, the special counsel talked with one side, then the other. He drafted a letter that nudged the witness and needled I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff.

Three days later, Libby put fingers to keyboard and told New York Times reporter Judith Miller that she was freed from her promise to protect his identity. He praised her mightily and urged her to "come back to work -- and life." Satisfied, she quit jail after 85 days, testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury and surrendered details she had vowed never to reveal.

Miller's testimony carried Fitzgerald one step closer to the climax of his investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's name, an inquiry that a federal judge termed "exhaustive" and President Bush called "dignified." In typical fashion, the Chicago prosecutor interceded personally, with a blend of toughness and flexibility, and pocketed what he needed.

Fitzgerald's most difficult and contentious choices -- whether to seek criminal charges -- remain to be announced, possibly this week. Yet in a case with huge political stakes for the White House, a portrait is emerging of a special counsel with no discernible political bent who prepared the ground with painstaking sleuthing and cold-eyed lawyering.

So far, Fitzgerald has given neither Republicans nor Democrats grounds to question his motives as he excavated the machinations of a White House that prided itself on its discipline and its ability to push its pro-war message. He did not blink, lawyers and witnesses say, and he did not leak.

News organizations have complained bitterly that Fitzgerald fractured the special relationship between reporters and their sources. White House allies have warned that he will criminalize routine Washington political transactions or impute a coverup where no provable original crime occurred. But federal judges have strongly backed Fitzgerald, who presented secret evidence to persuade an ideologically diverse appeals court that someone committed "a serious breach of public trust."

Fitzgerald, 44, is investigating allegations that Bush administration officials illegally leaked CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity to reporters to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who challenged White House justifications for the Iraq war. Evidence suggests senior officials including Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove were more deeply involved in the events than the White House initially said.

Fitzgerald was recruited to the case in December 2003 by close friend James B. Comey, deputy attorney general to John D. Ashcroft. He was two years into a posting as Chicago's U.S. attorney, a job he won partly because he was a seasoned outsider with no evident political agenda, qualities that inspired Comey to appoint him to a case with powerful partisan overtones.

Known for convicting Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and for compiling the first criminal indictment against Osama bin Laden, Fitzgerald is an Irish doorman's son who attended a Jesuit high school, then Amherst College -- where he was a Phi Beta Kappa mathematics and economics major -- and Harvard.

He registered to vote in New York as an independent. When he discovered that Independent was a political party, he re-registered with no affiliation. Illinois citizens know him for pursuing Republicans and Democrats with equal fervor. Former governor George Ryan (R) is on trial on corruption charges, and a growing number of aides to Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) face influence-peddling charges.

Famous among colleagues for remembering minutiae, he keeps extraordinary hours while handling the leak investigation and managing a Chicago office with more than 150 lawyers. Dick Sauber, an attorney for Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in the leak case, said Fitzgerald "worked the case down to the small details. He was the one who knew the obscure fact in a document and knew where to find it."

Fitzgerald laughed at portrayals of himself on Comedy Central, but he was never coy when talking business, said Sauber, who recalled warning Cooper that jail would certainly be next if he lost his appeal.

Someone present when Fitzgerald questioned a witness said he was glad not to be a target.

"He's that really strict judge that everyone fears, not because they think he's going to do the wrong thing, but because they're afraid he might do the right thing," said the source, who has ties to the White House and requested anonymity.

"As White House staffers," he continued, "you had generals and Cabinet secretaries being deferential to you. He didn't care what you'd done or how well you knew the president."

Chuck Rosenberg, U.S. attorney in Houston, said Fitzgerald's doggedness is legendary.

"Pat takes the same approach to all his cases. He works them harder and knows them better than any soul on the planet," Rosenberg said. "I'll sometimes ask Pat a question about something in my district. Not only will I get an e-mailed answer dated at 2 o'clock in the morning, but it will go on for three single-spaced pages."

While supervising at least four lawyers and an FBI team in the leak case, Fitzgerald jetted between his downtown Chicago office and borrowed space at 1400 New York Ave. NW, not far from the courthouse where the grand jury meets most Wednesdays and Fridays. In its first 15 months, the investigation cost $723,000, according to the Government Accountability Office.

"He keeps the investigation within the team," said an attorney who works with him in Chicago. Such discretion frustrated defense lawyers, potential targets and reporters alike. As one figure told Time, "If he played his cards any closer to the vest, they'd be in his underwear."

Fitzgerald and his team started with basics, assembling many details before formal questioning began. They cast a wide net for evidence of a conspiracy within the Bush administration, scouring phone records and visitor logs. They tracked a State Department document to Air Force One and obtained notes and correspondence from the upper echelons of the White House. They delved into the deliberations of the White House Iraq Group, created in August 2002 to help the administration build support for the war.

Privately or in front of the grand jury, the special counsel questioned Bush, Cheney, former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and former CIA director George J. Tenet, along with many aides and spokesmen, particularly on Cheney's staff.

To exhaust all possibilities, Fitzgerald questioned a number of witnesses under oath even when he was confident they could add little to the grand jury's knowledge.

Legal sources say he studied inconsistencies and forgotten facts from witnesses, including Rove, whose early testimony differed from Cooper's recollections. Rove, who spoke to the grand jury four times, changed his story after failing to mention that he discussed Wilson and his wife with the Time correspondent.

A critical early success for Fitzgerald was winning the cooperation of Robert D. Novak, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist who named Plame in a July 2003 story and attributed key information to "two senior administration officials." Legal sources said Novak avoided a fight and quietly helped the special counsel's inquiry, although neither the columnist nor his attorney have said so publicly.

At least five other reporters -- Miller, Cooper, NBC newsman Tim Russert and Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler -- produced testimony. Members of the media high and low were none too happy to see Fitzgerald demand information from conversations intended to stay private. They also worried that, in his methods, he was setting a dangerous precedent that would make sources less likely to speak up about wrongdoing.

While Cooper and Miller initially refused to cooperate, Fitzgerald made pragmatic accommodations with the others. In the case of Pincus, Fitzgerald structured the testimony to allow him to avoid revealing the name of his source, even though Fitzgerald and the grand jury already knew it. That preserved the reporter's ability to say he had not broken his promise. The name has never been made public.

"The basic thing is he was enormously fair," said Pincus, a veteran national security reporter whose sources waived confidentiality. "There were no threats, just a discussion of how to solve this dilemma. He understood. He never pressured me."

By October 2004, Fitzgerald announced he was "for all practical purposes" finished. The final pieces he wanted were the testimony of Miller and Cooper, who had each discussed Plame with either Rove or Libby. Using a provision that allowed the submission of evidence in secret, Fitzgerald persuaded U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan, a Reagan appointee, to order the reporters to testify or face jail for contempt.

Miller and Cooper appealed, but three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals backed Hogan, including Clinton appointee David S. Tatel, considered one of the most liberal voices on the court. Public copies of Tatel's opinion included blank pages where the judge discussed the secret evidence. He called Fitzgerald's investigation "exhaustive" and said the testimony of the two reporters "appears essential to remedying a serious breach of public trust."

Cooper testified after losing the appeal and receiving a confidentiality release from Rove. When Fitzgerald rejected a compromise that would have kept Cooper from facing the grand jury, he insisted that he was not out to get reporters or dismantle the First Amendment, despite accusations from some constitutional lawyers and editorial writers that he was doing just that.

"It's not personal," Fitzgerald said, according to Sauber. "It's my job."

Miller chose jail, setting the stage for the last piece of Fitzgerald stagecraft. Periodically calling lawyers, he eventually learned from Miller attorney Robert S. Bennett that she might relent if she received a clear and personal waiver from Libby.

In three single-spaced pages, the special counsel wrote Libby attorney Joseph A. Tate that it would be seen as "cooperation with the investigation" if Libby reiterated the confidentiality release he had previously given Miller.

But in a twist apparently designed to get Libby's attention, Fitzgerald said twice that he suspected Libby may have preferred Miller to keep quiet about their talks.

Libby, after months of silence, quickly wrote Miller. He told her she was missed. He declared that he would be better off if she testified, and he made clear he was freeing her from her pledge.

Miller testified, and Fitzgerald prepared to wrap up his inquiry, but not without a final surprise.

A lawyer familiar with Miller's grand jury testimony said the special counsel asked her to discuss all relevant conversations she had with Libby before Novak published Plame's name. When Miller detailed two July 2003 discussions and said she could not remember any others, Fitzgerald begged to differ.

He showed her a page from a White House logbook that recorded a June 23 visit by Miller to Libby at the Old Executive Office Building. Miller corrected herself and soon produced for the grand jury her notes from that meeting.

Soon after, Fitzgerald called it a day.
---------------------------------------------
Leonnig and research editor Lucy Shackelford reported from Washington.

Indictment letters to Rove and Libby
On MSNBC's Hardball tonight, Chris Mathews announced that letters have been sent by Fitzgerald to Rove and Libbey that they are in legal jeopardy. Mathews said a copy of the letter was added to Fitzgerald's website (with a copy of the letter on screen), but I didn't find it there.

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc/index.html

BBB

Mathews is pretty much breathless with excitement at the possibility that members of the Bush Administration might get indicted.

Bush at Bay: Fitzgerald Looks at Niger Forgeries
Bush at Bay: Fitzgerald Looks at Niger Forgeries
By Martin Walker
UPI
Monday 24 October 2005

Washington - The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.

This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.

Fitzgerald's inquiry is expected to conclude this week and despite feverish speculation in Washington, there have been no leaks about his decision whether to issue indictments and against whom and on what charges.

Two facts are, however, now known and between them they do not bode well for the deputy chief of staff at the White House, Karl Rove, President George W Bush's senior political aide, not for Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The first is that Fitzgerald last year sought and obtained from the Justice Department permission to widen his investigation from the leak itself to the possibility of cover-ups, perjury and obstruction of justice by witnesses. This has renewed the old saying from the days of the Watergate scandal, that the cover-up can be more legally and politically dangerous than the crime.

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.

And since no WMD were found in Iraq after the 2003 war, despite the evidence from the U.N. inspections of the 1990s that demonstrated that Saddam Hussein had initiated both a nuclear and a biological weapons program, the strongest plank in the Bush administration's case for war has crumbled beneath its feet.

The reply of both the Bush and Blair administrations was that they made their assertions about Iraq's WMD in good faith, and that other intelligence agencies like the French and German were equally mistaken in their belief that Iraq retained chemical weapons, along with the ambition and some of technological basis to restart the nuclear and biological programs.

It is this central issue of good faith that the CIA leak affair brings into question. The initial claims Iraq was seeking raw uranium in the west African state of Niger aroused the interest of vice-president Cheney, who asked for more investigation. At a meeting of CIA and other officials, a CIA officer working under cover in the office that dealt with nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame, suggested her husband, James Wilson, a former ambassador to several African states, enjoyed good contacts in Niger and could make a preliminary inquiry. He did so, and returned concluding that the claims were untrue. In July 2003, he wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission - and his disbelief - public.

But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.

Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.

The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.

There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.

Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires.

If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.

If Fitzgerald issues no indictments, the matter will not simply die away, in part because the press is now hotly engaged, after the new embarrassment of the Times over the imprisonment of the paper's Judith Miller. There is also an uncomfortable sense that the press had given the Bush administration too easy a ride after 9/11. And the Bush team is now on the ropes and its internal discipline breaking down, making it an easier target.

Then there is a separate Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry under way, and while the Republican chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas seems to be dragging his feet, the ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, is now under growing Democratic Party pressure to pursue this question of falsifying the case for war.

And last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, introduced a resolution to require the president and secretary of state to furnish to Congress documents relating to the so-called White House Iraq Group. Chief of staff Andrew Card formed the WHIG task force in August 2002 - seven months before the invasion of Iraq, and Kucinich claims they were charged "with the mission of marketing a war in Iraq."

The group included: Rove, Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and Stephen Hadley (now Bush's national security adviser) and produced white papers that put into dramatic form the intelligence on Iraq's supposed nuclear threat. WHIG launched its media blitz in September 2002, six months before the war. Rice memorably spoke of the prospect of "a mushroom cloud," and Card revealingly explained why he chose September, saying "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The marketing is over but the war goes on. The press is baying and the law closes in. The team of Bush loyalists in the White House is demoralized and braced for disaster.

BBB, It's not there, but there's an interesting summary on the petitions from Cooper and Miller that didn't have any legal standing as media priviledge where it concerns the grand jury.

All the talking heads are. Its the biggest thing since the blue dress.

I think that's the black and white striped uniform..with a huge number on the chest. LOL