Libby indicted

Jane Pauley.

Jane Pauley will be shocked.

It seems that Patrick Fitzgerald agrees (kinda) with the WSJ, who has filed a legal motion requesting that a federal appeals court unseal eight pages of redacted information that Fitz used to justify throwing Judith Miller into the slammer last summer.

OH, I know who the PM is, all right. It is Mr. Paul Martin.

Chicago Sun-Times- Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2005

quote:

"CANADA"S GOVERNMENT FALLS IN SCANDAL

A corruption scandal forced a vote of no confidence Monday that TOPPLED Prime Minister Paul Martin's minority government, triggering an unusual election campaign during the Christmas holidays.

Canada's three opposition parties, which control a majority in Parliament, voted against Martin's government, claiming his LIBERAL PARTY NO LONGER HAS THE MORAL AUTHORITY TO LEAD THE NATION"

end of quote.

My goodness, I didn't know that there was corruption in Canada.

After reading Blatham, I became convinced that the only corruption on the planet was in the White House in the USA.

Since Blatham is a Canadian and skilled in diplomacy, tragedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited, he should give some attention to the plight of the PM and rush up to save the LIBERAL PARTY from sure destruction.

The Full Disclosure Tucker Carlson Isn't Making
The Full Disclosure Tucker Carlson Isn't Making
Arianna Huffington
02.28.2006

Ever since Scooter Libby was indicted, Tucker Carlson has had a lot to say about the central players in the legal drama, Libby and Patrick Fitzgerald. On his MSNBC show and on his blog, he's been unfailingly supportive of Libby and critical of Fitzgerald.

Here was his takedown of Fitzgerald the day the indictments were announced:

Pat Fitzgerald gave us all a long lecture this afternoon about the grave harm leaks like this do to America. "National security was at stake," he said. But when a reporter asked Fitzgerald how the leak of Valerie Wilson's name had hurt the country, he refused to answer.... If Patrick Fitzgerald believes the leak of Valerie Wilson's name constitutes a crime, he ought to indict someone for it. Otherwise, he ought to spare us the lectures.

A few weeks later, following the post-indictment revelation of Bob Woodward's involvement in the story, Carlson asked:

What else doesn't Pat Fitzgerald know? After two years of investigating the case, he had no idea Woodward was a recipient of the Plame leak (something anybody who lives in Washington would have guessed immediately), and learned only when he was told by an unnamed administration official. Yet Fitzgerald's ignorance didn't prevent him from accusing Libby - falsely and in public - of undermining this country's security. Fitzgerald should apologize, though of course he never will.

When are journalists going to realize that Fitzgerald is their enemy, and the enemy of the public's right to know what its government is doing?

[W]hat the hell is this investigation about anyway? Fitzgerald's original job description was simple: Find out who leaked Valerie Plame's name, and determine whether that leak was a crime. After two years, he seems to have concluded what was obvious right away: No, the leak was not a crime. Yet he has kept his investigation alive, as independent counsels always do. Meanwhile, people's lives are being disrupted and in some cases destroyed. What is the justification for this? I'd love to hear Fitzgerald himself explain.

But when it came to Libby, Carlson's had nothing but love, castigating the White House for telling staffers not to talk to Libby in the wake of his indictment: "It is so offensive to me... not only is this morally wrong -- this is a guy who devoted his whole life to the vice president. He's got little kids. He worked 18 hours every day for five years."

Carlson also slammed the Vice President for a lack of loyalty to his former chief of staff:

You'll notice that Cheney has said next to nothing about Libby since the day he was indicted. He hasn't stood up for him in public. He hasn't raised money for his legal defense fund. He's apparently done nothing to prevent Bush aides from telling White House staffers not to have any further contact with Libby. In other words, Cheney is acting like most politicians: He demands total loyalty, and gives very little in return.

But with all he's had to say about the case, there is one thing that Tucker Carlson has failed to mention: That his father, Richard Carlson, is on the advisory committee of the Libby Legal Defense Trust, the GOP-heavy-hitter-laden group that has so far raised $2 million.

Indeed, Richard Carlson was the Early Money Is Like Yeast of Libby defense fund-raisers, having couriered a check to Libby's home the morning he was indicted.

And Tucker Carlson's connection to Libby's defense fund isn't just familial. A quick scan of the Libby website shows that Scooter's high-powered pals appreciate the things that Richard's boy is saying.

In a section titled "What You Aren't Hearing About Scooter Libby," a cobbled version of Tucker Carlson's "What the hell is this investigation about" quote is prominently displayed, just under pro-Libby blurbs from President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

But while Carlson has mentioned the legal defense fund on the air and on his blog (including chiding Cheney for not donating to it), he hasn't seen fit to offer up an "in the interest of full disclosure" type disclaimer. Speaking of which: In the interest of full disclosure, I have known Richard Carlson for a number of years, and have always found him to be a very charming and gracious man. In fact, he's blogged on the Huffington Post. And if he wants to give his money to Scooter Libby, that's certainly his right.

See, Tucker, transparency is as easy as that.

Of course, I'm not telling Tucker Carlson anything he doesn't already know. In fact, during a recent debate with Eric Alterman at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Carlson said, "[News outlets] should not allow reporters to cover things where their interests are at stake." Their interests? Their father's interests? Their children's interests? Bottom line: it's so easy to be above board and up front about these things. And it's so important, especially for someone like Tucker who doesn't just toe the Republican Party line -- including on big issues like the war in Iraq.

But this seems to be a bit of sore spot for Tucker. In a 1997 column, Howard Kurtz wrote about a dust-up over an article Tucker Carlson had written in The New Republic, in which he slammed Grover Norquist as a "cash-addled, morally malleable lobbyist" for his dealings in the Seychelles islands -- but failed to mention that his father, as U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, had butted heads with Norquist over those dealings.

At the time, Tucker Carlson told Kurtz that there had been no need for him to run a "disclaimer" because "I didn't talk to my dad about the piece."

I wonder if, nine years later, he'll use the same line to explain away his lack of a Libby disclaimer: "I never talked to my dad about the case."

What do you say, Tucker?

CIA Leak Path: Cheney, Libby, Woodward
CIA Leak Path: Cheney, Libby, Woodward
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Monday 06 March 2006

In mid-June 2003, when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's criticism against the White House's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence started to make national headlines, Vice President Dick Cheney told his former chief of staff and close confidant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak classified intelligence data on Iraq's nuclear ambitions to a legendary Washington journalist in order to undercut the charges made against the Bush administration by the former ambassador.

On June 27, 2003, Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, became the first journalist to whom Libby leaked a portion of the classified National Intelligence Estimate that purportedly showed how Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

This story is based on interviews with current and former administration officials who work or worked at the CIA, the State Department and the National Security Council. All of the individuals are familiar with the events that took place in the days that led up to Libby's meeting with Woodward and other journalists in which the NIE was discussed.

Woodward, currently an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, did not return calls for comment. Leonard Downie, the executive editor of the Post, would not comment for this story. A spokeswoman for Cheney said she could not comment for this story, and attorneys for Libby did not return calls for comment.

Libby was indicted in October on five-counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators related to his role in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, Ambassador Wilson's wife.

The leak of the NIE to Woodward was orchestrated by Cheney and Libby in mid-June 2003 in hopes that Woodward would write a story for the Washington Post that would contradict the assertions made by Wilson - that there was no truth to intelligence cited by the Bush administration on numerous occasions that Iraq tried to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger.

Just two weeks earlier, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus wrote an article attacking the administration's use of the Niger uranium allegations in President Bush's January 28, 2003 State of the Union address. Pincus's article was based on an unnamed source - later learned to be Joseph Wilson - who called into question the veracity of the White House's use of the documents that supposedly proved Iraq sought uranium from Niger.

Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit Wilson, according to current and former State Department and CIA officials. Although the officials said they helped prepare negative information on Wilson about his personal and professional life and had given it to Libby and Cheney, Wilson seemed to drop off the radar once the Iraq war started on March 19, 2003.

With no sign of weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, news accounts started to call into question the credibility of the administration's pre-war intelligence. In May 2003, Wilson re-emerged at a political conference in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. There he told the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff that he had been the special envoy who traveled to Niger in February 2002 to check out allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the country. He told Kristoff that he briefed a CIA analyst that the claims were untrue. Wilson said he believed the administration had ignored his report and had been dishonest with Congress and the American people.

Then rumors started to swirl inside the Beltway in mid-June 2003 that Wilson would soon go public and reveal that he was tapped by the CIA to travel to Niger a year earlier to check out whether there was any truth to the intelligence that claimed Iraq tried to acquire uranium from the African country. He reported back to the CIA in March 2002 that the intelligence was bogus.

A day or two after Pincus's article was published in the Post, a meeting took place in Cheney's office to coordinate a response to the charges. In attendance were Libby, Cheney, and several other senior aides to the vice president as well as officials from the State Department, and the National Security Council.

It was then that Cheney decided the only way to counter Wilson's criticism was by having Libby leak portions of the NIE to a select group of reporters whose previous work in their respective publications had advanced the White House's political agenda.

For an administration that despises leaks, the decision by Cheney to declassify highly sensitive portions of the NIE and have his most trusted aide leak it to reporters in order to attack the former ambassador's credibility shows how personal the Wilson issue had become for the vice president.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but the timing of an executive order signed by President Bush supposedly granting Cheney the authority to declassify such national security intelligence fits nicely into the time frame when he and his senior aides spearheaded a campaign to discredit Wilson.

The executive order was signed on March 23, 2003, four days after the start of the Iraq war, and two weeks after Wilson first appeared on the administration's radar.

In an interview with Fox News last month, Cheney said he had the legal authority to declassify intelligence as he saw fit. There is still strong debate about the interpretation of the executive order Cheney referred to that provided him with such power. Cheney's comments came on the heels of a disclosure Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald made in a letter to defense attorneys representing Libby in the leak case.

In the letter, Fitzgerald said Libby testified before a grand jury that he was authorized by his "superiors" to leak portions of the NIE to journalists.

Woodward was first on deck. He met with Libby on June 27, 2003, in Libby's office next to the White House. A week or so earlier, Woodward met with two other government officials, one of whom told him in a "casual" and off-handed manner that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

Woodward said the meeting with Libby and the other government officials had been set up simply as "confidential background interviews for my 2004 book "Plan of Attack" about the lead-up to the Iraq war, ongoing reporting for the Washington Post and research for a book on Bush's second term to be published in 2006."

Woodward wrote a first-person account for the Washington Post after he gave sworn deposition to Fitzgerald about information he had learned about Valerie Plame Wilson. It was a shocking revelation at the time. Woodward had publicly discounted the importance of the Plame Wilson leak and had referred to Fitzgerald as a "junkyard dog" prosecutor. He then revealed in November that he had been told about Plame Wilson's CIA employment in June 2003 - before any other journalist.

In that first person account published in the Post, the Watergate-era journalist wrote that when he met with Libby on June 27, 2003, "Libby discussed the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, mentioned "yellowcake" and said there was an effort by the Iraqis to get it from Africa. It goes back to February '02. This was the time of Wilson's trip to Niger."

The information in the NIE about Niger was still considered highly classified and extremely sensitive, and although Woodward had been the recipient of classified information on other occasions during the course of gathering material for his books, the data he was provided with concerning the NIE had been authorized by Cheney in order to rebut Wilson. Woodward never wrote a story for the Post about the intelligence information he was given.

Libby also met with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, another Pulitzer Prize winner, and leaked the same portions of the NIE when questions were raised by Miller about Wilson's claims about the administration's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Miller and Woodward had been handpicked by Libby to receive the information contained in the NIE, sources familiar with the events that led up to the meetings said, and were urged by Libby to write stories to undercut Wilson's credibility by showing that the NIE disagreed with Wilson's claims.

Miller never wrote a story for the Time, either. She testified before a grand jury that Libby gave her information in the NIE concerning Iraq's attempt to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

In the meantime, while Libby had been leaking portions of the NIE in late June to back up the administration's use of the Niger claims, other officials from Cheney's office and the National Security Council had been speaking with a select group of journalists and had revealed Plame Wilson's identity.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson went public. A week later, his wife's name and covert status were published in newspaper reports.

In the interest of fairness, any individual named in this story who believes he has been portrayed unfairly will have the opportunity to use this space to respond.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.

so who bet what? and who's paying?

Time to change the title of this thread to....

Libby found Guilty on 4 out of 5 counts.

Vindication.

That there would be further indictments in the case. Right now, it looks as if Tico is winning the bet; unless Libby flips or other information comes out, of course.

Cycloptichorn

Scooter Libby's official White House portrait
Scooter Libby's official White House portrait:

Has anyone here yet predicted who long it will take for Bush to pardon Libby and for Cheney to provide him with a high-level position at Halliburton?

New Revelations from Former 'Wash Post' Reportor/Libby Juror
New Revelations from Former 'Wash Post' Reportor/Libby Juror
By Joe Strupp
Published: March 07, 2007

Denis Collins, the juror in the Libby/CIA leak case who delivered a post-verdict commentary for the press, spent about a decade at The Washington Post. Today, after a night on cable TV shows, he re-appears with a massive recounting of his experience at the Huffington Post blog.

His story is billed as "INSIDE THE JURY ROOM: WHAT THE JURY THOUGHT, DAY BY DAY, WITNESS BY WITNESS, AT THE SCOOTER LIBBY TRIAL" by Denis Collins, Juror #9. It calls it "unedited" impressions, memories and facts. Other jurors' names are changed.

The New York Times today reports that he is a registered Democrat.

Yesterday, E&P published the first full report on Collins' background at The Washington Post, where he covered both metro news and sports, and spent time on the copy desk, according to editors at the paper.

The longtime journalist, 57, who has also written for The Miami Herald and the San Jose Mercury New, is recalled as smart,
hardworking and energetic, although not always "coloring within the lines."

The jury convicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief aide to Vice President Cheney, on four of five counts today, including perjury and obstruction of justice. Collins, whose identity was not known until today, came out of the courthouse and spoke to the press, saying that as a former reporter he felt this was the right thing to do.

Cable TV news commentators noted the irony of a former reporter becoming chief jury spokesman -- at least today -- in a trial where reporters played such a central role. Some also wondered how someone who had written a book on spying (including the CIA variety) had made it on this jury.

In the jury selection phase, before Collins name came out, he was identified as having worked with Bob Woodward at the Post and being a neighbor of NBC's Tim Russert. Both would later testify in the case.

"Every experience I had with Denis was absolutely positive and professional, a delightful person," recalled George Solomon, the former sports editor who retired in 2003 after 28 years at the Post. "Very flexible, willing to do
whatever it took to do the job."

A review of Post archives finds hundreds of stories by Collins dating back to the early 1980s, with many related to sports, but others involving travel, karate, Nerfball, a profile of comedian Bob Goldthwait, and a wide array of other subjects.

Solomon said Colllins was most interested in the outdoors beat, which he took over on occasion, although he also covered baseball and football. "His greatest interest was covering hiking and camping and running rather than the standard hunting and fishing fare," Solomon said.

Tom Wilkinson, a post assistant managing editor who has been at the paper since 1969, called Collins enthusiastic, and "not always coloring within the lines, which is okay...I remember him being a pretty good reporter, an independent guy," Wilkinson added. "He had his own sense of what stories are, occasionally hard to reel in."

Amazon.com lists at least two recent books by Collins, "Nora's Army," about a Bonus camp in 1932 Washington, D.C.; and "SPYING: The Secret History of History."

Asked if he would want Collins on his jury, Solomon said, "There are a lot of people who worked for me I would not want to decide my fate." But he then added, "he is a reasonable, smart and fair guy. Who else would you want on a jury?"

Later, on Larry King's CNN show, Collins said he would write about the trial, but "I'm not sure of format or where it will be." He added that he "never expected to be accepted to serve on the jury." He also admitted he was not "one of the lions" on the jury.

Fox News host John Gibson expressed surprise today that the defense allowed 1) a reporter and 2) someone who has written about the CIA, to be on this particular case.

Collins' article on Inside the Jury Room:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/docs/libby/

Justice is not always served.

So, you think Libbly has had an injustice done to him?

Yes.

You'll be alright.

I'm inclined to doubt it, snood.

The country will suffer an injustice when Libby is pardoned.

Like these you mean?

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pardonchartlst.htm

As noted on the other thread here pertaining to this matter, Marc Rich's lawyer was none other than Scooter Libby.