Did he “Cheney” himelf? News accounts of the CIA Leak investigation seem to suggest Bush Administration senior officials don’t know whether the CIA Leak investigator, Patrick Fitzgerald, is going to indict anyone, or how high in the Administration the indictments might go.
Maybe. But President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their Flying Monkeys, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, certainly know what they did in their campaign to smear Joe Wilson in the summer of 2003. So they must have a pretty good idea who among them will be indicted. If this this report is correct, Cheney himself may be on the list:
[Fitzgerald] is focusing on whether Vice President Dick Cheney played a role in leaking a covert CIA agent’s name, according to people familiar with the probe that already threatens top White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis Libby…
Fitzgerald has questioned Cheney’s communications adviser Catherine Martin and former spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise and ex-White House aide Jim Wilkinson about the vice president’s knowledge of the anti-Wilson campaign and his dealings on it with Libby, his chief of staff, the people said. The information came from multiple sources, who requested anonymity because of the secrecy and political sensitivity of the investigation…
Fitzgerald, 45, has also questioned administration officials about any knowledge Bush may have had of the campaign against Wilson. Yet most administration observers have noted that on Iraq, as with most matters, it’s Cheney who has played the more hands-on role.
The buzz in the Beltway and beyond is that something major is about to break:
One lawyer intimately involved in the case, who like the others demanded anonymity, said one reason Fitzgerald was willing to send Miller to jail to compel testimony was because he was pursuing evidence the vice president may have been aware of the specifics of the anti-Wilson strategy.
And both U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan and an appellate-court panel — including David Tatel, a First Amendment advocate — said they ruled in Fitzgerald’s favor because of the gravity of the case.
Katy Harriger, a political scientist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who has written extensively about special-counsel investigations, said the pace and trajectory of Fitzgerald’s probe suggests it will end with the indictment of Rove, Libby or both.
Harriger said she anticipates indictments in part because of the special prosecutor’s willingness to jail Miller. “That’s not something you do unless you really have something more going on that isn’t obvious to the public,” she said.
Larry Barcella, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said the recent activity in the case suggests criminal charges are likely, although not in connection with the 1982 law making it illegal to disclose a covert agent’s identity.
A more likely focus is possible “false statements, conspiracy or obstruction of justice,” said Barcella, now a defense lawyer for the Washington-based law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. “It’s obviously not good that Rove and Libby have spent so much time before the grand jury.”
To make a case against Cheney as part of a conspiracy indictment, Fitzgerald would have to show the vice president was an active participant in a decision to smear Wilson, Barcella said. “It’s a case most easily made if you can prove a person knowingly entered into an agreement to do something illegal,” he said. “Beyond that, it can be tricky.”
Fitzgerald’s status differs in one potentially important respect from the independent counsels who investigated alleged wrongdoing during earlier administrations. They reported to a panel of appellate judges, while Fitzgerald reports to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who at least theoretically must approve any indictment.
One thought on “Prosecutor in Leak Investigation Focusing on Cheney”