So Much for the Push Back

Regardless of the manure that Scooter Libby's lawyers are shoveling, this Woodward revelation (that he received the leak about Plame) is horrible news for the White House. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, it does nothing for Libby's legal case (which is about lying to the grand jury); it doesn't even "catch Fitzgerald in a lie," as Keith Olbermann nicely explains:

(Scooter Libby’s attorney Ted) Wells issued a statement at midday, the key passage of which concludes that Woodward’s “disclosure shows that Mr. Fitzgerald’s statement at his press conference of October 28, 2005 that Mr. Libby was the first government official to tell a reporter about Mr. Wilson’s wife was totally inaccurate.”

But Fitzgerald didn’t say just that.

The transcript of Fitzgerald’s news conference is not disputed - nobody from his office has called up trying to get it altered after the fact. On October 28, in his opening statement Fitzgerald actually said: “Mr. Libby was the first government official known to have told a reporter” about Ambassador Joe Wilson’s wife.

That word “known” is a significant qualifier. And although much later, in the question-and-answer portion of his news conference, Fitzgerald described Libby as “at the beginning of the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter,” the second statement cannot simply be used in preference to the first. Either the qualifier - expressed virtually at the outset - is considered still in force, or both versions (“first official” and “first government official known”) have to be included.

This is no one-word parsing nonsense. Not only does that meaning of "known" change entirely the meaning of Fitzgerald's statement, but its related root words (know, knowing, knowingly etc) have been the keys to whether or not anybody was indicted for revealing Plame's covert status at the CIA.

Of course, this didn't stop practically every news outlet from blithely reporting that Woodward's disclosure contradicted Fitzgerald's statement. It didn't. And it doesn't matter anyway.

Of course, all this Woodward thing adds is another layer to the group of people in the White House dedicated to getting Plame's identity into the hands of journalists. It lends credibility to the notion of a conspiracy (see Steve Soto on this). And worst of all, this keeps the Plame story in the news cycle. That's really the last thing the White House needs. They're knee-deep in their "We Didn't Mislead, You Mis-Followed!" push-back tour, even re-animating Dick Cheney from the undead last night to deliver the message. Their attempts to re-focus the debate has gone up in smoke because of this.

Meanwhile, lost in a lot of this hue and cry is that Fitzgerald had Woodward testify to a new grand jury:

While the Woodward disclosure may muddy the Libby prosecution, the Wall Street Journal's Squeo and McKinnon report that the White House must now "brace itself" for the possibility that Fitzgerald's probe, "far from winding down, may have just gotten a second wind."

Prosecutors deposed Woodward in anticipation of presenting that evidence to a new grand jury, according to a person familiar with the situation. And that is exclusive new news, courtesy of Dow Jones.

He's continuing the investigation. No wonder Bush is so despondent.