Good News For Bloggers, Rod Blagojevich Is Back In The News!

As expected, Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Rod Blagojevich and multiple aides, including his own brother, on corruption charges including (but not limited to) the selling of Barack Obama's Senate seat.

Federal prosecutors expanded their case against former Gov. Rod Blagojevich today in an indictment that drew more of his closest aides into the scandal and adds new schemes to the list of charges against him: Pocketing money funneled through his wife through a phony real estate job. Shaking down a powerful congressman. Running the state as a racket.

Coming nearly four months after federal agents roused a sitting governor out of his Northwest Side home in a predawn arrest -- and weeks after lawmakers dumped him from power -- today's indictment of Blagojevich, his brother and four former top insiders could have been anti-climactic.

Instead, prosecutors added a few more chapters to the Blagojevich saga, further pulling his family into the pay-to-play conspiracy, revealing yet more confidants had turned on him and suggesting he was intent on corruption before he was even sworn in. The indictment carries a potentially lengthy prison sentence and possible forfeiture of his family home should Blagojevich be convicted [...]

Blagojevich was indicted on 16 racketeering, fraud and extortion counts. Among the new, damaging allegations were that Blagojevich delayed a $2 million grant to a public charter school while trying to extort campaign cash from now-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and threatened to withhold future state business from financial institutions that refused to hire his wife.

Blagojevich's effort to profit, both personally and for his Friends of Blagojevich campaign fund, was so pervasive that federal prosecutors labeled the racketeering scheme the "Blagojevich Enterprise."

When you have a nickname for your stealing, you're doing a lot of stealing.

More on the attempted shakedown of Rahm Emanuel here. For the record, Emanuel rejected it, and good for him. But his involvement in the case does mean that other things may come up in the discovery phase. At this point, however, I'll stress that Rahm looks clean.

The breadth of the corruption is pretty staggering, even for Illinois. Meanwhile Blagojevich was down at Disney World yesterday. Apparently, Fitz applied RICO statutes to some of this, meaning that the Feds could confiscate Blago's property. In short, he's in big trouble.

News Of The Good

I've been slamming the President enough the past couple days, here are a few things that he's recently gotten right.

• Continuing his full restoration as an environmentalist, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has put a stop to a Bush-era draft plan to allow offshore drilling on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

"To establish an orderly process that allows us to make wise decisions based on sound information, we need to set aside" the plan "and create our own timeline," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced in a statement.

Alleging that the Bush administration "had torpedoed" offshore renewable energy in favor of oil and natural gas, Salazar said he was extending the public comment period by 6 months.

"The additional time we are providing will give states, stakeholders, and affected communities the opportunity to provide input on the future of our offshore areas," he said.

Salazar also ordered Interior Department experts to compile a report on the Outer Continental Shelf's energy potential — not just oil and gas, but also renewables like wind and wave energy.

I mean, it's just stunning to see sound policy coming out of the federal government again, so we'd do our best to acknowledge it.

• Obama is also looking to keep Patrick Fitzgerald on as the US Attorney for Northern Illinois. This is a merit-based appointment as well as one with an eye to continuity, as Fitzgerald is currently readying his case against Rod Blagojevich. But Fitz has done an excellent job, not only on the Plame case but on cleaning up corruption in the Land of Lincoln. Good move.

• This could be the most striking - a progressive policy choice for the US drug czar.

According to both local and White House sources, President Barack Obama will nominate Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy—a cabinet-level position commonly referred to as the Drug Czar—an appointment that could signal a substantive departure from our nation’s current marijuana-focused, interdiction-heavy drug policy, and a more realistic and progressive approach toward the issue of drug abuse in general.

Within the context of career law enforcement professionals, I think it safe to label Kerlikowske a “progressive.” During his ten-years at the helm of the Seattle Police Department and his current term as president of the Major Chiefs Association, Kerlikowske has been a vocal advocate for gun control and community policing, while serving as a prominent critic of the use of intrusive data mining techniques as a tool for combating domestic terrorism. But while he hasn’t been particularly outspoken on drug control policy, Kerlikowske’s relative silence is encouraging in itself, considering the progressive mores and statutes of the city whose laws he has enforced for the past decade.

While Kerlikowske opposed a 2003 citizens initiative making marijuana in Seattle a “low priority crime,” calling the measure vague and confusing (and… well… most initiatives are), he emphasized to local reporters at the time that marijuana possession and use already was a low priority, and in fact, Seattle’s already low marijuana prosecution rate has dropped even further since the measure’s passage, indicating a responsiveness to the will of the voters.

A saner drug policy is one of those third rails of American politics that is much easier to perform through shifts of emphasis than legislation, and perhaps Kerlikowske will signal that shift.

Can Burris Be Seated?

Senate Democrats seem prepared to try and block the appointment of Roland Burris to the US Senate, and at first glance, given the Senate's control over the seating of its own members as granted by the Constitution, I thought they had that ability. However, a closer reading of precedent suggests that they may be stuck with ol' Roland.

Democrats said they were confident of their standing under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which says “each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own members.” On rare occasion, the Senate has denied seats to candidates whose election outcome was in doubt or who were caught up in corruption.

Yet constitutional experts question the extent of that authority, particularly in light of a 1969 Supreme Court decision in the case of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York. The court found that the House could not bar Mr. Powell, who had been accused of financial impropriety, if he met the constitutionally determined qualifications for age, citizenship and residency.

“I think the best reading of the text of the Constitution and the Powell case together is that the Senate has to seat Burris,” said Abner S. Greene, the Leonard F. Manning professor of law at Fordham University School of Law.

Jack Balkin thinks the Senate can essentially say that the process of the executive appointing Burris was improper, and that could be the basis of their refusal. Considering that the Secretary of State of Illinois is refusing to certify the appointment (and it's unclear whether or not he even has a say in the matter), there's at least some basis for that. I think this fight comes down to more of a delaying tactic than anything, waiting out Blagojevich until he's indicted or impeached and hoping that Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn can make the appointment. However, Patrick Fitzgerald just asked for an extension in the indictment process:

In a motion filed today in U.S. District Court, Fitzgerald said that the length, scope, and complexity of the investigation, combined with the intrusion of the holiday season, has prevented him from meeting the January 7 deadline. The probe, writes the prosecutor, began in 2003 and "involves multiple potential defendants" and thousands of intercepted phone calls.

The move means that we likely won't learn much more from Fitzgerald about Blagojevich's alleged crimes until at least March. So speculation is likely to continue.

And the Illinois legislature won't be speeding up their process of impeachment, meaning that wouldn't kick in until mid-February. And then there's the question of what happens if Quinn tries to appoint and the Burris case is still tied up in court.

Again, if nobody can lead an effort to change the Constitution, mandating special elections for every vacancy, after THIS, then there is no such thing as a Constitutional amendment anymore. Rather, I think this parallel in the Times story is the one Senate Dems are meekly hoping for:

One rough parallel to the current situation arose in 1947 in a Senate dispute over whether the white supremacist Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi should be seated after accusations of voter suppression and campaign corruption. In that case, the Senate found itself deadlocked, and Mr. Bilbo died before the disagreement could be resolved.

...As to Blagojevich's motivations, I agree with Dan Conley that this is a criminal defense trial masquerading as a Senate appointment. He is proving that he can appoint a Senator without auctioning off the seat, undermining that element of the complaint (which isn't the main one, by the way); and by appointing an African-American, and by getting the respected Bobby Rush to warn Senate leaders not to "lynch" him, he brings racial politics into the equation, which may be an aid when the jury is seated, perhaps in heavily black Chicago.

Blago Home

Going through all the various reports of Gov. Blagojevich's indictment, what's staggering is how he continued his pay-for-play schemes even while knowing he was under investigation for several years. Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the case, said the same thing.

Noting that Blagojevich has been under investigation for years for pay-to-play corruption charges, Fitzgerald expressed his amazement that the activity would continue. “You might have thought in that environment, pay-to-play would have slowed down. The opposite happened. It sped up,” he said.

The “most cynical behavior” by Blagojevich pertained to his attempt to sell the open Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama, Fitzgerald said:

The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave. The governor’s own words describing the Senate seat: “It’s a [bleeping] valuable thing. You just don’t give it away for nothing.” Another quote: “I’ve got this thing and it’s [bleeping] golden. I’m just not giving it up for [bleeping] nothing. I’m not going to do it. I can always use it — I can parachute me there.”

In addition, how stupid do you have to be to try and threaten the President-elect? Do you think he doesn't have access to the feds? (The story reflects pretty well on Obama, by the way, his preferred Senate candidate Valerie Jarrett took herself out of the running as soon as these pay-to-play schemes were offered, and Rahm Emanuel may even be the whistleblower).

Blagojevich was under investigation for years. He pretty much knew he was being wiretapped. And yet he kept going. In addition, he threatened to withhold assistance from the Tribune Company if they didn't fire members of the editorial board who were hostile to him.

This is not a situation of a prosecutor targeting a Democrat. It's a prosecutor targeting a crook. And a pretty stupid one at that.

...strong suggestions that Jesse Jackson Jr. tried to play ball with Blagojevich.

Closing In

Karl Rove has been extremely slippery with what he was able to get away with while in service at the White House, but over the past couple weeks events have probably made him gulp and pull the collar away from his neck a couple times. Same with his former bosses.

First you have Scott McClellan basically admitting that Bush and Cheney gave the go-ahead to Scooter Libby to selectively leak contents of the 2002 Iraq NIE, and in the process the identity of Valerie Plame. Henry Waxman, upon hearing this, immediately set to work.

New revelations by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan raise additional questions about the actions of the President and the Vice President. Mr. McClellan has stated that "[t]he President and Vice President directed me to go out there and exonerate Scooter Libby." He has also asserted that "the top White House officials who knew the truth - including Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney - allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie." It would be a major breach of trust if the Vice President personally directed Mr. McClellan to mislead the public [...]

In his interview with the FBI, Mr. Libby stated that it was "possible" that Vice President Cheney instructed him to disseminate information about Ambassador Wilson's wife to the press. This is a significant revelation and, if true, a serious matter. It cannot be responsibly investigated without access to the Vice President's FBI interview.

The interviews with senior White House officials also raise other questions about the involvement of the Vice President. It appears from the interview reports that Vice President Cheney personally may have been the source of the information that Ms. Wilson worked for the CIA. Mr. Libby specifically identified the Vice President as the source of his information about Ms. Wilson. None of the other White House officials could remember how they learned this information [...]

In his FBI interview, Mr. McClellan told the FBI about discussions he had with the President and the Vice President. These passages, however, were redacted from the copies made available to the Committee. Similar passages were also redacted from other interviews.

There are no sound reasons for you to withhold the interviews with the President and the Vice President from the Committee or to redact passages like Mr. McClellan's discussions with the President and the Vice President. Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation is closed and he has indicated that it would be appropriate to share these records with the Committee. There has been no assertion of executive privilege.

Well sure, when you line it all up like that, it looks like a conspiracy.

What's more, Marcy Wheeler thinks Patrick Fitzgerald, who prosecuted the Plame case, might be ready to talk about allegations about his potential firing that came out during the investigation into the US Attorneys scandal.

Later in the Rezko trial, two witnesses said that Rezko told them not to worry about the criminal investigation, because the Republicans—Rove and Kjellander—would get rid of Fitzgerald. Hastert would install a friendly federal puppy who wouldn't bother the Combine, according to the testimony. "The federal prosecutor will no longer be the same federal prosecutor," testified Elie Maloof, a Rezko associate who is now a cooperating witness.

And a state pension board lawyer who has already pleaded guilty told grand jurors that Cellini told him "Bob Kjellander's job is to take care of the U.S. attorney." [...]

"If I owe a response [about the putsch to remove him from his job], I owe it to Congress, first," Fitzgerald said when asked about all this after the verdict.

But that's not all. As pressure grew on Rove for answers about the railroading of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, prosecutors
abruptly dropped their appeal that sought longer sentences for him and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy in the "bribery" case, also known as "a politician appointing an ally to a board." And 54 former state attorneys general from across the country filed a brief on Siegelman's behalf with the appellate court where he is contesting his conviction, asking that it be overturned. And now the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating.

The US Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is investigating the conduct of at least two specific US Attorneys in the “selective prosecution” of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, sitting Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver E. Diaz Jr., and Mississippi attorney Paul Minor, according to attorneys close to the investigation.

In a May 5 letter sent to House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI), OPR Director H. Marshall Jarrett wrote that OPR “currently has pending investigations involving, among others, allegations of selective prosecution relating to the prosecutions of Don Siegelman, Georgia Thompson, Oliver Diaz and Paul Minor.”

RAW STORY has confirmed that Leura Canary (above right), the US Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Dunnica Lampton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi , are under investigation. Their offices are also being probed.

This leads back to Rove - the Siegelman case, the politicization of US Attorney positions, firing prosecutors who wouldn't play ball, leaking classified information in the Plame case. Rove is a slippery creature. But there are a lot of investigations all happening at once.

Making It Up As They Go Along

We have elites running this country who are not only ruthlessly partisan and selfish, but also completely ignorant about the government they're running. Bush commuted Scooter Libby's jail sentence but not the 2 years' probation. Turns out that you can't serve probation in a federal case under the statute unless jail time has been served. So Bush inadvertently wiped out the probation as well. Only he said he didn't in his statments, so the judge doesn't know what to do and is hauling everyone back into court (h/t pontificator):

President Bush spared former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby from prison, and his clemency order may wipe out Libby's 2-year probation as well, the trial judge told lawyers Tuesday.

A conviction remains on Scooter Libby's record, and he must still pay a $250,000 fine.

Strictly interpreted, the statute authorizing probation indicates that supervised release "should occur only after the defendant has already served a term of imprisonment," U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton wrote.

Walton ordered lawyers to weigh in with their arguments on the matter by Monday.

So now Judge Walton and Fitzgerald, in open court, get to question the ruling and how to proceed. And if Bush's lawyers file a friend of the court brief to get their way, they can be fully questioned by both the prosecutor and the judge. Walton must not be happy with this turn of events, as would anyone who's authority is usurped. So there'll be a showdown some time next week.

Even when they do incredible wrongs, they can't get it right.

If you want to cringe, you should also watch Bush's first public statement about the commutation. First of all, he looks drunk and incoherent. Second of all, this didn't happen until nearly 24 hours after the order and in response to a question. President Ford pardoned Nixon and went right on television to explain to the nation why. This guy hides behind a press release. Third, he says that he respects the verdict, just not enough to allow for any kind of sentence and not enough to actually know the statute.

Disgusting, hilarious and sad. All at once.

Won't Need A Nickname For Prison

Scooter Libby faces sentencing today. There's liveblogging on it at Firedoglake. Patrick Fitzgerald apparently said "We're not going to recommend any sentence. I do think the sentence has to make clear and loud that truth matters and one's station in life does not."

Reading around, the legal consensus seems to be that he'll get a year or two. Of course, don't be surprised if it's nada; rich people still get a favorable hand from the long arm of the law.

He won't go to jail immediately, as there will be an appeal... unless the judge decides he has to be jailed pending the appeal.

UPDATE: The Smoking Gun has secured all the letters written by character witnesses asking for leniency in the Libby case. Now here's some character: Don Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Mary Matalin and James Carville (!), Richard Myers (former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Richard Perle, James Woolsey (ex-CIA director), Douglas Feith, Chris Cox (SEC Chairman) and Nixon's old lawyer Leonard Garment.

With friends like those...

UPDATE II: This is from the Matalin-Carville letter:

I have seen what this trial has done to my own kids, just reading about it.

Usually legal arguments and amicus curaie briefs are must-reading for children. What a bunch of tripe.

Today's Obligatory Liberal Blog Post

I would not be the rock-solid liberal blogger that I am without mentioning that Valerie Plame was covert.

While assigned to CPD, Ms. Wilson engaged in temporary duty (TDY) travel overseas on official business. She traveled at least seven times to more than ten countries. When traveling overseas, Ms. Wilson always traveled under a cover identity — sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias — but always using cover — whether official or non-official cover (NOC) — with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.

At the time of the initial unauthorized disclosure in the media of Ms. Wilson's employment relationship with the CIA on 14 July 2003, Ms. Wilson was a covert employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.

Not that this fact will disrupt the insaneosphere's shriekings that "she had a desk job!" Reality has a well-known liberal bias and all that.

Scooter Libby should get the full penalty of the law for lying about outing a covert CIA agent working on WMD in a time of war. He obstructed an investigation into a very serious crime. And he certainly delivered information on Plame to Judy Miller and Matt Cooper and Tim Russert. He's a convicted criminal and a shame to this nation.

The Case of the Missing Emails

The latest report is that the White House lost over 5 million emails in a two-year period, which isn't a heck of a lot when you think about your own email usage and then multiply it by an entire office of people who are manic obsessives, BUT... these are emails from the Executive Office of the President and it's actually the law that they are to be preserved, in accordance with the Presidential Reocrds Act. So not only are White House staffers going offline to do their secret dealings by using RNC email servers, they're purging the emails that are ONLINE.

Furthermore, the RNC instituted a "document retention" policy under which all emails were supposed to be preserved, particularly Karl Rove's, as Patrick Fitzgerald asked that this be done during the CIA Leak investigation. But even still Rove was deleting his emails up a storm.

Mr. Kelner's briefing raised particular concems about Karl Rove, who according to press reports used his RNC accountfor 95%o of his communications. According to Mr. Kelner, although the hold started in August 2004, the RNC does not have any e-mails prior to 2005 for Mr. Rove. Mr. Kelner did not give any explanation for the e-mails missing from Mr. Rove's account, but he did acknowledge that one possible explanation is that Mr. Rove personally deleted his e-mails from the RNC server.

Mr. Kelner also explained that starting in 2005, the RNC began to treat Mr. Rove's emails in a special fashion. At some point in 2005, the RNC commenced an automatic archive policy for Mr. Rove, but not for any other White House officials. According to Mr. Kelner, this archive policy removed Mr. Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails from the RNC server. Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove. But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns. It was unclear from Mr. Kelner's briefing whether the special archiving policy for Mr. Rove was consistently in effect after 2005.

And as if we had to guess, the New York Times is reporting that the missing emails may be related to the firing of the US Attorneys. Ya think? That was the whole point! The missing links in the paper trail are all emails to the White House about various prosecutors, meetings, et al. And now even the White House is acknowledging the "mistake," still sticking to the story that email can vanish when everyone knows it can't. And they're also sticking to the notion of executive privilege, even for email that comes out of the RNC (I guess that's party privilege):

It also exposed the dual electronic lives led by Mr. Rove and 21 other White House officials who maintain separate e-mail accounts for government business and work on political campaigns — and raised serious questions, in the eyes of Democrats, about whether political accounts were used to conduct official work without leaving a paper trail.

The clash also seemed to push the White House and Democrats closer to a serious confrontation over executive privilege, with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, asserting that the administration has control over countless other e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. Democrats are insisting that they are entitled to get the e-mail messages directly from the national committee.

In a letter to Mr. Leahy and Representative John Conyers Jr., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Fielding, the White House counsel, said the administration was prepared to produce e-mail from the national committee, but only as part of a “carefully and thoughtfully considered package of accommodations” — in other words, only as part of the offer for Mr. Rove and the others to appear in private.

Mr. Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, issued a tart reply: “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the R.N.C. as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”

Ben Smith at The Politico has more.

We are moving into uncharted territory here with this scandal, and the press has been spending the entire week talking about Imus getting fired. They need to get their eyes back on the ball. The White House is acknowledging that they broke the law, and is refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena. Keep your eyes on the ball, people. There's a Constitutional crisis under your noses and you don't even know it.

More tomorrow.

Theatrics and Loyalty

Ted Wells, Scooter Libby's lawyer, wins the award this Oscar season for worst supporting actor. Not only did he start crying at the end of his closing argument, he did so after cutting in to his fellow defense lawyer's time, pissing him off. Marcy Wheeler has a great recap.

Wells really does have a schtick, one that the journalists who have seen him before all recognize. He finishes the rational part of his case. Then he spends the last 20 minutes or so summoning rage for his client. He brings all the emotion summoned for his client to a crescendo. And then he weeps, demonstrating clearly to the jury how deeply he believes that his client has been wronged.

But remember that 20 minutes that Zeidenberg goaded Wells into wasting? Well, it meant that Wells had no time to get into character, and he went immediately from a rushed but rational argument about memory into his emotional appeal.

Don't sacrifice Scooter LIbby for how you may feel [about] war in Iraq or Bush Administration. Treat him the way he deserves to be treated. He worked every day to be NSA for this country. Analyze it fairly. Fight any temptation for your views if you're Democrat whatever party. This is a man who has a wife [and] kid[s]. He's been under my protection for the last month. Just give him back. Give him back to me, give him back.

Followed by an abbreviated choke, a catch of his brreath. Without the crescendo, it sounded more like a death rattle than any truly felt emotion. And compared to the real rage Wells had shown earlier in the day, it looked fake. Utterly, completely fake.

Because Wells reacted to Zeidenberg's barbs, he showed the jury true emotion that made all his elaborate schtick--the thing that Wells does best, normally--look like an act.

And Patrick Fitzgerald played off this perfectly. As they say, read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, is anyone else amused by the fact that while the Vice President's former chief of staff awaits his fate from the jury, his ex-boss is LITERALLY halfway around the world?

Don't tell me that wasn't by design.

The Protective Non-Defense

I gave my impressions of the Scooter Libby trial yesterday, where I reached the conclusion that that Libby's shockingly brief defense comes out of some wingnut mythology that you show confidence at all times. It's as if they're trying to intimidate or bamboozle the jury by showing that they don't even have to mount a defense against such self-evidently ridiculous charges or something.

I asked emptywheel, pretty much America's greatest Plame expert, about this, and here's her reply:

Wingnut overconfidence (2+ / 0-)

Perhaps that, or the realization that the Hannah ploy backfired, so there weren't more people they could call without risk of magnifying the risk.

I didn't address this yesterday. John Hannah is an official with the Office of the Vice President who the Libby defense team used to get out their claim that Scooter Libby was so very busy during this time in 2003 that he couldn't possibly have remembered what he told everyone about Valerie Plame. But prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald crossed up Hannah in a major way.

What we did get was Cheney proxy John Hannah, who spent the morning telling us what a Very Important Man Scooter Libby is, and how very busy he was fighting Al Quaeda single handedly the week of July 8 and how he had a charming habit of forgetting things that Hannah would tell him. In the courtroom Scooter smiled affably at this good-natured portrait of his memory-challenged self.

On cross examination, Fitzgerald then inquired of Hannah if part of Libby's job was to push back if the integrity of the OVP was attacked, and Hannah said yes. Fitz then wanted to know if, during that very critical week, Hannah wanted to go out for coffee with Scooter for a couple of hours and shoot the breeze would Scooter even have time to say yes? Hannah started to squirm, knowing that this is exactly what happened between Judy Miller and Scooter at the St. Regis. So a very uncomfortable Hannah replied, well, if it were really important, he's sure Scooter would do it. Fitzgerald then wants to know if it's fair to conclude that if Scooter DID agree to go, it would be over something that was very important to him.

It was a Perry Mason moment.

If Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney had to walk onto that witness stand with this information already out, it could have been a bloodbath. Fitzgerald basically got Hannah to admit how important the Libby-Miller meeting was. And even Libby's defense team is having to admit that he leaked classified information.

Lawrence O'Donnell thinks Libby's guilty as sin:

The multi-million dollar defense, which provided no defense at all, did not call Libby to the witness stand for one very simple reason: Libby is very very guilty. Publicly, defense lawyers cling to the text book theory that the defendant has no burden of proof and that no negative inference should ever be taken when a defendant doesn't defend himself on the witness stand. Practically, every defense lawyer knows that the jury desperately wants to hear from the defendant and that the only reason not to put him on the stand is that he is soooo guilty that every answer he gives after his name will eradicate any shred of reasonable doubt. Think about it. Your whole life is at stake in the outcome of a criminal trial. You're innocent. And you don't testify in your own defense? Around the courthouse when defense lawyers are chatting about their cases, the only question they ask each other is can you put your guy on the stand? Those conversations always assume the defendant is guilty. The question is just about the degree of difficulty in presenting a defense.

Libby's defense gave up before the opening statements in the trial. They always knew Libby was too guilty to put on the witness stand. And they were never going to call the Vice President. Telling the judge that they were going to call Libby and Cheney was just a mirage they were trying to create to misdirect Patrick Fitzgerald's focus. I'd be shocked if Fitzgerald was fooled for even a second.

O'Donnell thinks the whole defense is a set-up for a campaign to get him pardoned. Possibly. He's certainly holding things back for the inevitable appeal, hoping to run out the clock until December 2008 when a pardon would have no political ramifications.

For those interested, please also read Murray Waas' column, which explains the reason we're having this trial in the first place, because the executive branch was pissed off about an earlier leak by Republican Senator Richard Shelby, which they wanted to investigate with outside counsel, and when the CIA leak came up they were forced into showing equaniminty. Which is kind of hilarious.

What's Criminal Is What Isn't Illegal

Kudos to Jane Hamsher and the crew at Firedoglake for their above the fold front-page story in the New York Times. They've been the go-to source on the Scooter Libby trial, bar none.

I only wish they got a better event to cover. After a thrilling first week which was full of surprises and revelations, the trial went like a flash. The prosecution presented a very systematic case, wherein Patrick Fitzgerald showed how a host of contacts discussed Valerie Plame with Libby well before he said he first heard about her from NBC's Tim Russert. Then he played Libby's testimony from the Grand Jury trial, which not only showed that Libby adamantly denied knowing Plame's identity until the Russert conversation, but showed that Libby and his boss, Vice President Cheney, planned to leak classified information to counter Joe Wilson's criticism of the case for war.

Why isn't that a crime? Politically motivated leaks of intelligence to prove your own points and discredit others? Seeking out opponents and using information to destroy them, without giving anyone a chance to see the full picture?

But of course, that wasn't the only instance where what ought to be a crime was not seen so under the law. Fitzgerald's final witness was Tim Russert, who rebutted Libby's testimony that the two discussed Valerie Plame. But the crime here was that Scooter Libby, the chief of staff to the Vice President, called Russert to complain about Chris Matthews and Hardball, and Russert took the call without using the opportunity to question Libby, AND assumed the entire call was off the record:

If you're a journalist, and a very senior White House official calls you up on the phone, what do you do? Do you try to get the official to address issues of urgent concern so that you can then relate that information to the public?

Not if you're NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert.

When then-vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby called Russert on July 10, 2003, to complain that his name was being unfairly bandied about by MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Russert apparently asked him nothing.

And get this: According to Russert's testimony yesterday at Libby's trial, when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record.

That's not reporting, that's enabling.

That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable.

In fact, journalism comes out looking pretty bad in this whole trial. Clearly the White House knew how to use press sources to, as Atrios put it, "launder information" to give it a once-removed patina, so that it appeared more credible than if it was merely coming out of the mouth of the press secretary. And after the media knew they were burned by the OVP and the White House, used to sell a war and punish an enemy, after it was completely clear to all of them that they were nothing more than pawns on a chessboard, all they wanted to do was make it go away.

So as the facts of the White House cover-up now tumble out into open court, it's important to remember that if it hadn't been for Fitzgerald's work, there's little doubt the Plame story would have simply faded into oblivion like so many other disturbing suggestions of Bush administration misdeeds. And it would have faded away because lots of high-profile journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and NBC wanted it to.

In a sense, it was Watergate in reverse. Instead of digging for the truth, lots of journalists tried to bury it. The sad fact remains the press was deeply involved in the cover-up, as journalists reported White House denials regarding the Plame leak despite the fact scores of them received the leak and knew the White House was spreading rampant misinformation about an unfolding criminal case.

And that's why the Plame investigation then, and the Libby perjury trial now, so perfectly capture what went wrong with the timorous press corps during the Bush years as it routinely walked away from its responsibility of holding people in power accountable and ferreting out the facts.

Fitzgerald's challenge in this trial is having these knaves and losers as his key witnesses in the perjury trial. They aren't all that much more credible than Scooter Libby himself in the grand scheme of things. Of course, reporters were the defense's key witnesses as well, and on Monday they rapid-fire suggested that other Administration officials were leaking Plame's name, not Libby. One of these was former press secretary Ari Fleischer, who leaked to WaPo journalist Walter Pincus. This added to the intrigue, as it contradicted some of Fleischer's testimony for the prosecution, and suggested that he was only a witness to hold up his end of a bargain of immunity.

How the fact that Scooter Libby didn't tell everybody he knew about Plame exonerates him from lying is curious to me. But everyone comes off looking so bad in this thing that maybe Libby looks good by comparison. That appears to be the strategy:

Fitzgerald is wary of a defense "jury nullification" argument. He thinks the defense wants to argue that since Libby wasn't the leaker, and the real leakers, including Karl Rove, Richard Armitage and Ari Fleischer aren't being prosecuted, it would be unjust to convict Libby. But that's not what the defense is arguing. Everybody, including the jurors, knows that Libby isn't charged with being the leaker, only with being a liar [...]

The jury has been told over and over again that Valerie Plame Wilson's actual status with the CIA is neither relevant nor an issue in the case. They also know Libby didn't leak Plame Wilson's employment status, whatever it was, to Robert Novak. They are going to be consumed with the issue of whether Libby intentionally lied.

At any rate, the defense felt like they didn't need to do much else to impugn the prosecution's case, so they abruptly changed course, deciding that Dick Cheney and Libby wouldn't testify and closing their case. In so doing, they raised the ire of the judge, mainly because the prospect of Libby's testimony led him to hold information from the jury.

The trial fell well short of the Watergate and Iran-Contra trials that riveted the nation's attention. Defense attorneys decided not to call the two biggest witnesses they had dangled in pretrial proceedings: Libby and his former boss Cheney.

In 14 days of testimony, the trial never filled an overflow courtroom, with a video hookup, to handle the crowds expected — particularly for the cross-examination of Libby and Cheney.

Nevertheless, testimony showed that Cheney was intimately involved on a daily basis in July 2003 in rebutting Wilson's allegations that President Bush had lied about intelligence to push the nation into war with Iraq [...]

But the defense had to settle for a pale shadow of what it had planned to show: how preoccupied Libby was with topics he considered more serious. In anticipation of his testimony, the judge had ruled that he could introduce sanitized descriptions of the many topics in his daily CIA briefing and a statement that he was "very concerned" about some of the topics.

When Libby decided not to testify, Walton reversed course on Wednesday and barred almost all the classified evidence.

"My absolute understanding was that Mr. Libby was going to testify," Walton said. "My ruling was based on the fact that he was going to testify."

Pretty slick tactic, but I don't think you want to piss off the judge in this way headed into the jury instructions. Some have speculated that Libby and Cheney were never going to testify. They didn't want to get tripped up on cross-examination, period and open themselves up to more perjury charges.

Part of me thinks that Libby and his team believes that whole wingnut ideology of never showing weakness, so they're deliberately providing a bare-bones defense to "prove" how weak the prosecution's case is. Or something. But once again, what should be the crime here? Libby's whole case is that he has a faulty memory. Yet his boss was clearly so intimately involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame, how could he possibly have forgotten something that was such an extreme focus? And how can it be OK that the Vice President of the United States, someone who thinks his office exists in a special fourth branch where he doesn't have to comply with any executive OR legislative requests, can operate in a legal and ethical vaccuum?

Let's start with something that, if not quite a proven fact, is a clear inference from the trial so far: Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald suspects that Vice President Dick Cheney told Libby to leak Valerie Plame Wilson's employment at the CIA to reporters during a flight aboard Air Force Two on July 12, 2003. In a post on Friday at Firedoglake, I excerpted a searing line of questioning from Libby's second grand jury appearance (in March 2004) in which Fitzgerald stacked up one reason after another why Cheney might have made such a recommendation, faced with an unexpected and unceasing media firestorm over the false intelligence behind the Iraq war [...]

In case you've forgotten, here's the issue again: Besides Libby's chats with Matt Cooper and Judy Miller, what other leaks of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity occurred on July 12 — the one to Walter Pincus, and what else? Did the Vice President of the United States authorize these leaks, and what evidence does special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald have to this effect?

Ladies and gentlemen, start your journalistic engines… and now, go!

I'm an amateur Plameologist who's only on page 16 of Anatomy of Deceit (h/t Vernonlee for letting me borrow it). But it seems to me that the real criminal acts being revealed in this trial are either unethical but legal, or incredibly illegal but not being discussed. And the implications are great for the future. While journalists may be more careful about how their conversations with official sources are being used, the Office of the Vice President and its current resident may endlessly evade any kind of oversight. Dick Cheney has created a shadow Presidency where he is completely above the law and can direct all the powers of the government at his command. How the Congress and the judiciary handle this - now and for the next Vice President - will really determine what kind of government we have going forward. For that reason alone, this trial has been of incalculable value, whether the jury renders a verdict of guilty or not (if I had to make a bet I'd say they will convict).

The Libby Trial

Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up his case today in the the Scooter Libby trial by bringing to the stand Tim Russert (you know, the guy who hates Chris Matthews. All this week, the jury has been listening to the tapes of Libby's grand jury testimony, which will be released publicly after the trial. For now, we can go by the liveblogging at Firedoglake for juicy tidbits. What generally emerges is that Libby was, well, lying: claiming that he only heard about Valerie Plame from Russert, when in fact every other prosecution witness claims they heard about Plame from Libby, BEFORE he ever talked to Russert. This matches with testimony from FBI agent Deborah Bond, who added another contradiction into the mix:

(Bond) described the bureau's interview with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on Oct. 14, 2003. Asked where he first learned of Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, he had told the FBI then -- from the vice president, on or about June 12 that year, in a telephone conversation.

Vice President Cheney had also said that she worked in "CP" or counter-proliferation at the agency. How did Cheney know this? From someone at the CIA -- possibly director George Tenet, but Libby wasn't sure.

How to explain Libby originally claiming he had first heard about Wilson's wife from NBC's Tim Russert in July? He had simply forgotten he had actually heard it from the vice president a month or more earlier, Libby said. But Libby's notes, produced by prosecutors during this testimony, did show notations from June 12 regarding Wilson's wife. And Libby later confirmed this in a second FBI interview.

An even more damaging bit of evidence, not just to Libby but to the entire executive branch, was this note written by Vice President Cheney to Scott McClellan, which demands that Libby get the same denial of involvement from the Press Secretary afforded Karl Rove.

Has to happen today.

Call out to key press saying same thing about Scooter as Karl.

Not going to protect one staffer & sacrifice the guy this Pres. that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.

"This Pres." is crossed out. Could this mean that the President was personally involved in asking to protect Rove while Libby had to, as the VP put it, stick his neck in the meat grinder? Was the President ASKING Libby to be sacrificed to save his political director?

And there's more evidence of Bush's possible involvement.

One "very startling moment" occurred when a tape of Libby's grand jury testimony included references to President George Bush.

"There was one other very startling moment, referring to President Bush, in Scooter Libby‘s Grand Jury testimony on audiotape. Libby noted on a piece of paper a notation, and prosecutors asked whether the notation shows that President Bush was interested in the Kristof article on the State of the Union," Shuster said. "It was a Kristof article in May of 2003 which first got the White House thinking about Ambassador Wilson, because it talked about an ambassador‘s trip, which essentially undercut the State of the Union speech."

Shuster continued, "Libby was asked about the president‘s interest and he said, yes, that‘s what my notes signals, but Libby then went on to testify he never discussed the president‘s interest with the vice president, nor did Libby speak about it with President Bush. He went on to testify that he only heard about the president‘s interest from a senior staff meeting. Of course, we don‘t know if Libby was telling the truth, but it was certainly a tantalizing bit of testimony."

So was Bush involved in pushback on Joe Wilson from even BEFORE his writing of the now-famous op-ed? Later on in the day, the FDL liveblog claims that Libby said he had the President's approval to leak favorable portions of the 2003 NIE on Iraq to Judith Miller.

This case has so many interesting twists and turns, and today's testimony will put a cap on it for the prosecution. But I'm interested in further pursuing this line of inquiry about the President. His possible personal involvement in the leaking a CIA agent's name, at a time when he was claiming he'd fire anyone involved, would be a crushing blow to his already weakened state. Nobody's getting off easy in this trial.