Small Plame Item

Greg Sargent in the American Prospect points out something I missed in my Plame story on Saturday:

Thanks to Waas, for the first time, we may now know for a fact that Rove and other Bush advisers viewed the truth about the run-up to war as something that could destroy his re-election prospects. It is entirely plausible that Bush advisers calculated that if it came out that they’d outed Plame, Congress would have been forced by the resulting firestorm to run a far more aggressive investigation of Bush’s pre-war deceptions – and possibly uncover the smoking gun Waas reports on, among other things. Remember, Libby and Rove testified in early 2004, during the heat of a presidential campaign which Rove himself had apparently concluded was at risk if existing hard evidence of Bush’s deceptions surfaced.

So it seems plausible that Libby and Rove sought to minimize the chance of the aggressive congressional oversight that might have resulted if it became known that they’d outed Plame. In short, misleading the grand jury about Plame may simply have been a key piece of a broader effort to get past the election before the truth about the run-up to the war surfaced to sink his campaign.

The timing of their testimony is critical here. I have wondered right from the very start why Libby, an experienced Washington player and a lawyer to boot, would lie so transparently and overtly to a Grand Jury. Rove was less overt, he had "memory" lapses, and omitted anything he could to avoid drawing the attention of Pat FitzGerald. They made a calculation that the reelection of their prospective masters outweigned the risk of perjury, relying on the aversion of reporters in revealing their sources, and, I believe, underestimated the Special Prosectors tenacity and legal skill in forcing Cooper and Miller to testify. Notice how both Libby and Rove were unwilling to clearly release Miller and Cooper from their pledge of confidentiality without being pressured.

We should also draw our attention to the Jason Leopold piece in Raw Stort that claims that, despite all of Rove maneuverings in front of the Grand Jury, and the strategems of he and his lawyer after the Libby indictment, Patrick FitzGerald is moving for an indictment of Rove. And that my friends, is whole new kettle of Fish. As Mojo likes to point out, neither of these guys is Gordon Liddy, they are not going to do any time in Prison just to take one for the team. They might hold out for a pardon, but that is quite a bet to make on the Presidents loyalty to you personally. No one else has confirmed the Leopold story, so take it with a grain of salt, but I tend to believe Fitz would not be visiting the Grand Jury so much if he didn't have something cooking.

Good Times....