[Oopsie. Scottie walked it back. I guess it was just a cheap stunt to sell books. Who knew?]

Your case has re-opened. On Plame, what did Bush know, and when did he know it? ’Cause Scott “Sucker MC” McClellan dropped a dime:

E&P was first mainstream news outlet to report on Monday night that the McClellan excerpt [from his new tell-all book] reads:

“The most powerful leader [sic] in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration “were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself.”

Chris Dodd—yay!—responds:  Read more 

Republicans are such crooks:

From Brent Budowsky
February 18, 2007
To: Robert Kaiser, Washington Post

Mr. Kaiser, I am forwarding below the note I wrote to Messrs. Graham and Hiatt about Outlook’s Victoria Toensing piece today.

With all due respect [snicker], I have long admired your work, but that piece today was the most egregious attempt at jury tampering that I have ever seen in this or any other town.

I spent six years at the core of the group writing the CIA Identities Law with its original sponsor, Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Setting aside my great differences with both Editorial and Op Ed pages at the Post on this case and Iraq in general, this piece was different. It was a clear attempt to influence the jury, after the defense rested and before the jury is given the case.

I predict the Judge will not be a happy camper, but beyond this, the piece was a shameless attempt to present a nullification defense to the jury, by an officer of the court who has worked for the Departement of Justice. It is attempt to bypass the judge and jury and present arguments to the jury, through the Post, that would not be admissable for law or fact, which also included factual inaccuracy.

This is the functional equivalent of the Post editorial board and the Libby defense team standing outside the jury room, handing the jurors leaflets, ignoring the judges instructions, and handing the jurors inadmissable evidence and telling them to vote not guilty.

I believe the Post owes its readers an alternate viewpoint, presented with the same visibility as Ms. Toensing’s piece, though the ridiculing artwork will not be necessary and the tone of prosecution is more worthy of a second tier blog than the paper of record for this Capital.

Please, can we just keep Froomkins, Walter Pincus, and Dana Milbank, and bulldoze the rest of Pravda into the Potamac?  Read more 

Joe has one of the clearest and most concise PlameLibby pieces I’ve read in a long time.

At long last, the fog of mystification generated by the Bush administration and the Washington media is lifting, so that everyone can see clearly why I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby is on trial and why his prosecution is important. Whether the jury eventually finds the former White House aide innocent or guilty of perjury, the evidence shows that his bosses George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have misled the public from the very beginning about the vengeful leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson’s C.I.A. identity.

The question that now hangs over the President and the Vice President is whether they lied to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald—the same crime for which their fall guy Scooter now faces possible imprisonment and disgrace. According to published reports, the special counsel interviewed both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney during the summer of 2004. The only way for them to dispel the suspicion that they may have lied to him is to permit full disclosure of those interviews.  Read more 

I’m not closely following the Libby trial because it’s too easy to spend a great deal of time reading about all the many details of the process. Basically, I’m in the “call me when there is a verdict” group. That said, I’m very glad some people are paying close attention, because in this age of Kremlinology, one never knows what may come out in the various testimonies and senior moments and whatnot. So like Ms. Rozen, I wonder about this moment that ’floored’ Swopa, who happens to be in the courtroom.

It happened when special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was arguing to submit as evidence an October 12, 2003 Washington Post article that Libby had saved in his files — and even underlined passages alluding to the alleged 1x2x6 leaks. Scooter’s lawyer stepped up to the podium and said, but we think those claims are entirely false, so why should Libby be accused of being worried about them? Fitz replied, no, we think there’s some basis to believe the claims might be true. “Tell us what,” said Team Libby, and I think the judge concurred.

At this, the unflappable, eternally prepared, ever-articulate Fitz basically lost all bladder and bowel control. He stood there, silent, for what seemed like ten seconds or more.  Read more 

LA Confidential, the gloriously seamy noir movie (from James Elroy’s novel), has the following tagline:

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush…

Compare Ari Fleischer today. From Firedoglake’s live blog:

[FLEISCHER] What I recall Libby saying to me, reiterated that VP did not send Wilson. Ambassador Wilson got sent by his wife, she works at CIA, Works in CPD, I recall that he told me her name. This is hush hush this is on the QT….

(See also Newsweek—later, of course, and with inferior analysis.)

Apparently both Libby and Fleisher knew LA Confidential well; after all, they’re quoting it to each other, much like one old DFH quoting Firesign Theatre to another. Why, you’d almost think they were using movie quotations to, um, send signals to each other. (As Firedoglake points out, there is a protocol for dealing with classified information, and movie quotations definitely aren’t part of that protocol). We’ve already seen this handwriting of obviously coded messages sent en claire in Libby’s famous though not decoded “aspens turning” note to Judy “Kneepads” Miller.

So what signal was Libby sending to Fleischer? It would be irresponsible not to speculate!  Read more 

Start your clocks, moonbats. It will be only a matter of seconds before he perjures himself. We’ll see who wants to follow that rabbit  Read more 

Re the details about the Libby trial, and what’s being said over there about who is the scapegoat and who is the bacon to be saved, Digby notes:

And here I always thought the VP’s office was part of the White House.

I suspect that when the history is written we will find more and more proof that Vice President Cheney has been running a shadow government from the very beginning and that much of the malfeasance of this era is a result of incompetent and competing power centers vying for supremacy. It begins to explain the unprecedented level of faulty reasoning and epic mistakes coming from the one administration.

It’s kind of funny that Cheney is calling Rove incompetent in this matter. When it comes to lying and obstruction (the skills required for this cover Cheney’s ass operation), Karl Rove is a consummate professional and Scooter Libby is a joke.

This has been what I have thought for years now.  Read more 

According to Investor’s Business Daily, that is. Where do I sign up for a subscription? Because any publication that writes like this is one I need to have:

Justice: Like the Duke lacrosse players, Scooter Libby faces jail for alleged involvement in a crime that was never committed, pursued by a vindictive prosecutor. And also like the Duke case, it’s a national disgrace.  Read more 

Cheney to appear as defense witness in Scooter Libby’s trial for treas—oh, I’m sorry, perjury.

Meaning that Fitz will get to cross-examine Big Dick!  Read more 

Oh, I’m so sad. It looks like Libby Wibby dinnit tell the Whole Truth, and now Daddy Fitz is angry:

A former White House aide, I. Lewis Libby, may have disclosed conclusions from a highly classified government report on Iraq to journalists before the report was declassified by President Bush, federal prosecutors said in a new court filing.  Read more 

Or something:

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Monday, July 3, 2006

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president’s statement.  Read more