posted on October 24, 2005 08:23:36 PM new
Can you say serious political damage to the White House?
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Habla siempre que debas y calla siempre que puedas....
[ edited by profe51 on Oct 24, 2005 08:23 PM ]
posted on October 24, 2005 08:49:28 PM new
to the White House, Dave, to the White House.
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Habla siempre que debas y calla siempre que puedas....
posted on October 24, 2005 11:28:06 PM new
Aw, c'mon you guys...ya know all those indictments and arrests and lies and crimes are just a big conspiracy by the left
posted on October 25, 2005 09:07:24 AM new
Some people think indictments popping out of the White House like a berserk pop corn popper is no big deal.
Welllll, since it IS all the highest ranking Republicans it's a big deal....all these accusations ......are they all really just a conspiracy...ALL of them????
SO many.....
Rove
Cheney
Frist
Delay
Libby
on and on and on........
and , of course, bushy didn't know nuttin' about nuttin'
Three more years!
...of indictments, trials,charges.........
[ edited by mingotree on Oct 25, 2005 09:10 AM ]
posted on October 25, 2005 10:02:08 AM new
Big deal to who?
President Bush won't be elected next election, Cheney is not running.
McCain the most likely candidate is more moderate and well liked, so if no one is convicted then this will just be a road bump in history and mean nothing in 3 years.
posted on October 25, 2005 10:54:27 AM new
If the law they are accused of breaking is one of politics which if not convited will mean nothing, I say let it go until you have definite proof for conviction. Not an idea they did something wrong.
McCain will not be able to resurrect a fractured GOP and an angry American populace. This indictment is sure to lead to a conviction and besides that, it opens the door to an investigation into the story behind the forged documents and other lies about the Iraq war. When the American public knows that the "mushroom clouds" and nuclear programs were lies, NO republican will be elected...not even a fence straddler like McCain.
Anyone who fails to understand the significance of Fitzgerald's investigation is a fool.
posted on October 25, 2005 11:03:37 AM new"Some people think indictments popping out of the White House like a berserk pop corn popper is no big deal."
posted on October 25, 2005 12:11:07 PM newThis indictment is sure to lead to a conviction...
There are no indictments to date. As far as a conviction...I'll believe it when it happens.
Anyone who fails to understand the significance of Fitzgerald's investigation is a fool. Uh Huh! All this special prosecution law does is waste taxpayer money. There is no criminal act here, it is all political maneuvering.
posted on October 25, 2005 09:01:08 PM new
It's not just about the next presidential election, it's already having an effect on people's opinions about the shape of the legislature in 2006. 58% in one poll recently indicated that they'd like to see a Democratically controlled congress in 2006, and it wasn't one of peepa's polls, either.
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Habla siempre que debas y calla siempre que puedas....
posted on October 26, 2005 06:34:02 AM new
So much for the party of moral values. I wonder if lying constitutes as a moral value.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
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The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
[ edited by logansdad on Oct 26, 2005 06:34 AM ]
posted on October 26, 2005 06:43:10 AM new Bush Aides Brace for Charges
Grand Jury May Hear Counts in Leak Case Today
By Jim VandeHei and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 26, 2005; Page A01
The prosecutor in the CIA leak case was preparing to outline possible charges before the federal grand jury as early as today, even as the FBI conducted last-minute interviews in the high-profile investigation, according to people familiar with the case.
With Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald in Washington yesterday, lawyers in the case and some White House officials braced for at least one indictment when the grand jury meets today. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, is said by several people in the case to be a main focus, but not the only one.
In a possible sign that Fitzgerald may seek to charge one or more officials with illegally disclosing Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation, FBI agents as recently as Monday night interviewed at least two people in her D.C. neighborhood. The agents were attempting to determine whether the neighbors knew that Plame worked for the CIA before she was unmasked with the help of senior Bush administration officials. Two neighbors said they told the FBI they had been surprised to learn she was a CIA operative.
The FBI interviews suggested the prosecutor wanted to show that Plame's status was covert, and that there was damage from the revelation that she worked at the CIA.
Underscoring the uncertainty surrounding the probe, two Republican officials said Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, the president's top strategist, is not sure whether he will face indictment as the case winds down. Rove was said to be awaiting word from Fitzgerald, even as prosecutors questioned at least one former Rove associate about Rove's contacts with reporters before Plame's name was disclosed. The White House expects indictments to come today, according to a senior administration official.
The news of the eleventh-hour moves came on the same day that Cheney himself was implicated in the chain of events that led to Plame's being exposed. In a report in the New York Times that the White House pointedly did not dispute, Fitzgerald was said to have notes taken by Libby showing that he learned about Plame from the vice president a month before she was identified by columnist Robert D. Novak.
There is no indication Cheney did anything illegal or improper, but the report was the first to indicate that he was aware of Plame well before she became a household name.
Fitzgerald's investigation has centered on whether senior administration officials knowingly revealed Plame's identity in an effort to discredit a critic of the Bush administration -- her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. On July 6, 2003, Wilson accused the administration in The Washington Post and the Times of using flawed intelligence to justify the war with Iraq. Eight days later, Novak revealed Plame's name and her identity as a CIA operative.
The grand jury, whose term expires Friday, is scheduled for a session today. Before a vote on an indictment, prosecutors typically leave the room so jurors can deliberate in private, and ask that the jury alert them when it has reached a decision.
Unlike the jury in a criminal trial, grand jurors are not weighing proof of guilt or innocence. They must decide whether there is probable cause to charge someone with a crime, and they must agree unanimously to indict. The prosecutor could seek to seal any indictments until he announces the charges.
Officials described a White House on edge. "Everybody just wants this week over," said one official.
The key figures in the probe, including Rove and Libby, yesterday attended staff meetings and planned President Bush's next political and policy moves. Others sat nervously at their desks, fielding calls from reporters and insisting they were in the dark about what the next 24 hours would bring.
But officials are bracing for the kind of political tsunami that swamped Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan in their second terms and could change this presidency's course.
It is not clear what charges Fitzgerald will seek, if any. After setting out on his original investigation, he won the explicit authority to also consider perjury and other crimes government officials might have committed during the nearly two-year-long probe.
Fitzgerald has looked closely not only at the possible crimes, but also the context in which they would have been committed. This search, say lawyers in the case, has provided him a rare, glimpse into the White House effort to justify the Iraq war and rebut its critics.
The trail has often led to Cheney's office, which officials describe as ground zero in the effort to promote, execute and defend the Iraq war and the campaign to convince Americans and the world that Saddam Hussein had amassed a stockpile of the most dangerous kinds of weapons. According to the report in yesterday's Times, the investigation also led to Cheney himself.
Cheney has the security clearance to review and discuss classified material, and no information has been made public to suggest he did anything illegal. But this is the first time the vice president has been directly linked to the chain of events that eventually led to Plame's identity being disclosed.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Cheney has always been honest with the American people.
In September 2003, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert he did not know Wilson or who sent him on the trip to Africa. Republicans close to the White House said Cheney was careful to distance himself from Wilson in the interview without lying about what he knew about the diplomat and his wife.
Two lawyers involved in the case said that, based on Fitzgerald's earlier questions, the prosecutor has been aware of Libby's June 12 conversation with Cheney since the early days of his investigation. The lawyers said Libby recorded in his notes that Cheney relayed to him that Wilson's wife may have had a role in Wilson taking the CIA-sponsored mission to Niger. According to a source familiar with Libby's testimony, Libby told the grand jury he believed he heard of Wilson's wife first from reporters.
The Times reported that Libby said Cheney learned information about Plame from former CIA director George J. Tenet.
Tenet said yesterday he has not discussed Fitzgerald's investigation in the past and does not want to talk about it now before the prosecutor reaches his conclusions.
In a sign that Fitzgerald continues to gather evidence, FBI agents interviewed at least two of Wilson's neighbors in the Palisades section of Northwest Washington on Monday night. In interviews yesterday, Marc Lefkowitz and David Tillotson said they told two FBI agents they had no clue that Plame, whom they knew by her married name, Valerie Wilson, worked for the agency until Novak's column appeared.
"They wanted to know how well we knew her, which is very well," Tillotson said. "Did we know anything about her position before the story broke? Absolutely not."
Staff writer Paul Schwartzman contributed to this report.
posted on October 26, 2005 07:47:44 AM new
Question - Does anyone here believe that when Cheney did an investigation on Wilson to get dirt to discredit him that he was not informed that his wife had held a covert position in the CIA?
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An intelligent deaf-mute is better than an ignorant person who can speak.
posted on October 26, 2005 08:41:21 AM new
""There is no criminal act here, it is all political maneuvering.""
Just like the Monica/Clinton debacle !
By the way, for those who think this is Democratically inspired it was the CIA who asked the Department of Justice to investigate the outing of one of their agents.
posted on October 26, 2005 08:52:30 AM new
Poll: Few doubt wrongdoing in CIA leak
Neighbor, former official questioned with grand jury set to expire
Tuesday, October 25, 2005; Posted: 11:05 p.m. EDT (03:05 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Only one in 10 Americans said they believe Bush administration officials did nothing illegal or unethical in connection with the leaking of a CIA operative's identity, according to a national poll released Tuesday.
Thirty-nine percent said some administration officials acted illegally in the matter, in which the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, was revealed.
The same percentage of respondents in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll said administration officials acted unethically, but did nothing illegal.
The poll was split nearly evenly on what respondents thought of Bush officials' ethical standards -- 51 percent saying they were excellent or good and 48 percent saying they were not good or poor.
The figures represent a marked shift from a 2002 survey in which nearly three-quarters said the standards were excellent or good and only 23 percent said they were fair or poor.
The latest poll questioned 1,008 adults October 21-23 and has a sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.
Federal law makes it a crime to deliberately reveal the identity of a covert CIA operative, and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is heading a probe into the matter. (Fitzgerald profile)
With the grand jury investigating the leak set to expire Friday, FBI agents interviewed a Washington neighbor of Plame for a second time.
The agents asked Marc Lefkowitz on Monday night whether he knew about Plame's CIA work before her identity was leaked in the media, and Lefkowitz told agents he did not, according to his wife, Elise Lefkowitz.
Lefkowitz said agents first questioned whether the couple was aware of Plame's CIA work in an interview several months ago.
Members of Fitzgerald's team also talked to a former White House official to gather last-minute information about the role of Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN.
Plame and her husband, retired State Department career diplomat Joseph Wilson, have accused Bush administration officials of deliberately leaking her identity to the media to retaliate against Wilson after he published an opinion piece in The New York Times.
The July 2003 article cast doubt on a key assertion in the Bush administration's arguments for war with Iraq -- that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium for a suspected nuclear weapons program in Africa.
Wilson, who was acting ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, said the CIA sent him to Niger, in central Africa, to investigate the uranium claim in February 2002 and that he found no evidence such a transaction occurred and it was unlikely it could have. (Full story)
Days after Wilson's article was published, Plame's identity was exposed in a piece by syndicated columnist and longtime CNN contributor Robert Novak.
Rove has testified before the Fitzgerald grand jury that he believes it was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, who first told him that Plame worked for the CIA and had a role in sending her husband to Africa, according to a source familiar with Rove's testimony.
New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail for contempt before finally agreeing last month to tell grand jurors that Libby told her Wilson's wife may have worked at the CIA, although she said Libby did not identify Plame by name or describe her as a covert agent or operative.
Libby has also testified before the grand jury.
Report links Cheney to case
The New York Times reported Tuesday that notes in Fitzgerald's possession suggest that Libby first heard of the CIA officer from Cheney himself. (Full story)
But the newspaper reported that the notes do not indicate that Cheney or Libby knew Plame was an undercover operative.
The Times said its sources in the story were lawyers involved in the case.
The notes show that George Tenet, then the CIA director, gave the information to Cheney in response to questions the vice president posed about Wilson, the Times reported.
Cheney said in September 2003 he had seen no report from Wilson after his assignment in Africa.
"I don't know Joe Wilson. I've never met Joe Wilson. I don't know who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back," he told NBC.
Cheney's office had no comment, and the White House would neither confirm or deny the Times report.
"The policy of this White House has been to carry out the direction of the president, which is to cooperate fully with the special prosecutor," said White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who was peppered with questions about the report at his daily briefing.
"There's a lot of speculation that is going on right now. There are many facts that are not known. The work of the special prosecutor continues and we look forward to him successfully concluding his investigation," he said.
McClellan said he had not sought any clarification about Cheney's involvement from the vice president or his office and bristled when a reporter asked if Cheney always tells the truth to the American people, dismissing the query as "ridiculous."
In 2003, McClellan used the same word to deny that either Rove or Libby had been involved in the leak.
The Justice Department opened a criminal probe in September 2003 at the request of the CIA.
Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Illinois, was named special prosecutor at the end of 2003 after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the probe.
As the grand jury term expires, Fitzgerald could ask for an extension of the grand jury's service, request indictments or end the probe without bringing charges.
CNN's Kelli Arena, Dana Bash and Suzanne Malveaux contributed to this report.
posted on October 26, 2005 09:26:19 AM newQuestion - Does anyone here believe that when Cheney did an investigation on Wilson to get dirt to discredit him that he was not informed that his wife had held a covert position in the CIA?
The question is not whether he did or did not know that, it is whether he intentionally leaked it and committed a crime. C'mon fenix, you watch enough legal and cops shows to know that.
I find it amusing you all have been crowing for months how much this admin has f/u'ed, how they cant do anything through, or right, yet, we are to believe with everything rove is involved with he took the time to run a fine tooth comb (and got a patsy within the CIA to get it for him without anybody knowing this information was being accessed), all this - to discredit Wilson and his wife?
Maybe he did, maybe he didnt.
But they will have to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
....
Mingo!