[veronica]

Bush Consults Lawyer in CIA Leak Case

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - "President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said Wednesday.

There was no indication that was a target of the leak investigation, but the president has decided that "in the event that he needs his advice," he would retain him," White House deputy Claire Buchan.

The attorney is Jim Sharp, she said, confirmed a report by CBS News.

"The president has said that everyone should cooperate in this matter and that would include himself," Buchan said.

She deflected questions about whether Bush had been asked to appear before a grand jury in the case."

What's the big deal??

[Steve_Seattle]

What's the big deal?

Surely by now you know that the press - ever nostalgic about the glory days of Watergate when they brought down Richard Nixon - will latch on to this with a vengeance, e.g., "What did he know and when did he know it?" If by July everything is wonderful in Iraq, the press will manufacture a scandal somehow, someway.

[Howlin]

Wilson has suggested in a book that the leaker was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. But Wilson's book, "The Politics of Truth," give no conclusive evidence for the claim. The White House denies the claim and accuses Wilson of seeking to bolster the campaign of Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites), for whom he has acted as a foreign policy adviser. Wilson also said it's possible the leak came from Elliott Abrams, a figure in the Reagan administration Iran-Contra affair and now a member of Bush's National Security Council. And Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, may have circulated information about Wilson and Plame "in administration and neoconservative circles" even if Rove was not himself the leaker, Wilson writes. Another possibility is that two lower-level officials in Cheney's office — John Hannah or David Wurmser — leaked Plame's identity at the behest of higher-ups "to keep their fingerprints off the crime," Wilson speculates.

Geez, is there anybody left he hasn't accused?????

red, SCOOTER alert!