Hey Fritz, she wasn't on the NOC list. She worked a desk job and was not undercover.
FITZGERALD: That's the way this investigation was conducted. It was known that a CIA officer's identity was blown, it was known that there was a leak. We needed to figure out how that happened, who did it, why, whether a crime was committed, whether we could prove it, whether we should prove it.
And given that national security was at stake, it was especially important that we find out accurate facts.
More BS from a guy who knows better. Your an hero to Chrissy Matthews and Moonbats by perpetuating a lying myth.
FITZGERALD: I will say this: Mr. Libby is presumed innocent. He would not be guilty unless and until a jury of 12 people came back and returned a verdict saying so.
I bet you really don't think he's guilty.
But if what we allege in the indictment is true, then what is charged is a very, very serious crime that will vindicate the public interest in finding out what happened here.
And "very very" not a crime against National Security.
QUESTION: Mr. Fitzgerald, you've said that there was damage done to all of us, damage to the entire nation. Can you be any more specific about what kind of damage you're talking about?
FITZGERALD: The short answer is no. But I can just say this: I'm not going to comment on things beyond what's said in the indictment.
After all you said during your press conference -- You don't know?!
Here's the Fitz transcript.
Good luck everybody.
I hope it reads better than it sounded today.
I was lost. :)
Arrg!
Your = You're
This, after two years of investigation? Give Libby a medal!
Ping a Ling
If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fastball and hit a batter right smack in the head, and it really, really hurt them, you'd want to know why the pitcher did that. And you'd wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, "I've got bad blood with this batter. He hit two home runs off me. I'm just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can."And to use yet another baseball analogy, "Fitzgerald really struck out on that one."
You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter's head. And there's lots of shades of gray in between.
You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back and it hit him in the head because he moved. You might want to throw it under his chin, but it ended up hitting him on the head.
FITZGERALD: And what you'd want to do is have as much information as you could. You'd want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you'd want to know.
And then you'd make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, "Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it."
In this case, it's a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us.
I told all you Freepers at the outset of this farce that Karl Rove did nothing wrong. No matter what the MSM says or believes, Karl Rove is off the hook for good!!! As for Fitzgerald, he better bask in his fifteen minutes of fame, because within two years he will be a nobody, plus he has opened wound among conservatives that will unleash a roaring lion. The President will bury Mr. Fitzgerald and the Democrat "Traitor" Party next week when he names his choice for the Supreme Court. The battle is joined. The results, the POYUS will get his choice for SCOTUS and the Pubbies will pickup seats in 2006 and keep the White House in 2008. Fitzpatrick has helped kill himself and the Democrat Party. The fools are just too ego driven and stupid to see it!!! The "Fitzpatrick" impact on the POTUS, NONE!!!
Did anyone ask Mr. Fitz why there was so much illegal leaking from HIS grand jury, and whether he plans to investigate that.
Also, since Ms. Miller, Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Novak have named their source, why was there no indictment for that?
That means less than 50% of the world's population knew that she worked for the CIA.
Has anyone ever SEEN the CIA request for an investigation? I have said several times today that I read the request was not made by usual routine.
There has been confusion regarding covert vs classified because Fitz would not use the word covert.
Is it possible we have been wrong about the request? We are assuming the investigation all along has been about the deliberate outing of a COVERT agent.
What if the CIA, knowing she was not covert, didn't waste time, so they used CLASSIFIED knowing they might have a better chance to get the WH.. A means to an end. Any means to a specific end.
Have we been hoodwinked by the dark side again? All this we have discussed about how this is not a crime; she was not covert. Was the investigation the leaking of classified info from the very start?
Fitzgerald should be removed from this investigation. He makes claims that have no basis in reality let alone fact.
Valerie Wilson's cover was blown in July 2003. The first sign of that cover being blown was when Mr. Novak published a column on July 14th, 2003.
We can't talk about information not contained in the four corners of the indictment.
after spending 20 minutes talking about how evil outing a secret agent is - something that was nowhere in the indictment.
I listened to this bozo's "press conference" today. He left me with the impression that he's after Crazy Howie Dean's job with the DNC. A regular Lefty blowhard. But I feel a lot more "secure" and "safer" even though there wasn't a "crime" until AFTER this blowhard began his "investigation."
I don't believe Russert.
Was it my imagination or did Fitz look almost tearful during this news conference. He nearly was in tears, especially when he first started talking. Even with all the blah-blah-blah, it STILL sounds like a very weak case.
FITZGERALD: That's a good question. And I think, knowing that he gave the information to someone who was outside the government, not entitled to receive it, and knowing that the information was classified, is not enough.
FITZGERALD: You need to know at the time that he transmitted the information, he appreciated that it was classified information, that he knew it or acted, in certain statutes, with recklessness.
And that is sort of what gets back to my point. In trying to figure that out, you need to know what the truth is.
So our allegation is in trying to drill down and find out exactly what we got here, if we received false information, that process is frustrated.
But at the end of the day, I think I want to say one more thing, which is: When you do a criminal case, if you find a violation, it doesn't really, in the end, matter what statute you use if you vindicate the interest.
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How can *the interest* be vindicated when you not only admit that you cannot prove that Plame was a covert agent, you also admit that, from a legal perspective, even providing information about a person with classified status is not even a crime?
This prosecutor is unwise.
Investigators do not set out to investigate the statute, they set out to gather the facts.
It's critical that when an investigation is conducted by prosecutors, agents and a grand jury they learn who, what, when, where and why. And then they decide, based upon accurate facts, whether a crime has been committed, who has committed the crime, whether you can prove the crime and whether the crime should be charged.
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At some point very early in the process, don't investigators ask: "If the facts turn out a certain way, can I indict? If not, shouldn't I stop the investigation?"
In other words, it seems Fitzgerald could have determined fairly early on whether Plame was confidential or covert. If just confidential and not covert, would leaking her identity be a prosecutable offense? It does not look like it. So why did he continue?
Do prosecutors really gather "all the facts" so they can determine 'why the pitcher threw the pitch at the batters head' even when the most damning possible explanation would not amount to a crime?
This morning I realized he kept sticking his tongue to the front of his mouth as he was talking. George Felos kept sticking out his tongue (much more obviously) when he spoke to the press right after Terri died.
I want to trust Fitzgerald is a straight shooter, but this similarity has me worried.