How the judge rules on this will be key to the disposition of the case. If Libby gets his discovery, then all he has to do is hang tough and eventually the political pressure by dems and the Old Media will force the prosecutor to drop charges. The stakes for the media and the dems are jut too high to let the case go to trial.
But until the judge rules, the pressure on him NOT to grant discovery will be huge. He knows, if he grants discovery to Libby, he and his wife will not get invited to any of the power DC parties for ten years. If he has kids who want internships or contracts with the government, those doors will close. If his kids are attorneys, their clients will hire someone else. If there is an illegitimate child thirty years ago, it will somehow find its way into the NY Times.
The dems and the Old Media (and the Clinton holdovers in the CIA and State Dept) will play the hardest of hardball on this one because it goes to one of the core pillars of their power.
Let's just hope the judge is a red-state kind of guy who could care about the power parties and that his kids work in a decent place in flyover country and don't do business with the government.
What will NOT happen in this case is a public airing in court of the way the press has handled this case.
"But until the judge rules, the pressure on him NOT to grant discovery will be huge."
Not granting discovery is probably reversible error.
"The Libby trial
Last week Clarice Feldman left a comment on American Thinker that sums up why the Scooter Libby trial is likely to turn out to be such fun.
As I have observed, the Special Prosecutor, constrained by the DoJ regulations on questioning reporters about their sources and by his felt need to do so, conducted a perfectly ridiculous inquiry in which reporters who quite obviously had prior independent knowledge of Valerie Plame’s identity were never asked about that knowledge of the source(s) of it, as Fitzgerald accused Libby of being the person who started the rumors of her employment.
Bob Woodward’s voluntary acknowledgement of independent knowledge well before any conversation by Libby cited in the indictment was further evidence of this fact.
Today Libby’s lawyers filed a motion which (a) will establish the half-baked nature of the investigation and (b) his right to independently question the media about matters which Fitzgerald should have, but failed to inquire, to make the investigation a fair one.
Lurking in the dim recesses of my mind is the suspicion that Fitzgerald knew exactly what he was doing. What better way to put the press on trial."