Plamegate: 25 Lingering Questions

Original FReeper review of Michael Isikoff and David Corn, "Hubris" | 02/07/2007 | Fedora

[Fedora]

Ping

[dirtboy]

A ping and a mark for later reading.

[Fedora]

Ping. Regarding what we were discussing on the other thread, you might want to skip to Questions 6, 11-16, and 23.

[Txsleuth]

PING

[nopardons]

Many thanks for the ping; great article! :-)

[greyfoxx39]

place mark

[musicman]

WOW Fedora!!!

Bookmark & BTTT !!!

[Leto]

Ping for a great summary!

[showme_the_Glory]

bump for later

[Eva]

Did you read that article in the WSJ about both Fitzgerald and Comey having a grudge against Libby? Apparently both had been on the losing side in former dealings with Libby. For Fitzgerald it was the fact that Libby did some of the work for the defense of Marc Rich and for Comey, it was the fact that Libby was the front man for the administration on the wiretap thing, when Comey was filling in for Ashcroft and the administration did an end around Comey, going directly to Ashcroft, who was in the hospital with gall bladder problems, to get approval.

[visitor]

bump

[Fedora]

No, I hadn't seen that article--will have to check that out, thanks!

[Eva]

It was on the editorial page.

[Calpernia]

Related:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1780966/posts
Yellowcake and yellow journalism (ann coulter)

[Fedora]

Is this it?

The Libby Injustice

As it happens, Messrs. Fitzgerald and Libby had crossed legal paths before. Before he joined the Bush Administration, Mr. Libby had, for a number of years in the 1980s and 1990s, been a lawyer for Marc Rich. Mr. Rich is the oil trader and financier who fled to Switzerland in 1983, just ahead of his indictment for tax-evasion by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bill Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich in 2001, and so the feds never did get their man. The pardon so infuriated Justice lawyers who had worked on the case that the Southern District promptly launched an investigation into whether the pardon had been "proper." One former prosecutor we spoke to described the Rich case as "the single most rancorous case in the history of the Southern District."

Two of the prosecutors who worked on the Rich case over the years were none other than Mr. Fitzgerald and James Comey, who while Deputy Attorney General appointed Mr. Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Mr. Fitzgerald worked in the Southern District for five years starting in 1988, at the same time that Mr. Libby was developing a legal theory of Mr. Rich's innocence in a bid to get the charges dropped. The prosecutors never did accept the argument, but Leonard Garment, who brought Mr. Libby onto the case in 1985, says that he believes Mr. Libby's legal work helped set the stage for Mr. Rich's eventual pardon.

This was all long ago, it's true. But Mr. Libby and Mr. Comey tangled more recently as well. In 2004, as Mr. Fitzgerald was gearing up his investigation, Mr. Libby was the Administration's point man in trying to get Justice to sign off on the NSA wiretapping program. In early 2004, Mr. Comey was acting Attorney General while John Ashcroft recovered from gall bladder surgery, and Mr. Comey reportedly refused to give the NSA program the greenlight, prompting the White House to seek out Mr. Ashcroft in the hospital in a bid to circumvent Mr. Comey.

[Fedora]

Thanks, Calpernia!

[Eva]

Yeah, that's the one. It just adds one more wrinkle to the prosecution of Libby.

I still think that Fitzgerald is steering this prosecution towards a mistrial that would do as much damage to the administration as possible and leave Libby hanging in limbo. A mistrial would hurt Libby's career as much, if not more than a conviction because he could neither appeal nor be pardoned.

[Wuli]

You always amaze us. Bless you.

[omnivore]

"Then in the early 1990s she reportedly adopted a Nonofficial Cover (NOC, aka “deep cover”, referring to a cover involving a non-government CIA front such as a fake business entity), posing as a member of an energy firm operating out of Belgium."

So ... she must have been on that NOC list that Tom Cruise was trying to recover in Mission Impossible I. It all makes sense now, how important she truly was, and what danger this leak put her in ...

Aside from the fact that there's a (cough) slight difference (cough) between Hollywood and reality.