Fitzgerald May Have Rove And Libby On Perjury Or Obstruction

by Steve

Those of you who think that Patrick Fitzgerald is pursuing perjury charges against several White House officials will find confirmation of your suspicions in a piece this morning from Bloomberg, which appears to be the leak outlet of choice for someone on Fitzgerald’s team. Bloomberg reports this morning that Fitzgerald is looking at discrepancies between what Rove and Libby told investigators about where they got their information on Valerie Plame, and what those same reporters/columnists told Fitzgerald and the grand jury. It looks like Rove and Libby have been caught telling lies to the investigators.

And as to those GOP talking points that the White House staff didn’t know the information on Plame was sensitive, we can now dispense with that nonsense as well. According to a story repeated in today’s Bloomberg piece and first reported yesterday in the Post by the Agency’s best media friend Walter Pincus, the State Department memo that was given to Colin Powell for the Africa trip clearly indicated that the information on Valerie Plame was secret. So anyone who accessed that information on the trip, like Dan Bartlett or Ari Fleischer, who then shared that information with Rove or Libby, was guilty of exposing confidential information. Perhaps someone will ask Karen Hughes today at her confirmation hearing for the spinmeister’s job at Condi’s State Department what she knows about the Africa trip and Rove’s alleged innocence, since it appears now that Rove and Libby were very involved indeed in mixing national security and political attacks and spin. And Hughes herself was integral to the effort to get Joe Wilson, so why should she be confirmed today, when she herself was a part of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) along with Rove and Libby, and when her name probably appears throughout the subpoenaed records that Fitzgerald now has about the WHIG’s actions in July 2003, the month of Plame’s outing?