Plame Update

by Steve

Well, here are some Plame items for your Monday morning consideration:

First, Bloomberg, which seems to have a pipeline with several of the defense attorneys on the Plame case, confirms this morning what we’ve heard for a week or so: Fitzgerald is looking closely at whether or not he can make a case against Cheney. According to the piece, Fitzgerald is looking at how much Cheney knew about the efforts to destroy Joe Wilson. There are other questions since the publication of the Times’ stories on this, such as why did a NYT reporter have a security clearance and withhold information from the paper and its readers? Whose interests was Miller serving all these years; the Times or the PNAC cabal while on the Times' payroll?

My own question is this: why isn’t it possible that Judy Miller is another version of Armstrong Williams? One got laid, the other got paid.

Bill Kristol said yesterday on Fox that he thinks Rove and Libby will be indicted. And Condi admitted yesterday that she has talked with Fitzgerald also, and she believes that he will issue a final report, which is required when indictments are sought. Miller’s attorney Robert Bennett also says that Scooter may have a problem, and that Fitzgerald is looking for a big case here.

And read what Howard Kurtz has in his piece this morning, where he references the thoughts of a former co-worker of Miller’s who wanted nothing to do with her after seeing how she operated:

Craig Pyes, a former contract writer for the Times who teamed up with Miller for a series on al Qaeda, complained about her in a December 2000 memo to Times editors and asked that his byline not appear on one piece.

"I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller," wrote Pyes, who now writes for the Los Angeles Times. He added: "I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies," and "tried to stampede it into the paper."

That sounds like our Judy Kneepads, doesn’t it?

Have you noticed that when a reporter appeared to be an advocate in going after Bush over the issue of his TANG service, the right wing went nuts and yelled "liberal media" at the top of their lungs? Yet when we now have a reporter who has taken her own paper and editors for a ride and carried out an agenda favorable to the PNAC crowd that is factually inaccurate, we hear nothing from these same right wing blowhards about journalistic integrity.

I'm shocked, shocked .....