The Daily Background

As I’ve written recently, it’s becoming more and more clear that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is interested in much more than just Scooter Libby.

As Jane Hamsher reminds us: Scooter is the firewall to Shooter (Shooter being Dead-Eye Dick). Dan Froomkin had some very compelling thoughts in his column yesterday as well. I rarely quote so much, but this is important and really interesting, I think you’ll agree:

“What is this case about?” special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald asked in his rebuttal to the defense’s closing arguments yesterday in the Scooter Libby perjury trial.

“Is it about something bigger?”

And while Fitzgerald never directly answered that second question, he at long last made it quite clear that the depth of Vice President Cheney’s role in the leaking of the identity of a CIA operative is one of the central mysteries that Libby’s alleged lies prevented investigators from resolving.

“There is a cloud over the vice president . . . And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice,” Fitzgerald said.

“There is a cloud over the White House. Don’t you think the FBI and the grand jury and the American people are entitled to straight answers?” Fitzgerald asked the jury.

Libby, Fitzgerald continued, “stole the truth from the justice system.”

After literally years of keeping his public pronouncements about the case to an absolute minimum, Fitzgerald yesterday finally let slip a bit of the speculation that many of us have long suspected has lurked just beneath the surface of his investigation.

Suddenly it wasn’t just the defendant alone, it was “they” who decided to tell reporters about Wilson’s wife working for the CIA. “To them,” Fitzgerald said, “she wasn’t a person, she was an argument.”

And it was pretty clear who “they” was: Libby and his boss, Cheney.

I remember after it seemed like Fitzgerald was only going to charge Libby, there was a lot of frustration in the blogosphere that Fitzgerald was wimping out from more serious work, or something like that. At the same time, there were conservative pundits repeating their same old talking points with renewed vigor: nobody was charged with the “underlying crime” and therefore Libby is just a victim of circumstance.

Bullshit. Or as Fitzgerald cried jokingly in his closing statements, “Madness! Madness! Madness!” It’s now abundantly clear that Fitzgerald sees a successful Libby prosecution, conviction, and sentencing as key to moving forward with the rest of this case and the underlying issues at hand: i.e. the actual illegal, treasonous leaking of a CIA operative by top Administration officials.

Scooter is the firewall to Shooter. For whatever reasons, and nobody knows Fitzgerald’s reasoning better than Fitzgerald does, Libby is the key to moving forward. “Is it about something bigger?” Yes.

Fitzgerald is a mild-mannered Republican from the midwest (Chicago, to be exact). He’s moderate, quiet, serious about his work, and not what you’d call a zealous, show off press-hungry counsel (cough cough, Ken Starr, cough cough, Clinton hunting). He’s kept his cards secret for what seems like ages. He’s still not showing us his cards, but he’s letting us know that he hasn’t played his full hand just yet.

He started to investigate the case he was charged with, originally by then Attorney General John Ashcroft after he recused himself, and he did so. Only there was a problem: somebody was lying to him and obstructing justice. Somebody was standing in the way of the rest of the case going forward. And that somebody was Scooter Libby.

Some of Libby’s people are rumored to have tried to convince the former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff to sign a plea agreement before the trial even got under way. He didn’t, and now he’s facing 30 years in prison. Will Fitzgerald somehow figure out a way to “flip” Libby and turn him into a prosecution witness in a later case against the Vice President? That’s what a lot of Washington “insiders” have been speculating lately.

I’m not so sure. Libby could get convicted, serve some time, get a pardon in 20 months when Bush is leaving office, and keep his 3 million dollar “defense fund” as a payoff to stay loyal and not testify against Cheney later.

Besides, even if Libby did “flip” and become a prosecution witness, Cheney’s lawyers could easily try to impeach his testimony by pointing out the simple fact that he was convicted of lying to a grand jury under oath, and could certainly be lying when he is testifying against the Veep. He was convicted of lying once, so there’s nothing to say that he isn’t lying again: he’s just untrustworthy.

So I’m not entirely convinced this is why Fitzgerald had in mind. But I do understand that Fitz is pretty confident that Libby will get convicted, and that he’s saved some of his awfully strong evidence for later on. And I think he’ll have occasion to use it.

So, when will the jury rest? I’ve guessed that it might be Friday, just because there’s something about finishing something up before a weekend comes that I think appeals to juries (the jury would resume deliberations on Monday if they don’t rest before the weekend). Then again, there’s quite a bit of evidence in the case that they’ll want to review, and so maybe it’ll take longer.

In any case, Fitzgerald will speak to reporters after the jury rests. And if we don’t have a sense of where htis is going by then, he’ll give us one.

Filed under: Plame Leak, Z-TDB Blog