Daily Archives: October 27, 2005

Scootin’ Scooter?

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Aaron Brown just announced on CNN that, according to the New York Times, Scooter Libby will be indicted tomorrow. Karl Rove, he said, will remain under investigation.

I scooted over to the New York Times web site. David Johnston and Richard Stevenson report:

Associates of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, expected an indictment on Friday charging him with making false statements to the grand jury in the C.I.A. leak inquiry, lawyers in the case said Thursday.

Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, will not be charged on Friday, but will remain under investigation, people briefed officially about the case said. As a result, they said, the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was likely to extend the term of the federal grand jury beyond its scheduled expiration on Friday.

That sounds to me as if the reporters were not absolutely certain. And I thought this grand jury’s term could not be extended, but that Fitzpatrick would have to round up a new grand jury if he needs one.

The reporters continue,

Mr. Fitzgerald’s preparations for a Friday announcement were shrouded in secrecy, but advanced amid a flurry of behind-the-scenes discussions that left open the possibility of last-minute surprises. As the clock ticked down on the grand jury, people involved in the case did not rule out the disclosure of previously unknown aspects of the case.

Jim VandeHei and Carol D. Leonnig at the Washington Post write that Libby and Rove have both assembled legal teams.

The White House, district court officials and two possible targets of the CIA leak investigation were making preparations yesterday for the possible announcement of indictments by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald today, according to several sources familiar with the investigation.

Two sources said I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, was shopping for a white-collar criminal lawyer and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove began assembling a public relations team in the event they are indicted.

Now David Gergen is speaking to Aaron Brown and saying that it sounds as if Rove isn’t off the hook, and that the investigation will continue to distract him. Fitzpatrick will likely come under increased criticism for dragging things out if he keeps Rove under investigation, Gergen says.

Update: John Aravosis at AMERICAblog writes,

If this is true, there will be one major indictment tomorrow, of Libby. But it looks like Fitzgerald won’t be finished. All week, we’ve been reading that the White House was just waiting for this to come to a conclusion so they could finally get their act together and get back to work. But if the Times is right, there isn’t a conclusion yet for Karl, by any means. Another grand jury looking even harder at Karl, that means Fitzgerald has his teeth into Karl and isn’t letting go (it also means we don’t have to update our Treason’s Greeting holiday cards – phew!). Just as importantly, Libby will be under indictment and Lord only knows what Fitzgerald is going to uncover about Cheney and the White House’s role in lying to the country about going to war in Iraq etc.

Obstruction

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Murray Waas writes,

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.

Hmm, wonder if Harriet Miers was one of those lawyers?

Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney’s office — and Libby in particular — pushed to be included in Powell’s speech, the sources said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was looking into whether the CIA or other agencies had provided faulty intelligence to the Bush Administration as it prepared to go to war in Iraq. However, Waas writes,

… the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.

Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.

Waas writes that both Republicans and Democrats felt the investigation had been hampered by the White House’s refusal to hand over critical documents. It’s not too late for a do-over, I say.

Jesse Lee at the Stakeholder writes that this passage from the Waas article stuck out:

At the same time, however, administration officials said in interviews that they cannot recall another instance in which Cheney and Libby played such direct personal roles in denying foreign policy papers to a congressional committee, and that in doing so they overruled White House staff and lawyers who advised that the materials should be turned over to the Senate panel.

Jesse Lee comments:

Notice anybody missing from that equation? Did President Bush even know there was a debate? Did he know there were any debates about anything ever?

Maybe he was busy working out on his mountain bike.

Via Josh Marshall, Rep. Jerry Nadler is calling for expanding the Fitzgerald investigation “to look at a possible White House conspiracy to deceive Congress.”

Specifically, I’ve asked that Mr. Fitzgerald seek answers to three pressing questions: whether the CIA leak incident was part of a larger, deliberate effort to deceive Congress into authorizing war in Iraq, who exactly was involved, and whether any of their actions were criminal. If a larger, intentional effort was indeed underway – as evidence is tending to show that it was – that amounts to a criminal conspiracy.

President Bush may be spending the rest of his term huddled in a closet with his lucky pillow.

Home Alone

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Via Kos, we learn that the Miers nomination was withdrawn after GOP senators privately told Andy Card that she wouldn’t be confirmed. For once, Bush must have listened.

Actually, that’s twice, and in two days. Yesterday he caved on Davis-Bacon after Andy Card talked to “a caucus of pro-labor Republicans.” Karl Rove, I assume, is huddled with his lawyers.

Most of us concluded the Miers withdrawal was timed to distract attention away from possible indictments of White House officials, but Dan Froomkin has another thought–the withdrawal was timed to be overshadowed by indictments of White House officials. He writes,

As Candy Crowley suggested on CNN, if there are indeed indictments tomorrow, the Miers withdrawal will be quickly forgotten. That wipes the slate clean, more or less, and gives President Bush an opportunity to pivot away from the leak scandal with a new Supreme Court nomination sometime in the next week or two.

CNN’s Jeff Greenfield also noted that the Miers withdrawal headlines in tomorrow’s papers will be a nice gift to Bush’s conservative base — on the very day indictments presumably come down and Bush really needs his most ardent supporters firmly in his court.

News media is brimming with speculation about what Bush will do next. Will he fight the indictments? Will the next nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor be a clone of Jabba the Hutt? Or will he move more cautiously if he doesn’t have Karl Rove whispering in his ear? Experience suggests the former, but the latter wouldn’t surprise me. At his core, Bush is a weenie. He can act boldly when he knows his gang of toughs are backing him up. But his inner circle is shrinking down to the his most obsequious courtiers–people who flatter Dear Leader’s ego but may not be much use in a fight.

Paul Begala writes at TPM Cafe:

When he came to Washington, Mr. Bush surrounded himself with tough-minded people who seemed not to be afraid to stand up to him. But now his team is loaded with weak-kneed toadies, and Mr. Bush is home alone. Karl Rove, of course, is fending off a potential indictment …

… What of the rest of Team Bush? Karen Hughes is at the State Department, as is Condi Rice. Al Gonzalez has decamped for Justice, and fellow Austinite Margaret Spellings is at the Department of Education. Harriet Miers is fighting a losing battle to avoid becoming a permanent punch line. Ari Fleischer is selling books and dispensing sage advice to corporations. And Mary Matalin is busy raising her girls and rallying the troops from the outside.

The exodus and incapacity were inevitable; replacing Bush’s stand-up guys and gals with suck-ups and sycophants was not.

Myriad pundits have pointed out recently that Ronald Reagan pretty much replaced the White House staff to get his second term back on track, as did Bill Clinton in his second term. And both presidents brought in solid people who were not necessarily long-time associates. But Bush went the opposite route; he drove the solid people away and wrapped himself in sycophany. Begala continues,

Mr. Bush would do well to augment his current staff, a C-Team if ever there was one, with some stronger characters. But to read the Bush-Miers correspondence is to gain a disturbing insight into Mr. Bush’s personality: he likes having his ass kissed. Ms. Miers’ cards and letters to the then-Governor of Texas belong in the Brown-Nosers Hall of Fame. You can be sure the younger and less experienced Bush White House aides are even more obsequious. The last thing this President wants is the first thing he needs: someone to slap his spoiled, pampered, trust-funded, plutocratic, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life cheek and make him face the reality of his foul-ups.

And so they wait. And they sniff the royal throne. They tell the Beloved Leader he’s the victim of a partisan plot (although how the Bush CIA, which referred the Plame case for prosecution, became ground zero of Democratic liberalism escapes me). They assure him all is well. But all is not well. People are looking over their shoulders. The smart ones have stopped taking notes in meetings. The very smart ones have stopped using email for all but the most pedestrian communications. And the smartest ones have already obtained outside counsel.

This White House might be saved if the old Repubican establishment would take the president into hand and give him some direction. But that is unlikely to happen, because the Bushies have pretty much destroyed the old Republican establishment. Sidney Blumenthal writes, “There is no one left to rescue the Republican Party from George W. Bush. He is home alone.”

Now the old establishment is faded. Its remnants largely consist of his father’s superannuated retinue. Not even the old Texas establishment in the person of James A. Baker III, Bush’s father’s field marshal and the former secretary of state (among his many official posts), who managed the Florida contest that gave the presidency to the son, is welcome in this White House.

The Republican Party after Bush, minus its traditional establishment, threatens to become the party of its irreducible base, the party of the old Confederacy and the sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states. But this base, however loyal and obsequious to Bush, regardless of any crisis, does not offer statesmen to step in to handle his shaken White House.

A sharp reversal of policy and turnover in personnel are the only actions that may enable Bush to salvage the shipwreck of his presidency, as they did for Reagan. But bringing in the elders, even if they could be summoned, would be psychologically devastating to Bush, a humiliating admission that his long history of recklessness and failure, from the Texas Air National Guard to Harken Energy, with rescue only through the intervention of his father and his father’s friends, has reached its culmination.

Other presidents, including the aforementioned Reagan and Clinton, have dug themselves out of second-term slumps. But they have done so by taking charge and making changes. Frankly, I don’t think Bush has it in him to do that. I think he is far more likely to retrench and wrap himself even tighter in his comfort blanket of sycophancy. If there are indictments (tomorrow?), it will be interesting to see if he is proactive and asks for resignations, or if he passively allows staff members to figure out their own next steps.

As for the next Supreme Court nominee–Bush’s probably wishing he could clone John Roberts. He may go with someone he thinks would be easily confirmed. Or, he may nominate some drooling paleo-hominid to play to his base, because they’re about the only friends he’s got left. We’ll see.

Not So Wild About Harry

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The Washington Post reports that Harriet Miers just withdrew her nomination to the Supreme Court. So much for counting on November 7 hearings to distract the public from Traitorgate indictments.

Of course, if Bush wants a distraction, the next nominee will be somebody really outrageous.

Update: On reflection, would it have been smarter for the White House to hold off on this announcement until ten minutes after any Fitzgerald announcement? I guess that depends on whatever it is that Fitzgerald announces …

Fitz Watch

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Carol D. Leonnig and Jim VandeHei write in today’s Washington Post that the big announcement will be made on Friday.

The prosecutor in the CIA leak investigation presented a summary of his case to a federal grand jury yesterday and is expected to announce a final decision on charges in the two-year-long probe tomorrow, according to people familiar with the case.

The reporters say it is unlikely he will fake us out and extend the grand jury’s term, which expires tomorrow:

Should he need more time to finish the investigation, Fitzgerald could seek to empanel a new group of grand jurors to consider the case. But sources familiar with the prosecutor’s work said he has indicated he is eager to avoid that route. The term of the current grand jury has been extended once and cannot be lengthened again, according to federal rules.

Whenever I feel impatient, I remind myself that the wait must be torture for Karl Rove. Happy thoughts!

Even as Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald wrapped up his case, the legal team of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has been engaged in a furious effort to convince the prosecutor that Rove did not commit perjury during the course of the investigation, according to people close to the aide. The sources, who indicated that the effort intensified in recent weeks, said Rove still did not know last night whether he would be indicted.

And here’s another happy thought:

A new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll reminded the White House of the damage the CIA leak case has already inflicted: Eight in ten people surveyed said that aides had either broken the law or acted unethically.

Over at the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus, Warren Vieth and Mary Curtius discuss how the White House might react to indictments.

The basic plan is familiar to anyone who has watched earlier presidents contend with scandal: Keep the problem at arm’s length, let allies outside the White House do the talking, and try to change the subject to something — anything — else.

The White House doesn’t plan to attack Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak investigation — at least not directly, several GOP officials said. Instead, expect Bush to unveil a flurry of proposals on subjects from immigration and tax reform to Arab-Israeli peace talks.

Oh, yes, that’ll work. When the press hears the President is going to make a tax reform proposal, they’ll scamper away from the courthouse and come runnin’ to the White House.

Or maybe not.

Republicans outside the White House are pleading with Bush to act quickly and decisively if aides are indicted. “What is of most concern is that the president handle it properly — that he ask [officials who are indicted] to step down; that he not vacillate, not equivocate; that he be decisive,” said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), a leading Republican moderate.

“Changing the subject will not work,” said David Gergen, a former aide to Presidents Reagan and Clinton. “Giving more speeches about Iraq or the state of the economy doesn’t have the weight that action does…. It’s dangerous for the country to have a disabled president for three years, and we’re getting close to seeing that happen. I worry that they [Bush and his aides] are in denial.”

And GOP pollster David Winston warned that discontent among Republicans in Congress was rising. “This is not the environment that Republicans want to run in next year,” Winston said.

The Bushies actually seem to think the story will go away.

White House officials and allies are hoping that intensive news coverage of the Fitzgerald investigation will be short-lived. On Nov. 7, they predicted, attention would shift to the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers.

“Let’s say something happens in the next 48 hours,” said one official. “It will dominate the news cycle until the 7th of November. Then a new cycle begins: Harriet will be the news.”

Once the controversy begins to subside, they argued, Bush will have an opening to change the subject and call public attention to Iraq and the domestic economy, where the administration says there is good news.

“Because all this other snap, crackle and pop is occurring, it’s harder to tell the story of the progress being made on the foreign policy front and the economic front,” another strategist said. “When some of these other stories expire, it will be easier to get back on those issues.”

Others disagree.

[David] Gergen said problems went deeper than the CIA case. “This story’s going to have legs if somebody gets indicted,” he said. “I think the president has to lance the boil directly…. It starts with facing reality, accepting your share of responsibility without blinking.”

Kenneth M. Duberstein, who served as chief of staff to Reagan after his White House was shaken by a scandal over secret weapons sales to Iran, said his old boss “cleaned house and appointed…. a very strong management team. There are lessons to follow there.”

Yes, but this is George W. Bush we’re talking about. He’s not capable of facing reality without blinking, accepting responsibility, or starting over with a new team any more than pigs can fly.

Also: Congratulations to Chicago and the White Sox. The fellow pictured on the baseball card above, John Collins, played first base for the Sox ca. 1912.