Open Plamegate indictments thread

So it looks like Libby gets indicted today, and Rove is not out of the woods. Special Prosecutor will hold a press conference at 2 PM today on the matter — according to Fitzgerald’s official web site. Be sure to check out Tom Maguire’s blog, as he has pretty much owned this story since day ...

By Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

October 28, 2005, 3:06 PM

So it looks like Libby gets indicted today, and Rove is not out of the woods. Special Prosecutor will hold a press conference at 2 PM today on the matter -- according to Fitzgerald's official web site. Be sure to check out Tom Maguire's blog, as he has pretty much owned this story since day one. But then come back and comment away here. UPDATE: The AP reports that Libby has been inicted on obstruction of justice, perjury, and making a false statement to investigators. Kathryn Jean Lopez says there are two counts of both perjury and making a false statement. I suspect this quote from William Kristol's Weekly Standard essay hinting that no indictments would be the way to go is going to be resurfacing in the blogosphere for the rest of the day:

So it looks like Libby gets indicted today, and Rove is not out of the woods. Special Prosecutor will hold a press conference at 2 PM today on the matter — according to Fitzgerald’s official web site. Be sure to check out Tom Maguire’s blog, as he has pretty much owned this story since day one. But then come back and comment away here. UPDATE: The AP reports that Libby has been inicted on obstruction of justice, perjury, and making a false statement to investigators. Kathryn Jean Lopez says there are two counts of both perjury and making a false statement. I suspect this quote from William Kristol’s Weekly Standard essay hinting that no indictments would be the way to go is going to be resurfacing in the blogosphere for the rest of the day:

[I]f anyone lied under oath the way Bill Clinton did–knowingly and purposefully in order to thwart a legitimate legal process, or if anyone engaged in an obstruction of justice, the way Bill Clinton did, then indictments would be proper.

Here are links to the actual indictment as well as the transcript of Fitzgerald’s press conference, as well as the Washington Post‘s explanation of the charges. LAST UPDATE: For my money — and assuming that Fitzgerald has completed his indictments — Jason Zengerle has the last, best word at TNR’s Plank:

the whole notion that the Fitzgerald investigation was going to reveal how the Bush administration led us into Iraq now seems to have been completely wrong. Democrats wanted their own Ken Starr–a prosecutor who let his investigation metastasize and whose operation leaked like a sieve. Instead, they got Elliot Ness. As Fitzgerald himself put it at his press conference:

This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel. This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer’s identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person — a person, Mr. Libby — lied or not. The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction. And I think anyone’s who’s concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn’t look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.

That sounds like good advice.

Indeed.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

Tag: Politics