Fitzgerald's Beanball Metaphor

At his Friday press conference, Patrick Fitzgerald used a baseball metaphor, but left it to us to devine its implications...

If a pitcher hits a batter in the head, he said, then you try to figure out what is in his head. Was he trying to hit him? Brush him back? Wild throw?

But what if several pitchers hit the same batter in the head? Wouldn't you then look at the pitching coach and the manager and try to figure out what is in their head... Not too difficult in this instance to figure out who the pitching coach(VPOTUS) and manager(POTUS) are in this instance... nor is it too difficult to figure out what is in their heads. It's called a conspiracy to bean Valerie Wilson. And if the whole team is trying to throw sand in the umpire's eyes, well that is called a conspiracy to obstruct justice... I'd be surprised if Fitzgerald does not get the implications of his own metaphor.

Fitz gave us the big story and we are missing it!

Fitz said it loud and clear in his press conference.

"That Talking Point won't fly." Perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice are serious.

Perjury and Obstruction remain his focus right now... and that focus is on Cheney AND Rove, I believe. The Cheney focus has been reviewed ad nauseum, as have the cosmetic aspects of the Rove focus. But there is one BIG aspect of possible Rove obstruction and perjury that has gone unexplored... The cover-up that began only when they felt they needed a cover story. In other words...

What did Rove do when Novak's article became controversial?

Immediately after Novak's Plame-outing column, David Corn blew the whistle that there was a violation of the law in blowing a CIA operative's cover. And the Daily News followed up on Corn's assessment with Novak.

In an interview with Newsday on July 20, 2003, Novak said...

...his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

Wilson and others said such a disclosure would be a violation of the law by the officials, not the columnist.

Novak reported that his "two senior administration officials" told him that it was Plame who suggested sending her husband, Wilson, to Niger.

Steady Eddie in DKos comments notes...

Novak only started to establish a cover story with Rove in October 2003 -- after the DoJ investigation started. In other words, when he thought he was going to get away with it with ease, right after the column, he saw no problem in saying HE wasn't being the bad guy.

Only when he started getting a little more realistic about the consequences of his situation did he realize he had to make motivations and cover stories match up. Then "they came to me" had to become inoperative.

Now what if Fitzgerald has evidence of Rove, Novak contacts, or of a conspiracy to change Novak's story in the aftermath of the Corn article and the DOJ investigation... and Fitz was somehow was able to get Novak to testify to that.

Check out Jane Hamshire citing Murray Waas, and then riffing...

BTW -- I should note that I seriously doubt Novak was all that helpful right out of the gate. I've always given a great deal of credence to Murray Waas's claim that Bobby cooked up some whopper with Rove early on:

But federal investigators have been highly skeptical of Novak's account -- as they have been of Rove's -- and were concerned that the key participants might have devised a cover story in the days shortly after it became known that a criminal investigation had been commenced.

If I had to guess I'd say that Fitzgerald gave Novak a dose of the same magical memory helper he gave to Judy Miller, probably around the same time Novak had his meltdown on Crossfire. Just a hunch. But a strong one.

Also, check out this WSJ article, which has Rove discussing with White House staffers a strategy for discrediting Wilson before Novak's article appeared.

Yesterday, one former administration official said Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff, had discussed former diplomat Joseph Wilson and the role of his wife, Ms. Plame, with White House staffers in 2003. That buttresses the possibility that Mr. Fitzgerald is investigating charges related to leaking classified information.

The former official said Mr. Rove had these discussions after Mr. Wilson went public with claims that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence to build support for the Iraq war. Mr. Rove discussed discrediting Mr. Wilson, the former official said, adding that Mr. Rove didn't necessarily name Ms. Plame or make her a key talking point in conversations with other White House officials. Prosecutors have been told of these internal discussions.

Robert Luskin, an attorney for Mr. Rove, said, "The allegation is maliciously false."

And of course who can forget Thomas DeFrank's now famous article outing Bush's knowledge of Rove's involvement in the leak?

WASHINGTON - An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.

"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."

Now, we all heard Patrick Fitzgerald on Friday... And we saw all of the here-to-fore unknown sources that he lined up to establish Libby's knowledge of the leak. I would bed dollars against donuts that he has a similar list of sources to show a chain of Rove's mendacity about the COVER-UP of the Plame work-up.

Do you think he is going to let Karl Rove go, just because Adam Levine says Rove didn't mention Valerie Plame...

I believe Fitzgerald will indict Rove... or he has flipped him in a big way.

The best two reasons/explanations I can see for why he just did Libby on Friday are:

1) To make a PR point about the seriousness of Perjury and Obstruction of Justice... Her heard Kay Barely Functioning on RUSSERT'S SHOW of all places and figured that he had a better shot of making the point that this is serious, willful and felonious with the clarity and power of the facts against Libby; the relative anonymity of Libby; and the lack of political support for Libby.

2) He read that Daily News Article then spoke with Luskin, and said, now that they are hanging your client out to dry, maybe he wants to take another shot at the "What did the President know and when did he know it?" question. Hence the visit to Bush's personal attorney after the Press Conference.

3) He had testimony coming in from rats scurrying the sinking ship that strengthened his cas against Rove.

4) Libby was the original target of the old grand jury and Fitz didn't want a grand jury that was deciding upon Rove indictments to be tainted with even the hint of perjury trap... i.e. Rove was simply a witness to the grand jury investigation targetting Libby, but his perjurious testimony to the old grand jury makes him the target of a new grand jury investigation.

So hang on folks... It's beginning to look alot like Fitzannukah!

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P.S. Why didn't a reporter at the Fitz press conference ask the question, "When did you empanel the new grand jury?"

P.P.S. Can anyone remember who wrote the article in the last two weeks that said something like... This case began with a senior witness telling a compelling story of how the leak happened, and then the special prosecutor had reason to doubt the veracity of that witness... If I can remember who that reporter was, I think I will know who to turn to for the best information about what Fitz is thinking.

P.P.P.S. You can read my previous diatribes and soliloquy's at...

kant's DKos diary

INNAUGURAL POST: The Essence of George Bush

This passage from the Washington Post, Tuesday, July 27, 1999, tells alot about the heart of the anti-intellectualsim in the White House:

When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.

Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.

The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. "I knew your father," Bush remembers Coffin saying, "and your father lost to a better man."

Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father's values were not universally admired.

"You talk about a shattering blow," said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. "Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I'm not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel]."

The protestations of intellectualism from the so-called neoconservatives are merely the vanities of fourth-rate Straussians. We have heard that Rove has longed to take us back to the McKinley era... to the extent that Bush understands history, I believe he would rather take us back to the pre-Enlightenment Era... Feudalism, primogeniture and an unquestioned aristocracy buttressed by the notion of Divine Right. That is the depth of immaturity with which we are dealing.

P.P.P.S. You can read my previous diatribes and soliloquy's at...

kant's DKos diary