I doubt Fitz is shooting anything – he has nothing. I too noticed he looked really bad during his press conference. The indictments will fail in court, way too weak.

Something just seems very askew…it almost seems like this is all on purpose (I am thinking it is all playing the press).

Someone made a very good point…he made more, here is one

“…My personal opinion of Fitzgerald is that he couldn’t find his ass with both hands – two years of investigation and all he comes up with are some questionable charges that were ultimately created by his investigation – nothing really to do with the original investigation.

But maybe… maybe he did find a lot of things during his investigation. The problem is that if he found the things we think he should have found, and just blasted away like he should have, maybe it would create a lot of short term and long term problems. CIA would be trashed as a viable government agency. MSM and government would be a long time before they could work together again. MSM would blather and obfuscate like they always do, and no one would ever really know what happened.

Maybe the last minute wrangling with Rove was to deliberately put Libby out there. MSM gets a bone, admittedly, kind of a scrawny chicken wing bone, but they get to make hay with it – and boy do they. The headlines, at least for a couple of days, you could almost see where they scratched out their pre-printed “Rove” and scrawled “Libby”. Didn’t matter, as long as everyone in the world KNEW that Bush did something VERY BAD.

But if Fitz came to Bush with something that would rock the world for a long time – and you know that that is not the game that Bush likes to play – who does Fitz ultimately answer to (er, besides the constitution)? Bush would have said, let’s play this low key, solve the problem for a long time, and not cause huge problems. When this is done, MSM will have been told to go to hell, and will be looking forward to the trip. The half-assed charges against Libby look like they were scraped together from the bottom of the barrel at the very last minute. Fitz had to do some creative blather to make them look good. And Fitz’s rhetoric about no plea deals, and jail for a long time, just smacks of “let’s make this look good”. Let’s make sure this hangs together long enough to at least get through discovery…”

—and what do you know? With the latest leak of the CIA prisons, we can see why!

I don’t always spell it out that well, but I just wonder if they is more than meets the eye!

It was Novak’s 14 July 2003 article which Wilson hung his hat upon. Wilson’s claim has been that Novak’s article is proof positive that the Bush Administration “outed” his wife in order to destroy him.

Yet Libby was not one of Novak’s sources…

It appears Rove was Novak’s secondary source. So the BIG question is who was Novak’s primary source? (“Mr. Tenet!…phone call for Mr. Tenet!…”)

The only problem I see with that is, I don’t think it is illegal for Cheney to have told Libby anything…the only way Fitz has a shot at Cheney is if Libby says Cheney told him to use it to smear Wilson or as a means of punishment and that just ain’t gonna happen!

I feel like a broken record here…but…

Could Fitzgerald be shooting a message across the Administration’s bow? As I see it, he has his fabled career to lose if the details of ABLE DANGER ever see daylight.

Could Libby’s indictment be a signal to Bush to standdown on AD…?

He seemed awfully nervous over a week ago when he announced the results of the Grand Jury… Frankly, I was a bit surprised at how “unconfident” this fabulous prosecutor turned out to be. I’m not trying to slam the guy…I truly thought he looked like a scared rat during that press conference.

Typically, federal criminal indictments are absolutely bare bones. Just enough to inform a defendant of the charges against him.
Federal prosecutors excel at these “plain, concise and definite” statement indictments – drawing on form books and institutional experience in drafting them. Thus, the typical federal indictment is the quintessence of pith: as short and to the point as the circumstances will permit.

Libby is charged with having perjured himself, made false statements, and obstructed justice by lying to FBI agents and the grand jury. A bare-bones indictment would address only these alleged crimes.

But this indictment went much further – delving into a statute under which Libby is not charged.

Count One in its first sentence establishes that Libby had security clearances giving him access to classified information. Then it goes on to state: “As a person with such clearances, Libby was obligated by applicable laws and regulations, including Title 18, United States Code, Section 793.

What is it?

It’s the Espionage Act — a broad, longstanding part of the criminal code.

The Espionage Act criminalizes, among other things, the willful – or grossly negligent — communication of national-defense related information that “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” It also criminalizes conspiring to violate this anti-disclosure provision

But Libby isn’t charged with espionage. He’s charged with lying to our government and thereby obstructing justice. So what’s going on? Why is Fitzgerald referencing the Espionage Act?

The argument goes because Libby has lied, and apparently stuck to his lie, Fitzgerald is unable to build a case against him or anyone else under Section 793.

Cheney provided the classified information to Libby – who then told the press.

Libby admits he learned the information from Cheney at the time specified in the indictment. But, according to Fitzgerald, Libby also maintained – in speaking to both FBI agents and the grand jury – that Cheney’s disclosure played no role whatsoever in Libby’s disclosure to the media.

Libby’s story was that when Libby “passed the information on to reporters Cooper and Miller late in the week, he passed it on thinking it was just information he received from reporters; that he told reporters that, in fact, he didn’t even know if it were true. He was just passing gossip from one reporter to another at the long end of a chain of phone calls.”

This story is a lie. But it is one that reeks of strategic purpose.

It protects Cheney because it suggests that Cheney’s disclosure to Libby was causally separate from Libby’s later, potentially Espionage-Act-violating disclosure to the press. Thus, it also denies any possible conspiracy between Cheney and Libby.

And it protects Libby himself – by suggesting that since he believed he was getting information from reporters, not indirectly from the CIA, he may not have had have the state of mind necessary to violate the Espionage Act.

Libby has been Dick Cheney’s firewall. And it appears that Fitzgerald is actively trying to penetrate that firewall.