Mark Kleiman has some interesting analysis of what is (and isn’t) knowable at this point about what Patrick Fitzgerald is planning to do: Conspiracy and the White House Iraq Group.

I’ve been guessing for months that at the end of the day Fitzgerald will charge Rove and Libby with violating 18 U.S.C. 793(d), a section of the Espionage Act…

I also expect that Fitzgerald will charge other officials with conspiring with the primary defendants to violate that law. Those other people, including members of the White House Iraq group, could either be indicted for conspiracy (i.e., conspiracy to break that particular law) or named as unindicted co-conspirators, which would make their actions admissible evidence against those who were indicted as members of the conspiracy. In addition, I expect ancillary charges of false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice relating to attempts to frustrate the investigation, and perhaps of conspiracy to commit some of those ancillary offenses.

In my optimistic moments, I have allowed myself to imagine that Dick Cheney might be named as an unindicted co-conspirator. I have largely managed to repress the thought that Cheney might be indicted, or that George W. Bush might also be named as a co-conspirator. (No matter what the evidence shows, I strongly doubt that Fitzgerald would want to face the constitutional and politcal sh*t-storm that would be provoked if he indicted a sitting President.)

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post (no! not the Washington Post!), Richard Cohen has ruffled many Bush-hater feathers by arguing that the Plame inquiry is just politics-as-usual, and Fitzgerald should just pack up and go home: Let this leak go. There have been many good reactions to Cohen’s piece; Casey Morris of democracycellproject had this one, for example: Dear Richard Cohen.

This entry was posted by jbc on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 5:14 am and is filed under george_w_bush, the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.