Fitzgerald Press Conference
Just an initial thought, Fitzgerald went through a lengthy baseball analogy to explain how it is important to look at possible motives. He then said it was important to understand why a person would want to pass information about Valerie “Wilson” on to three reporters. I can tell him why, and it won’t even take me two years and many millions of dollars to do so. (You can get it here free, baby. ) Robert Novak told us why. Reporters were told that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA (not that she was a covert operative there, but that she worked for the CIA) in order to explain how Wilson might have gotten the assignment to go to Niger. Reporters were also told that Plame worked at the CIA and that she probably recommended Wilson for the Niger assignment to refute Joe Wilson’s claim that the Vice President sent him. Joe Wilson has been proved to have lied about that (in the 9/11 Commission report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report). When will Wilson’s indictment come down? I wonder if the prosecutor will be as interested in Wilson’s motives to lie, as he was in Libby’s motives to tell reporters that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA.
I repeat again, though, if Libby did lie, he should accept responsibility for it. He has resigned from his job. That is more than can be said for a certain past President that lied on multiple occassions under oath. If he broke the law, he should face the consequences.
Update: I think Pat Hynes is probably right here. Bulldog Pundit at ABP agrees and provides additional commentary. Michelle Malkin is liveblogging the press conference, which is still in progress as I write this.
Fitzgerald just answered a question about what damage was done to Plame being that she was working a desk at Langley. His response set off some alarms in my mind. He said he would not touch that question with a ten foot pole, but would leave it to the CIA to assess any damage done.. He then went on to talk about how it is very important now, when the CIA needs people willing to go into dangerous places, that people know that the exposure of the identity of a CIA agent is a very serious thing and will not be taken lightly. (That is my paraphrasing, I will find the excerpt when a transcript is available.) What that said to me, the way he worded it, makes me believe that he bought the Demcrat spin that this was an outing of a covert agent who was endangered by the outing. It makes me believe that his intention here is not just to punish those who may be guilty of crimes, but to do a greater good of making an example of those people so that anyone who might be recruited by the CIA would have confidence that their identities would not be revealed.
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