Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?

BRANCACCIO: Former

House Majority Leader Tom Delay wrote a letter yesterday to supporters. And he said it’s all linked, the allegations of financial

impropriety involving Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Fitzgerald investigation. His quote to his constituents, “We are

witnessing the criminalization of conservative politics.” What do you make of that?

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: I would

respectfully disagree. I think we’re looking at when you do something illegal you get caught. And this is what’s

happened with Scooter Libby, at least, the allegation.

There’s enough there that the prosecutor feels that he can make a case and

from all that we’ve seen in the notes that– that Scooter Libby took that tell one thing whereas his– testimony at the grand jury was

something different which is kind of mind-boggling in the first place. That tells you that there’s something real here. And that’s

about illegal activity. …

I can’t imagine a thought process that said to Scooter Libby, “Go ahead and say to the grand jury

that you heard about Valerie Plame first from the press when you have your own notes that you know are being turned over under discovery

that show that you heard it from the Vice-President.” I don’t understand the thinking the went into that. It’s going to be very

interesting to see how they handle this and what the Vice-President does. Because this is his right hand person. And clearly he didn’t

act without– the Vice-President being very involved in whatever he did.

Has anyone

noticed that the coverup worked?

In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby last week,

Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified when subpoenas were issued in August 2004, and “we would have been

here in October 2004 instead of October 2005.”

Note the significance of the two dates: October 2004, before President Bush was

reelected, and October 2005, after the president was reelected. Those dates make clear why Libby threw sand in the eyes of prosecutors,

in the special counsel’s apt metaphor, and helped drag out the investigation.

As long as Bush still faced the voters, the White

House wanted Americans to think that officials such as Libby, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney had nothing to do with the leak

campaign to discredit its arch-critic on Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

And Libby, the good soldier, pursued a brilliant

strategy to slow the inquiry down. …

Bush and his disciples would like everyone to assume that Libby was some kind of lone

operator who, for this one time in his life, abandoned his usual caution. …

What exactly transpired in the meetings between

Libby and Cheney on the Wilson case? It is inconceivable that an aide as careful and loyal as Libby was a rogue official. Did Cheney set

these events in motion? This is a question about good government at least as much as it is a legal matter.

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