<p>FF, I have read some of your posts and I can’t help but think that you’re paid by the GWB Administration. Every time some corruption scandal comes up you can’t help but find an excuse for George. If you’re not a partisan hack can you level just three crticisms of the GWB Administration?. And I don’t mean critcisms from the far-right such as he should declare martial law in Iraq and kill everyhing that moves (although some "estemmed patriotic? generals have given those orders) or that he’s a guilty Conn. liberal on immigration.</p>
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<p>I do have to admit, I get a chuckle everytime I hear a Republican whine about special prosecutor witch hunts. I guess they’ve never heard the name Kenneth Starr?</p>
<p>IMO, Libby, Rove, Cheney, and Armitage should all be executed for treason. I can’t begin to describe how angry I am over a systematic outing of a non-proliferation CIA agent and an entire CIA front company for political purposes. It’s probably the most egregious “high crime” of my lifetime. Just despicable.</p>
<p>For anyone who doesn’t believe this was a systemic White House outing of Valerie Plame, check out this chart from the House Committee on Oversight showing all the paths from admin. officials to reporters:</p>
<p><a href=“http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20070316173308-19288.pdf[/url]”>http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20070316173308-19288.pdf</a></p>
<p>This was not inadvertent.</p>
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<p>By the time it reached the Senate, public opinion was runnng so strongly against the continued impeachment procedings that the Republican controlled Senate wanted to wrap it up and get out of Dodge with as little damage as possible, especially as news of Senate and House leaders’ own womanizing started “trickling” out…probably from the Clinton’s own very effective “oppo research” squad.</p>
<p>The country basically didn’t want to sit and watch the US Congress impeach a President for a sex scandal.</p>
<p>It’s possible that had the House actually held any hearings, heard from any witnesses or examined any evidence before impeaching, they wouldn’t have. </p>
<p>They impeached because it was a campaign promise, not because they did anything diligent to determine if there were grounds for charges.</p>
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<p>The law was on Clinton’s side. What he said didn’t rise to the level of perjury or obstruction of justice. If you’d like I can show you the legal scholarship. But I suspect you won’t accept it, because it doesn’t fit with your preconceived partisan notions.</p>
<p>If the Republican House wanted criminal charges filed in regular court, the way you’re suggesting, they shouldn’t have run for re-election on an impeachment ticket. You only get one shot to try someone in this country. Any fault lies with the people who rushed through an impeachment without evidence to convict.</p>
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And you overlook Lawrence Walsh who was one of the original witch hunters.</p>
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Libby wasn’t charged with that. There was no crime committed and certainly not treason. Libby should not be serving time for a crime for which he was not convicted.</p>
<p>In order to protect people’s rights and privacy, and in order not to confuse the jury pool; all grand jury testimony of all grand juries is by rule secret.</p>
<p>Now as for the question of witch hunt: please consider the number of leaks of grand jury testimony by the prosecutor’s office under Starr and under Fitzgerald. </p>
<p>You may not like Fitzgerald or what he did, but any fair minded person will have to agree he conducted himself in an honorably manner. You may love Starr and what he tried to do, but no fair minded person can say he conduced himself honorably.</p>
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<p>Just a quick fackcheck. Clinton was not convicted in the political trial in the Senate (though Senator Byrd’s explanation of how he decided to vote in Clinton’s favor even though he knew Clinton was “guilty as hell” was quite touching if you remember seeing it the morning after the vote). </p>
<p>The Arkansas court where Clinton first commited the perjury assessed a heavy fine against him and he later lost his license to practice law for 5 years as a result. That’s not something that happens to someone found not guilty, I presume.</p>
<p>All this happened immediately after Clinton left office, so it didn’t get a lot of play in the press.</p>
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Once again, you are wrong/mixed up. The impeachment proceedings do not take the place of trials in the judicial system - all they do is decide whether the person can continue in office or not. They do not expose the office holder to double jeopardy should he be tried in the courts after that. </p>
<p>If impeachement/conviction in Congress were to take the place of legal proceedings in the court system, Richard Nixon would have been an utter fool to resign from office. Based on your theory, he should have allowed himself to be impeached, convicted and removed from office and then use the double jeopardy protection to keep from being prosecuted in the criminal court system. By your theory, a president could commit murder and then have the worst penalty that he would be exposed to be removal from office. It just doesn’t work that way.</p>
<p>Bottom line is that if you want consistent treatment for perjury offenses, then you should be in favor of Clinton standing trial and going to jail as well.</p>
<p>I’d like to know something thats never been reported on, to my knowledge(maybe it has been?), by the sleuths in the press. It is a simple question. Did Valerie Plame have an office at the CIA that she went to to work, and if so, did she go there somewhat regularly? I do not know the answer to this, but have a suspicion that she did. Does anyone know what the fact is/was?</p>
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According to all accounts, Mrs. Wilson’s office was at Langley and she drove to work there everyday for all but a handful of days in the last five-six years she worked for the CIA.</p>
<p>And so is this something I missed because I didn’t follow this closely enough, or is this info usually omitted from most of the reported accounts? </p>
<p>I read a reasonable number of accounts of this story and cannot remember this point coming up.</p>
<p>I doubt it’s been discussed in many press reports. It has been in editorials and blogs as arguments were made, both pro and con, over whether or not Mrs. Wilson was technically covert as defined by the IIPA. </p>
<p>I also believe the fact was at least implied by Fitzgerald’s filings for the sentencing hearing.</p>
<p>thanks for dodging the ? ff</p>
<p>The CIA thought it was a crime to “out” her and asked the Justste Department to begin a criminal investigation. We can deduce from this action on the CIA’s part, that the CIA considers her covert. We can make this assumption since it is a crime to “out” a covert CIA agent but not a crime to “out” a CIA employee.</p>
<p>razorsharp…You say …There was no crime committed and certainly not treason. </p>
<p>That may or may not be true, but is absolutely true that President George H. W. Bush former director of the CIA and father of the present President Bush said that outing a CIA agent was worse that treason.</p>
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Yes, and that incident lead to the creation of the law making it a crime - the same law that Fitzgerald found absolutely no evidence to even bring charges against ANYONE. </p>
<p>And, as far as Fitzgerald acting honorably, that is far from the truth. He is closer to Mike Nifong in my book. First he tries to convict Libby in the court of public opinion with the implication that he was guilty of the charges that you think he is guilty of (which was pretty effective given your views and those of ID). Then, however, he never actually brought any of those charges and when the defense asked for documentation regarding Plame’s status he said that it was irrelevant to the case; even her employment by the CIA was irrelevant to the case. </p>
<p>So what does he do after trial? He brings out the “exposing a CIA agent” charade once again - this time to influence the judge in the sentencing. Once again, he was effective with the judge giving a much stiffer sentence than what was recommended. By virtue of his unethical actions alone, we see that this trial was nothing more than a political witch hunt. He knew up front enough information to determine that a crime had not been committed, yet he continued to pursue it hoping to catch someone in a contradiction.</p>
<p>Fitzgerald, Nifong and Ronnie Earl are all cut from the same cloth.</p>
<p>fundingfather:</p>
<p>You’ve got all the talking points down pat. However, the fact remains that the Rove/Cheney White House made a concerted, willful effort to discredit a CIA operative with classified status in order to punish her because her husband filed a report that contradicted their claims.</p>
<p>The same White House whose favorite talking point in nuclear proliferation and terrorist getting nuclear materials. The CIA operative they outed was a specialist in preventing exactly that. It just makes me see red.</p>
<p>Let’s also keep in mind that essentially no one paid any price for our government ratting out its own agent. Libby’s crime was perjury/obstruction of justice, he was not convicted of an underlying crime directly related to the events (which is another discussion and a sad, sad day that bush and bushies skated on that).</p>
<p>funny thing with judges, they don’t take kindly to being lied to. Again, that is little scooter’s crime</p>
<p>“However, the fact remains that the Rove/Cheney White House made a concerted, willful effort to discredit a CIA operative with classified status in order to punish her because her husband filed a report that contradicted their claims.”
Fundingfather is not the only one who has the talking points down pat.</p>