Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.And there's more.
During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.
Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment. Sources said Fitzgerald was in Washington, DC, Friday and met with Luskin for about 15 hours to go over the charges against Rove, which include perjury and lying to investigators about how and when Rove discovered that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative and whether he shared that information with reporters, sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said.
It was still unknown Saturday whether Fitzgerald charged Rove with a more serious obstruction of justice charge. Sources close to the case said Friday that it appeared very likely that an obstruction charge against Rove would be included with charges of perjury and lying to investigators.
It's puzzling to me that this is still totally off the radar screen of the rest of the media. There are some high-wattage people following this story, in the blogosphere as well as the big papers and the networks. One would expect that, if Leopold is reaching, his story would have been subjected to the withering dissection that is the blog world's signature; and if he really does have the story it would seem likely that someone else would have picked it up and run with it--or at least covered his story in one of those "reporting about the rumors we're unwilling to investigate ourselves" pieces that sometimes pass for journalism these days.
Wouldn't you think?
One other odd point: Although I confess I love the sound of the sentence "he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order," I don't completely get what it refers to. What happens in twenty-four hours? Maybe I've watched too much "Law & Order," but it seems to me that even if Rove is indicted not only for everything he did, but for everything we might ever dream he did, it's still just an indictment: Fitzgerald's staff talks to Rove's legal staff, papers are exchanged, Rove makes some appearances in federal buildings where other people do most of the talking, any bail that might be set gets paid with cash from K-Street (in those cool titanium briefcases the money men always give away like party favors when they make payoffs), and then Rove goes on his way. "24 hours to get his affairs in order" suggests he'll be taken into custody, which seems unlikely.
(Cross-posted at Preemptive Karma.)
2 comments:
The MSM have to wait for the WH talking points.
Sad but true.
bn
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