Frank Probst @ 217

IowaDem @ 192

Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but here’s my take:

Any appeal will take a long time to come to court if it even has legs. Libby will never spend a day in jail because eventually he will be pardoned. Fitz will not have enough to pursue others because of the obstruction and lying. I have a sick feeling that he has no plans to search further into the adminstration’s misdeeds. The actual outing will never be addressed. Despite appearances, this trial will have been a total waste of time. I am truly disheartened and have given up on seeing anyone pay for any of the awful things this administration has done. :>(

Unfortunately, I wonder if the civil trial will turn out any better. The “Gee, I didn’t know I was ruining someone’s career and endangering field operations” defense will get off the leakers.

After all of the obvious b.s. we’ve seen and speculated on for all this time, Rove is still free as a bird, Cheney is tarnished, but still in office and making plans for Iran and Bush is barely smudged (though unpopular) but still in charge and screwing with our country until Jan ‘09. At that point I see Bush and family making a run for Paraguay and Cheney sitting pretty on the board of some no-contract war profiteering company where he and his friends will count the billions they’ve bilked us out of and snicker.

Debbie Downer, look at it this way: Fitz’s job was to determine if any laws were broken in the leaking of a CIA agent’s identity. The President of the United States predicted that Fitz would fail, and that we would probably never know who any of the leakers were. We now know, based on testimony in open court, that there were at least FOUR leakers (Armitage, Ari, Rove, and Libby), and we have fairly damning evidence that Libby lied, obstructed justice, and committed perjury to conceal his role in the whole mess. For someone who wasn’t supposed to score at all, I’d say Fitz has racked up quite a few points at halftime. And we STILL haven’t heard any testimony from Armitage or Karl I-have-a-letter-exonerating-me-but-I-won’t-show-it-to-you Rove. Is it possible that Fitz doesn’t have anything else? Yes, it is. But I think it’s far more likely that he’s still working on this, and the fact that he’s still withholding some of his information from Libby suggests that there’s more to come.

Another thing to consider:

The longer this trial-and-appeals drag on (and Libby WILL appeal — that’s why he has $5 million in the legal fund kitty), the closer we get to the heart of the 2008 campaign season.

Fitz has Libby dead to rights. But Bush doesn’t dare pardon him now because doing so will kill any chance the GOP has of winning back Congress or holding the White House.

I am with Debbie Downer and fear that this case will not go any further. That we will not witness anyone held accountable for outing Valerie Plame and the the very serious and negative effects on U.S. national security.

Any threads of integrity that our nation may be clinging to depend on the U.S. judicial system and congress’s ability and desire to hold these criminals ACCOUNTABLE

As far as potential perjury, Linda2, Wells was trying to say that Punkinhaid knew in ‘98 that Clinton couldn’t have an atty in the GJ room, but claimed during his testimony in this case that he didn’t know that he wouldn’t have been able to have his atty in the GJ room. Wells is saying that’s maybe perjury because he was under oath at the time and said what he said about Clinton, which contradicts himself. Is that better?

You know, if I were on the jury, I’d be wondering, “What the fuck was all that shit about Cheney about?”

Hmmm…. This makes me wonder if the sealed indictment isn’t for Cheney. Obviously, the grand jury heard all this and must have wondered the same thing.

IowaDem @ 192

Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but here’s my take:

Any appeal will take a long time to come to court if it even has legs. Libby will never spend a day in jail because eventually he will be pardoned. Fitz will not have enough to pursue others because of the obstruction and lying. I have a sick feeling that he has no plans to search further into the adminstration’s misdeeds. The actual outing will never be addressed. Despite appearances, this trial will have been a total waste of time. I am truly disheartened and have given up on seeing anyone pay for any of the awful things this administration has done. :>(

Unfortunately, I wonder if the civil trial will turn out any better. The “Gee, I didn’t know I was ruining someone’s career and endangering field operations” defense will get off the leakers.

After all of the obvious b.s. we’ve seen and speculated on for all this time, Rove is still free as a bird, Cheney is tarnished, but still in office and making plans for Iran and Bush is barely smudged (though unpopular) but still in charge and screwing with our country until Jan ‘09. At that point I see Bush and family making a run for Paraguay and Cheney sitting pretty on the board of some no-contract war profiteering company where he and his friends will count the billions they’ve bilked us out of and snicker.

Debbie Downer, look at it this way: Fitz’s job was to determine if any laws were broken in the leaking of a CIA agent’s identity. The President of the United States predicted that Fitz would fail, and that we would probably never know who any of the leakers were. We now know, based on testimony in open court, that there were at least FOUR leakers (Armitage, Ari, Rove, and Libby), and we have fairly damning evidence that Libby lied, obstructed justice, and committed perjury to conceal his role in the whole mess. For someone who wasn’t supposed to score at all, I’d say Fitz has racked up quite a few points at halftime. And we STILL haven’t heard any testimony from Armitage or Karl I-have-a-letter-exonerating-me-but-I-won’t-show-it-to-you Rove. Is it possible that Fitz doesn’t have anything else? Yes, it is. But I think it’s far more likely that he’s still working on this, and the fact that he’s still withholding some of his information from Libby suggests that there’s more to come.

Another thing to consider:

The longer this trial-and-appeals drag on (and Libby WILL appeal — that’s why he has $5 million in the legal fund kitty), the closer we get to the heart of the 2008 campaign season.

Fitz has Libby dead to rights. But Bush doesn’t dare pardon him now because doing so will kill any chance the GOP has of winning back Congress or holding the White House.

Linda2 at 257 — There will likely be further arguments on all of the evidentiary matters in the morning, beginning teoretically around 11 am ET or so, depending on the weather and Judge Walton’s other matters schedule. The jur won’t be back tomorrow until 1:30 pm ET, so the Judge left room for some more motions arguments. Hopefully the contents will become a bit clearer for all of us at some point tomorrow. Glad you stuck around and we appreciate the kudos very much.

Well, I have to say that you are doing an incredible service for us (laymen/women) citizens at this really important point in history. The whole world is watching!!

Linda2 @
90

“I wish to play a certain tapes to the jury to show that Russert gave inaccurate testimony to the jury when he testified.”

If Russert perjured himself in his testimony, and they have the actual conversation on tape, doesn’t that make Libby’s case?

It’s pretty clear from the sidebar discussion that the defense is claiming that Russert lied about not knowing that you don’t get to have a lawyer to represent you in front of a grand jury, where it’s clear from earlier (much earlier!) tape (presumably of a TV show he was appearing on, back during Clinton’s presidency) that he at one time knew that. Russert claimed in his testimony last week that he didn’t know. Therefore he must be lying. Therefore you can impeach all of his other testimony.

There is a time and a place to make that claim. It’s called “cross-examination” and they had five hours to do it. They screwed up, and they want another bite at the apple.

I don’t believe it’s going to happen.

If I’m feeding a troll, so be it.

Hi, it’s me the “troll” ;}
At the time that I asked the question in response to what was being liveblogged, the sidebar discussions which clarified what tapes they were referring to had not occurred. I was interested at the time that, since the trial was quite suddenly coming to an end and this/these tapes attempting to impeach Russert’s testimony were suddenly being introduced, as to whether they could refer to the Russert/Libby conversation. At that point, no one reading the blog had any idea what they were referring to. After observing that evidence is frequently withheld for “national security purposes”, it occurred to me that possibly the phones at the WH or at Libby’s home, were routinely taped, possibly deemed “classified” and withheld from evidence and that possibly at the end of the trial, they had been declassified so they could be admitted. Stranger things have happened, and I certainly had no intention to create such a personal backlash from the blogger who anointed me troll. Many people have since kindly responded, and I thank you. FDL has done an extraordinary job.

Lastly, we learn that no one doing the FBI investigation talked to Dickerson, Gregory, Mitchell…and the defense doesn’t want to call Gregory or Dickerson. So my question is, could potentially the grand jury or investigators possibly talk to them in regard to other issues or is it pretty much all finished here?

Just because Cheney isn’t testifying in THIS very specific trial (or Libby for that matter) does not mean he or anyone else is off the hook as a result of information gleaned in the trial.

We (and more importantly Congress) learned that Cheney was the original source of leaking Plame’s identity, that he did know the details of Wilson’s report, that he misused his office to use intelligence for political gain (a clear violation, istm, of the Intelligence Act of 1947) and that he dissembled repeatedly about all of this and more.

Surely there is grounds in all of that for impeachment hearings on the Vice-President. And PLENTY of fodder for the Wilson civil suit.
Oh, and don’t forget Armitage. That tape recording with Woodward may resurrect the IIPA, despite Woodward’s benign take on it.

YES! I SAW THAT, TOO – I HAD THE IMPRESSION THAT ARMITAGE WAS A SILLY OLD WILLY WHOSE TONGUE HAD RUN AWAY WITH HIM IN A PICKWICKIAN SENSE DURING AN AVUNCULAR CHIT-CHAT. THAT WASN’T WHAT WE HEARD!!!!