Scooter Libby does not go quietly. It's late and I should be in bed, but this one I can't resist. Let's parse the big NYT "revelation" about Dick Cheney as Libby's Ur-source in the Plame scandal, shall we?

First of all, this is a leak from Scooter Libby's legal team. Just application of the cui bono principle probably would have told us that anyway, but why bother? Johnston/Stevenson/Jehl helpfully spell it out:

It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government's deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration. But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment, and Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, would not comment on Mr. Libby's legal status. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, declined to comment on the case.

Notice how that highlighted sentence does not read: "White House officials did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate." No: the White House and Fitzgerald's office are provided blanket no-comments (produced at the Times' request), but Tate's (which is not said to have been prompted by the Times) is specifically limited to "Mr. Libby's legal status"—the subject of the immediately preceding paragraph. In other words, the comment about Libby's legal jeopardy is explicitly not sourced to Tate, and that comment alone; while the reporters very carefully decline to foreclose the possibility of Tate's (or his office's) having sourced any of the rest of the information that the article attributes to "lawyers in the case." In a piece like this that's tantamount to giving Tate a byline.

Likely Scooter and his boss don't talk much these days, if ol' Scoots has to send smoke signals to the Dickster via the Times: being under relentless scrutiny for obstruction of justice (among other peccadillos) can probably force you into such awkwardnesses. But what exactly is this particular smoke signal saying? What motivates Scooter to make this play now?

I'm not going to try to go through all the permutations; I'll just pick the one that seems likeliest to me. This is a leak that accomplishes a couple of things: it ratchets up the political heat on Cheney, and thus on Bush; at the same time it manages not to say anything that Cheney doesn't already know, and (more to the point) that he doesn't likely already know that Fitzgerald knows. It may even be, in some degree, a deliberate obfuscation. (The Times apparently failed to locate George Tenet for a comment before the article went to press, but quotes "another former senior intelligence official" expressing skepticism over the central fact-ish thing here, that it was Tenet who briefed Cheney on Mrs. Wilson's CIA affiliation: "The former official said he strongly doubted that the White House learned about Ms. Wilson from Mr. Tenet." Make of it what you will.) Bad, a bit of a shock to the Cheneyan ticker maybe, but not too bad—not yet, anyway. The leak would, in other words, seem to be in the nature of a promise: a promise that more, and worse, and more definitely incriminating, may follow.

And why make such a promise, in such a forum, except as part of a negotiation? I'm guessing that the real scrotum-tightening action within the White House these days, at the Libby/Rove level, is over the question of pardons: an ugly little word, but one that us Fitzmas-impatient kids need to reckon with. No doubt Scooter and Karl have both been made to understand that they're supposed to take one for the team here: immediate pardons, in the current (shall we say) politically sub-optimal environment, would be awfully ticklish to manage. They might produce a swell of condemnation, on all sides, that'd make the Harriet Miers thing look like the proverbial walk in the park. Sorry boys, you'll just have to gut it out till '08. On the evidence of this Times article, though, I'd say that Scooter is so far uninclined to play the good soldier. Is he bucking for a get-out-of-jail-free card?

Update: Just to clarify. I think what this piece means, appearing just (one expects) a bit in advance of indictments, is that Scooter hasn't flipped yet: but that he will, and he wants his erstwhile pals to know he will, unless some pretty ironclad guarantees are forthcoming. I'm guessing it makes Scooter, really, really unhappy to think he might see the inside of a federal prison. I'd be able to guess that just knowing he was called "Scooter."

posted by michael  2:09:47 AM  
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