Going Doooooooowwwwnnnnn......
The MSM has become a veritable leak factory as we await the imminent approach of Hurricane Patrick. Tonight, the WaPo starts to sketch out what look to be the contours of Fitzgerald's case -- namely that the outing of Valerie Plame was just the latest chapter in Dick Cheney and the NeoCon's long-running battle with the CIA, much as Joe Wilson always claimed.
Stuff we know now that we didn't know before:
Senior administration officials said there was a document circulated at the State Department -- before Libby talked to Miller -- that mentioned Plame. It was drafted in June as an administrative letter and addressed to then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who was acting secretary at the time since Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage were out of the country.The fact that Grossman wanted the memo for a meeting at the White House is a tantalizing detail -- did he take the meeting? And if so, who was there?
As a former State Department official involved in the process recalled it, Grossman wanted the letter as background for a meeting at the White House, where the discussion was focused on then growing criticism of Bush's inclusion in his January State of the Union speech of the allegation that Hussein had been seeking uranium from Niger.
There is tremendous public hunger for this drama, and it can't be dismissed as mere lurid fasacination with a salacious story. There is something deeply cathartic on a national level about watching these guys go down after all these years of listening to all the lies and watching as the dead bodies piled up that can't be explained away as fascination with the latest bout of reality TV.
To all the Power Tools and their acolytes who thought this story would die the death of indifference, you have never, ever been more wrong. And that, can we say, is quite an achievement.
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 10/17/2005 11:40:00 PM
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