High Noon

It seems "papers" won't be released from the Fitzgerald investigation until noon eastern time, and Fitz himself won't speak to the cameras until two this afternoon.

So while there's a break in the feeding frenzy, you may want to look at an article from yesterday by Murray Waas that describes how Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby stonewalled the Senate Intelligence Committee back in '04.

Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources…

…The Intelligence Committee at the time was trying to determine whether the CIA and other intelligence agencies provided faulty or erroneous intelligence on Iraq to President Bush and other government officials. But the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.

I can't help but think this plays into the last minute maneuvering in Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation, but I sure don't want to speculate just how it will.

What we're hearing in the mainstream echo chamber now is that the Fitz case could turn into a trial of the Iraq war. I for one would like to see that--it's what I though the investigation was (or should have been) about all along.

Ultimately, though, the Iraq war has gone on trial in the court of public opinion whether Fitz pursues the issue through legal channels or not.

And that's a good thing.