Patrick Fitzgerald: “At the end of the day, what appears is that Mr Libby’s story, that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true - it was false,” he said.
“He was at the beginning of the chain of the phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government, to a reporter. And he lied about it afterwards, under oath, and repeatedly.”
Karl Rove, for the time being, remains uncharged. Time will tell whether Joe Wilson gets his wish and sees Rove “frog-marched” out of the White House.
There also is a larger, looming question: what was the Vice President’s role in all of this? Libby may go to jail rather than give up his boss, but it’s hard to believe that he would have gone to the trouble of outing Valerie Plame without SOME direction from higher up. And for him, higher up consists of only two people: Mr. Cheney, and Mr. Bush.
We probably never will know the whole story, but if Mr. Libby is in fact convicted, then perhaps some justice will come in this case. However, for the 2000 Americans and countless Iraqis who have died as a result of this administration’s lies in the lead-up to the Iraq war, justice is nowhere in sight.
