"Bad News for Rove" (Mark Kleiman, Huffington Post)

[swag]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kleiman/bad-news-for-rove_b_9536.html

Karl Rove just took two giant steps closer to a prison cell.

Step One: The LA Times reports that Fitzgerald's investigators have been canvassing the neighborhood where Valerie Plame Wilson lives to find out whether the neighbors knew of her employment at the CIA before the Novak story ran, and confirming that they didn't know.

This question certainly wouldn't matter for perjury/false statements/obstruction charges, so Fitzgerald is still thinking about some substantive offense about revealing secret information. The standard under the Espionage Act is whether the person revealing the information had "reason to believe" that the information could be used to injure the United States. If Rove's defense to such a charge were to be that the "secret" information was in fact already public -- the "no harm, no foul" defense -- then Fitzgerald might want to make sure he could knock that defense down before bringing charges.

But the charge to which these questions is most relevant would be the crime of revealing the identity of an intelligence officer under the Intelligence Identities Protetion Act.

I've been assuming that Rove's defenders were right in asserting that the IIPA was so hard to break that a prosecution couldn't be made to stick. Is it just barely possible that Fitzgerald thinks he can sustain charges under the IIPA after all? (The story reports speculation on that point.) Now that would be a surprise, wouldn't it?

What the investigators found doesn't sound good for Rove and the rest of the W.H.I.G.

. . . more

[xchrom]

1. now that's interesting.

it would be the best fitzmas ever if rove went to jail.

[swag]

2. A kick before dying.

More interesting, I think, in light of the latest Rawstory rumor.