Intrigue Has Familiar Ring for Libby and Associates
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 31, 2005
....there is speculation about whether Mr. Libby, facing the possibility of significant prison time if convicted, may decide that even his loyalty to the Bush-Cheney team has its limits.
While Mr. Libby said Friday, "I am confident that at the end of this process I will be completely and totally exonerated," the speculation posits that Mr. Libby may seek a plea bargain that could win him leniency and perhaps limit or sidestep jail time. In return he would have to provide something Mr. Fitzgerald says he still wants: an unobscured view into who at the White House may have signed off on revealing Ms. Wilson's identity, in hopes of discrediting her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. It was Mr. Wilson, a former ambassador, who took issue withreports that Iraq had tried to buy processed uranium from Niger....
***
A former White House official who often worked with Mr. Libby said on Sunday evening, after talking with his former colleagues, that "the scenario everyone is talking about is whether Scooter explains how this all happened." That would include exactly what was said aboard Vice President Dick Cheney's plane in June, just before a few reporters began to hear that Ms. Wilson worked at the Central Intelligence Agency and had played a role in dispatching her husband on a mission to Niger.
Officially, White House officials will not discuss whether they harbor any concerns about what Mr. Libby may talk about. The case is "so complicated and so layered," one of Mr. Bush's aides said this weekend, that no one knows if what happened on Friday was the investigation's climax, or its penultimate phase.
Mr. Cheney - who appears and disappears in critical segments of the indictment, but whose exact role is as shrouded in mystery as ever - made it clear in a statement that he had no intention of explaining his own role....But Mr. Cheney's statement was also effusive in its praise of Mr. Libby....Perhaps that was also an unspoken signal to Mr. Libby to stay in the fold; there was speculation on Sunday interview programs that he could, some day, receive a presidential pardon. (That happened to some in the Iran-contra scandal.) But however warm the words, Mr. Libby is already being cast adrift, much like one of the lonely characters in his novel....
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/politics/31bush.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
