more on Plame-gate

Karl in the Crosshairs
I'm a bit surprised that the left side of the blogosphere is not all a-flutter over Jason
Leopold's Plame case revelation of yesterday.

[S]ources knowledgeable about the case against Rove say that he was offered a plea deal in December and that Luskin had twice met with Fitzgerald during that time to discuss Rove's legal status. Rove turned down the plea deal, which would likely have required him to provide Fitzgerald with information against other officials who were involved in Plame's outing as well as testifying against those people, the sources said.

Jane Hamsher did comment on the article, focussing on attorney Robert Lushkin's reaction to questions about his meetings with Pat Fitzgerald.

Luskin would neither confirm nor deny that a meeting with Fitzgerald took place last month. "I am simply not going to comment on whether I was or wasn't talking to Mr. Fitzgerald," Luskin said. "I am not acknowledging that it did or didn't happen, I am just saying that I have never commented about that before and I am not going to start doing that now."

Lushkin's non-denials are indeed interesting, but it seems to me that the larger story is that Fitzgerald has Rove in his grasp, but he wants to go for bigger fish. Based on the evidence we have seen to date that bigger fish has to be Dick Cheney.

So let's re-cap. Rove is as good as indicted (who will come up with the Alito talking points, "Modest jurist!", when Unka Karl is gone?). Fitzgerald has reason to believe that the Vice President of the United States committed a crime while in office.

This is a huge story.

(First Draft)