RUSH: Speaking of prosecutors, ladies and gentlemen, you would think that if a prosecutor is going to file court papers that adds to the political attacks on the president, that he’d be careful about what he was filing. “The federal prosecutor overseeing the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, yesterday corrected an assertion in an earlier court filing that Libby had misrepresented the significance placed by the CIA on allegations that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger. Last week’s special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald wrote that in conversation with former New York Times info babe Judith Miller, Libby described the Iranian story as a key judgment of the CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The term of art indicating there was consensus within the intelligence community on that issue.
“In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimates key judgments and was listed further back in the 96-page classified document. In a letter to the judge, Fitzgerald wrote yesterday wanted to correct the sentence that dealt with the issue in a filing he submitted last Wednesday.” That caused an entire drive-by media attack. That set off a three-day, five day drive-by media frenzy. There was nothing new in it anyway, and it all led to this notion that Bush is leaking things which is impossible. It’s impossible for the president to leak because he alone has the authority to declassify whatever he wants to declassify, and by making something public he’s declassifying.
All he said was, ‘I want to get the truth out.’ This guy Wilson was lying about what was going on and what was in the intelligence, and everybody knows Wilson is lying. They forget it; they ignore it. The 9/11 Commission discovered he was lying about all this, and yet he’s still held up. Chris Matthews, I think, is investing his whole pursuit of the Bush presidency on Joe Wilson, but here’s this prosecutor who had to know that this was going to be jumped on by the media, and still, you got a large staff, how does this happen? It may happen more often than we know. I don’t know, but we don’t hear about it when it happens because cases are not as public as this one is.
What the sentence should have conveyed is this, that Libby was to tell Judith Miller some of the key judgments in the NIE and that the NIE stated that Iraq was vigorously trying to procure uranium. That’s what it should have said in its filing, and it didn’t say that, that’s what he corrected. Libby is not charged with mis-portraying or leaking classified information. In fact, Fitzgerald is not even pursuing that, and said that this whole thing is — it’s Kafkaesque in a sense. It’s a process crime. They’re getting him for perjury on the basis of his testimony before the grand jury, but it’s just amazing. So you’ve got a political prosecutor down in Durham, North Carolina.
By the way, he’s saying, ‘Oh, there’s nothing political about this. This is about justice.’ My rear end. He’s not even holding out the possibility that this thing is a hoax. In his mind, it happened. He’s taken the word of the woman, and none of us know what happened. We have no clue what happened yet, but the drive-by media is convinced it did happen, the prosecutor is convinced it did happen, he’s gotta get his primary victory in three weeks. The mistakes in this filing from the independent counsel, Mr. Fitzgerald, knowing full well it was going to create a firestorm of drive-by media assault, just… I don’t know. Ronnie Earle, political prosecutor? You just have to wonder.
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