Indictment aftermath and review. The GOP spin machine is claiming that the indictment of Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby is not a big deal because he was not indicted on the underlying charge of exposing a covert CIA agent to the media. To the contrary, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went to great lengths in the obstruction of justice count to explain in as much detail as possible Libby's damage to the national security of the United States.
There is more behind his motives than to politically retaliate against a Bush critic. It is Libby's background and network of associates that remains a major issue.
The prosecutor is also empanelling a new group of jurors in the grand jury process to investigate the motives behind Libby's and others' leaking of highly-sensitive classified information to the media. Karl Rove, Stephen Hadley, Cheney, and others remain under active investigation. When Fitzgerald said that the bulk of his investigation is over, he is correct. He and his team of Justice Department prosecutors and FBI special agents have investigated the leak and who was involved. They know the damage caused to a network of covert CIA operative engaged in sensitive counter proliferation tasks. All that remains is establishing the motives of the perpetrators (or should that be perpe-traitors?) The motives are where criminal conspiracy enters the fray. Fitzgerald supplemented his team with FBI agents from the counter-intelligence section of the bureau. They are looking into possible foreign entanglements of the perpetrators. This is a road that leads to cells of neo-con operatives across the Potomac at the Pentagon and in Rome, London, and Jerusalem. This is also where Fitzgerald's investigation dovetails with that of US Attorney for Eastern Virginia (and incoming Deputy Attorney General) Paul McNulty.
News reports last weekend indicated that Fitzgerald, after speaking with Judge Hogan, the oversight judge for the recently-ended grand jury, spoke to McNulty as well: the AIPAC investigation into the possibility of Israeli spies in the US.
Keep in mind, Libby's notes of his conversation with Cheney in which Cheney told Scooter of Plame's identity indicate clearly that he also learned she was part of the CounterProliferation Division, which by definition is a covert arm of the CIA.
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