http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Fitzgerald_a..._have_0201.html

Thnx for the Fitz update AP!

found another article...perhaps why Fitzgerald has been busy lately....maybe he can get back to the Plame inquiry now:

19 indicted in Internet piracy

By Rudolph Bush
Tribune staff reporter

February 1, 2006, 12:42 PM CST


An international software and movie piracy ring was hit today with a federal indictment that charged 19 members with stealing more than $6.5 million in copyrighted material.

U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald announced the charges against leaders and members of group dubbed "RISCISO" that allegedly copied and shared pirated films and software through password-protected sites on the Internet.

Founded in 1993, the group is accused of collecting a staggering amount of pirated material. On a single server, the group stored more than 23,000 CD-ROMs of movies, songs and software, according to a federal indictment.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Pravin Rao described the investigation as one of the largest busts of similar pirating operations in Chicago.

FBI agents in Chicago closed in on the ring through the help of a cooperating witness who provided them access to one of the group's servers, officials said.

Among the pirated material federal agents found were copies of the movies "Sideways," "The Incredibles," "Meet the Fockers" and "Vanity Fair," authorities said. Software included Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Intel applications.

It was not clear whether the members of the group sold the pirated technology or simply shared it among themselves.

"Whether or not the defendants make a profit, if all this technology and all this copyrighted work is out there for free ...we are hurting our ability to develop technology and software the way we do in the marketplace," Fitzgerald said.

Rao said authorities suspect the group had some 50 to 60 members.

Of the 19 charged, only one, 29-year-old Tu Nguyen, is from Chicago. Nguyen, a software consultant working on a doctorate in mathematics, could not be immediately located for comment.

Two of the defendants are foreigners, including the alleged leader of the ring, Sean Patrick O'Toole, 26, of Perth, Australia. Fitzgerald said U.S. authorities are beginning the extradition process for O'Toole and for Linda Waldron, of Barbados.

None of the defendants is in custody.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/c...ll=chi-news-hed

If they find that the White House did indeed destroy those e-mails, that constitutes a completely separate crime in itself. Tampering with evidence is a crime all by itself, and in most cases, it's a felony. How many times do we have to catch Al Capone evading taxes before we send him to Alcatraz?

Are there 18 missing emails ?

Sorry for the smart remark.
CB is right- this could be a very serious crime.

message to Fly dangler-

about putting posts where they belong

If you look, I posted this with barely a response, in the plame section

This one has many responses.

That is why the open cafe is where people want to be, and if you want something seen that is timely, putting it in its "proper" home and while it will stay there forever, nobody ever sees it.

So next time I put more things in the cafe, please do not blame me.

Thank you.

Yep, and it's really idiotic, there's a reasonable chance that the emails can be recovered with a warrant.If they're missing from several machines it can also constitute a conspiracy and the contents and/or dates of the emails will be far more damaging with them having been deleted.

I was thinking 18 megs of silence.

I agree completely. I keep saying it, but will try one more time:
I don't have time to search obscure forums for updates. Sometimes, the "view new posts" option catches things, but not always. The cafe is an easy place to look.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200602020012

Published on Friday, February 3, 2006 by TomDispatch.com

When Two Worlds Collide - Rove v. Fitzgerald

by Elizabeth de la Vega


For Karl Rove, no news from the Plame case -- Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a CIA agent -- is definitely not good news. Seismic activity is notoriously silent, so we may not be hearing any rumblings at the moment. But speaking as a former prosecutor, I believe it highly likely that, just below the surface, the worlds of Karl Rove and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, shifting like tectonic plates, are about to collide. As was true with Vice President Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, charged with obstruction of justice and lying to a federal agent as well as to the grand jury, Rove might not be charged with the leak itself. I am confident, however, that Rove will not leave this party empty-handed. He will, at the very least, almost certainly be charged with making false statements to an FBI agent. Here's why.

For starters, the evidence that Rove deliberately lied to the FBI is overwhelming.

In case anyone's forgotten, on July 14, 2003, eight days after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson in an op-ed in the New York Times publicly questioned Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to acquire "yellowcake" uranium in Africa, columnist Robert Novak wrote that "two senior administration officials" had told him the trip to Niger, which Wilson referenced in that piece, had been arranged by his wife Valerie, whom the officials described as a CIA operative assigned to investigate matters involving weapons of mass destruction.

It is now undisputed that Karl Rove spoke with at least two reporters about Valerie Wilson before Novak's now infamous article appeared: Novak himself (whom Rove has known for 30 years) and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. Some details of the discussion with Cooper are in dispute, but there's no question that the two men discussed Valerie Wilson's identity as a CIA agent and the administration's claim that she had arranged her husband's trip to Niger. After the conversation, Rove sent an e-mail about it to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Rove's aide Susan Ralston has reportedly testified that Rove told her not to log in the phone call, although that was the usual office procedure. On July 17, Cooper wrote an article in which he described conversations with two government officials who claimed Wilson's wife was a CIA agent and had arranged Wilson's trip to Africa. Cooper questioned whether the administration was declaring war on Wilson.

Between July 14 and October 8, when Rove was interviewed by the FBI, the Bush administration held approximately 30 press briefings in which the leak and/or the Iraq-Niger uranium allegations were discussed. There were hundreds of news articles and repeated calls for an investigation by congressmen, columnists, and the CIA.

By mid-September, Karl Rove was increasingly being named as one of the "two senior administration officials" who blew Wilson's cover and Bush's press officer Scott McClellan was facing ever more insistent questions about Rove's involvement. On September 16, McClellan said that "it was ridiculous" to suggest Rove was the leaker. On the morning of September 29, McClellan announced that "the President knows Rove is not involved." From that date to October 8, when Rove was interviewed, Bush and McClellan were specifically questioned about Rove's possible role on ten separate occasions. On October 7, Rove and other White House staffers were required to provide investigators with all documents relating to any contacts they had had with reporters about Joseph Wilson, his trip to Niger, or his wife, Valerie Wilson.

As has now been widely reported, when Karl Rove spoke to FBI agents, he specifically told them that he had not spoken to any reporters about Joseph Wilson's wife before Novak's article appeared.

Given the almost seamless press coverage of the leak during the preceding three months, the time and effort that the White House was devoting to the issue, as well as the intensifying focus on whether he himself had leaked the information, it is impossible to believe that, on October 8, Karl Rove -- known for his brilliance, attention to detail, and legendary memory -- did not remember those two conversations with reporters about Valerie Wilson. If Rove told the FBI agents otherwise, it was surely a deliberate lie.

According to reports, Rove then added that he had first heard about Valerie Wilson from a reporter, though he did not remember which reporter or when he heard it. He also said that he had enlisted the aid of the Republican National Committee and conservative news agencies among other groups to spread disparaging information about Joseph Wilson and his wife, but only after Novak's article appeared.

Rove's elaboration not only compounded his initial lie but also illuminated the world of politics that he has been incapable of leaving behind -- a world that collides head-on with the one Patrick Fitzgerald inhabits, where politics have no place and where laws, and the highest standards of public service, prevail.

Despite his measured words, Fitzgerald revealed much about his worldview in the press conference in which he announced Libby's indictment. He said that the investigation was serious because the disclosure of classified information about a CIA officer could jeopardize national security. But equally serious -- and he repeated this more than once -- was the betrayal of government employees by their own officials. Anyone who has worked as a federal prosecutor for two decades, as has Fitzgerald, has also worked closely, often late and long hours, with law enforcement agents, so it is not surprising perhaps that when asked about the damage caused by the leak, Fitzgerald offered the following:

"I can say that for the people who work at the CIA and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected. And they have to expect that when they do their job, that information about whether or not they are affiliated with the CIA will be protected. And they run a risk when they work for the CIA that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don't run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow employees."
Over and over again, in that same press conference, Fitzgerald demonstrated his belief that if you sign onto a system that has certain rules, you have to follow those rules even if it might be personally advantageous to break them. Those who tuned in saw reporters repeatedly ask him about information he could not reveal without violating the rules of grand jury secrecy or prosecutorial ethics. He was asked, for example, whether other people might be charged. He declined to answer. He was asked to evaluate the strength of the case. He declined to answer. He acknowledged how frustrating his inability to answer undoubtedly was to the assembled media, but explained that he couldn't gather information according to the rules of grand jury secrecy -- which prohibit talking about people who were investigated but not charged with a crime -- and then afterwards reveal the information anyway because it was too "inconvenient" not to answer reporters' questions.

Later in the press conference, he said simply, "All I can do is make sure that myself and our team follow the rules."

Fitzgerald's world is far removed from the world of expediency and personal advantage in which Karl Rove operates. In his carefully crafted statements during the FBI interview on October 8, Rove indicated an obvious belief that he could get away with spreading information about government employees for political purposes as long as someone else had revealed that information first, regardless of whether or not the information was disparaging or classified. He did not appear to be concerned with where the information came from, or even whether it was true.

Although it is astounding that Rove would blatantly describe such a despicable ethos (if you can call it that), it should not have been unexpected. In the world of campaign politics that Rove has so long inhabited, smears and personal attacks are designed to seem as if they were spontaneously generated. They can then wander around, undirected, until they finally curl up in America's living rooms like so many mysterious, uninvited guests. These intruders may be rude and destructive, but no one is supposed to be able to get rid of them, in part because no one is supposed to be able to sort out or pinpoint how they got there in the first place. Thus, although Karl Rove has lurked in the background of an unprecedented number of whisper and smear campaigns -- that, for instance, John McCain had an illegitimate child (a rumor spread during the Republican primaries that preceded the 2000 election), or that former Texas Governor Ann Richards was a lesbian (a persistent rumor that was spread during Bush's Texas gubernatorial campaign) -- he has never been held accountable. And that is a state of affairs to which Rove became accustomed.

Rove has escaped responsibility for his sneaky campaign tricks because the candidates for whom he has worked -- most prominently, George Bush -- have had a stunning ability to accept, unquestioningly, the miraculous appearance of information that takes down their opponents. They had no problem about endorsing brazen dishonesty or the least interest in ferreting out bad actors in their camps. At the same time, opposing candidates have had neither the resources, nor the time to fully investigate the attacks before plummeting in the polls. Afterwards, of course, it was already far too late.

Unlike Rove's former adversaries in the political world, however, Fitzgerald has both the time and investigative resources. When Fitzgerald was appointed special prosecutor, all the known facts on the outing of Valerie Wilson indicated that government officials had broken the rules, if not the law. It's no surprise then that Fitzgerald has pursued the matter vigorously; nor should it be a surprise that Rove's statement to the FBI on October 8 would have raised some obvious red flags and caused Fitzgerald to become skeptical. Rove deliberately omitted key information about conversations with reporters that he could not possibly have forgotten; he claimed to have heard classified government information only from a reporter -- despite the fact that he himself was one of the highest government officials in the nation; and then he admitted that he had no qualms about enlisting surrogates to betray government employees in order to achieve political gain.

Rove's statement raised more questions than answers. It also opened a window into the world of a President's key adviser who never left campaign mode and who had never before been tripped up, no matter what he did. Such a man would be quite unprepared for an investigator like Fitzgerald who operates under a very different timetable and in a world ordered by radically different rules.

Now that Rove's statement has been shown to be so obviously false, it would be most surprising if when his world and Fitzgerald's collide, the result isn't a political earthquake. The moment an earthquake arrives remains impossible to predict, but it would be surprising if, in the CIA leak case, the impact of a Rove indictment did not cause massive aftershocks.



http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0203-21.htm

Iraq, Niger, And The CIA

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Feb. 2, 2006

Vice President Cheney and his then-Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were personally informed in June 2003 that the CIA no longer considered credible the allegations that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials. The new CIA assessment came just as Libby and other senior administration officials were embarking on an effort to discredit an administration critic who had also been saying that the allegations were untrue.


CIA analysts wrote then-CIA Director George Tenet in a highly classified memo on June 17, 2003, "We no longer believe there is sufficient" credible information to "conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad." The memo was titled: "In Response to Your Questions for Our Current Assessment and Additional Details on Iraq's Alleged Pursuits of Uranium From Abroad."

Despite the CIA's findings, Libby attempted to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent on a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger the previous year to investigate the claims, which he concluded were baseless.


The campaign against Wilson led to the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA officer -- less than a month after the CIA assessment was completed. Libby resigned as Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser on October 28, 2005, after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice for concealing his role in leaking Plame's identity to the media.

Tenet requested the previously undisclosed intelligence assessment in large part because of repeated inquiries from Cheney and Libby regarding the Niger matter and Wilson's mission, although neither Cheney nor Libby specifically asked that the new review be conducted, according to government records and to current and former government officials. Tenet also asked for the assessment because information about Wilson's mission to Niger had begun to appear in the media, and Tenet thought that the press or Capitol Hill might raise additional questions about the matter.

The new disclosures raise questions as to why Libby and other Bush administration officials continued their efforts to discredit Wilson -- even as they were told that claims about Iraq's having procured uranium from Niger were most likely a hoax.

The answer may lie in part with the already well-known misgivings about the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and other senior Bush administration officials. At one point during that period -- the summer of 2003 -- Libby confronted a senior intelligence analyst briefing him and the vice president and accused the CIA of willfully misleading him and the administration on Niger. Libby was said to be upset that the CIA, in his view, had routinely minimized the extent to which Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction and was now prematurely attempting to distance itself from the Niger allegations.

Libby had also complained about the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control. WINPAC, as the center is known, scrutinizes unconventional-weapons threats to the United States, including the pursuit by both foreign nations and terrorist groups of nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons.

Libby, according to people with knowledge of the events, said that he and Cheney had come to believe that WINPAC was presenting Saddam Hussein's pursuit of such weapons in a far more benign light than Iraq's intents and capabilities reflected. Libby cited CIA bureaucratic inertia and caution and his view that many of WINPAC's analysts were aligned with foreign-policy elites who did not support the war with Iraq.

Libby and others in the office of the vice president apparently were even more suspicious because they mistakenly believed that Plame worked for WINPAC, according to these sources. When they also learned that Plame possibly played a role in Wilson's selection for the Niger mission, their suspicions only intensified.

One indication of Cheney's personal interest in the subject was that some of Libby's earliest and most detailed information regarding Plame's CIA employment came directly from the vice president, according to information contained in Libby's grand jury indictment.

"On or about June 12, 2003," the indictment stated, "Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA."

It would not have been improper or illegal for Cheney to discuss Plame's CIA employment with Libby or other government officials with high security clearances. No public evidence has emerged during the two-year grand jury probe by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Libby acted at the vice president's behest in leaking details of Plame's CIA employment to the press, or that Cheney even knew that Libby was doing so.

Contemporaneous notes of Libby's that were obtained by federal investigators in the CIA leak case indicate that Cheney had originally learned about Plame from then-CIA Director Tenet. Tenet has confirmed that Fitzgerald interviewed him, but Tenet has refused to make public any details of what he told investigators. He declined to comment for this story.

Sources said that Tenet may have discussed Plame with Cheney because of requests from Cheney, Libby, and other administration officials for more information about the Niger matter and Wilson's mission. Cheney's and Libby's interest in Niger was apparently rekindled after New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote on May 6, 2003, that the CIA had sent an unnamed former ambassador to the African nation in February 2002 to investigate allegations that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. Kristof wrote that the ex-ambassador reported back to the CIA and the State Department that the allegations were "unequivocally wrong" and "based on forged documents."

The column led Cheney and Libby to inquire about the then-still-unnamed ambassador and his trip to Niger. On May 29, 2003, Libby asked then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman for information about the mission. Grossman in turn assigned the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research to prepare a report on the matter. Cheney's and Libby's interest in the issue led Tenet to seek more information as well.

On June 11 or 12, according to the grand jury indictment of Libby, Grossman reported back that "in sum and substance Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, and the State Department personnel were saying that Wilson's wife was involved in the planning of his trip."

Also on June 11, 2003, according to the indictment, "Libby spoke with a senior officer of the CIA to ask about the origin and circumstances of Wilson's trip, and was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip." On the very next day, June 12, the indictment said, Cheney more specifically informed Libby that Plame worked at the CIA's "Counterproliferation Division."

Tenet received the highly classified memo on Niger from his analysts on June 17, 2003, five days after Cheney and Libby spoke with each other about Plame's working for the CIA. Sources familiar with the matter say that both Cheney and Libby were informed of the findings in the June 17 memo only days after Tenet himself read and reviewed it.

In the memo, the CIA analysts wrote: "Since learning that the Iraqi-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq purchased uranium from abroad."

The memo also related that there had been other, earlier claims that Saddam's regime had attempted to purchase uranium from private interests in Somalia and Benin; these claims predated the Niger allegations. It was that past intelligence that had led CIA analysts, in part, to consider the Niger claims as plausible.

But the memo said that after a thorough review of those earlier reports, the CIA had concluded that they were no longer credible. Indeed, the previous intelligence reports citing those claims had long since been "recalled" -- meaning that the CIA had formally repudiated them.

The memo's findings were considered so significant that they were not only quickly shared with Cheney and Libby but also with Congress, albeit on a classified basis, according to government records and interviews.

On June 18, 2003, the day after the new Niger assessment was sent to Tenet, Robert D. Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, briefed members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the findings. And on the following day, June 19, 2003, Walpole briefed members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence as well.

Six days after the memo was sent to Tenet, on June 23, 2003, Libby met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and -- as part of an effort to discredit Wilson -- passed along to her what prosecutors have said was classified information that Wilson's wife, Plame, worked for the CIA, according to allegations contained in Libby's indictment.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson himself went public with his allegations that the Bush administration had misused the Niger claims to make the case to go to war. Wilson made his arguments in an op-ed in The New York Times and an appearance that same morning on NBC's Meet the Press.

On July 8, 2003, Libby and Miller met again. During a two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, according to testimony Miller gave to the federal grand jury hearing evidence in the CIA leak case, Libby first told her that Plame worked for the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Office.

Around the same time, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove and at least one other senior Bush administration official leaked information to a number of journalists about Plame's CIA employment and her role in recommending her husband for the Niger mission.

Columnist Robert Novak, on July 14, 2003, published his now-famous column identifying Plame as a CIA "operative" and alleging that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger.

The disclosure did little to discredit Wilson. Instead, it had unintended and unforeseen consequences for Libby and the Bush administration: A special prosecutor would be named to investigate the leak; Judith Miller would spend 85 days in jail for refusing to testify regarding her conversations with Libby before ultimately relenting; and a federal grand jury would indict Libby on charges that he obstructed justice and committed perjury to conceal his own role in the leak of Plame's CIA status to the press.

As Libby awaits trial, one of the unresolved mysteries is why Libby insisted in interviews with the FBI and during his grand jury testimony that he learned about Plame's employment from journalists, when investigators already had Libby's own copious notes indicating that he had first learned many of the details of Plame's CIA employment from Cheney and other senior government officials.

One possibility examined by investigators is that Libby was attempting to cover for Cheney because of the political or legal fallout that might occur if it was determined that the vice president had been involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said, "The prosecutor's implicit inference before the jury may well likely be that Libby lied to protect the vice president. Even in a plain vanilla case, a prosecutor always wants to be able to demonstrate a motive."

That Cheney was one of the first people to tell Libby about Plame, and that Libby had written in his notes that Cheney had heard the information from the CIA director, Gillers said, might make it more difficult for Libby to mount a credible defense of a faulty memory. "From a prosecutor's point of view, and perhaps a jury's as well, the conversation [during which Libby learned about Plame] is the more dramatic and the more memorable because the conversation was with the vice president" and because the CIA director's name also came up, Gillers said.

The disclosure that Cheney and Libby were told of a CIA assessment that the agency considered the Niger allegations to be untrue, and that Tenet requested the assessment as a result of the personal interest of Cheney and Libby, would "demonstrate even further that Niger was a central issue for Libby," said Gillers, and would "make it even harder, although not impossible, to claim a faulty memory."



http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/...06/0203nj3.htm#

No its not. The destruction of those emails was vital to national security and therefore the president was forced to destroy them by Article II of the Constitution. We could tell you why, but then we'd have to ship you to a secret prison in a foreign country. So just trust us!

These scandals get worse and worse.

Boy, when the spit finally falls it will be an nuclear explosion however
Bush is hoping the clock will run out, Hillary will sweep it under the rugs, pardons will be given and nothing will happen

But one of these days, pow right in the kisser


How many trees gotta fall in the forest before someone hears something because the forest is gone and there are no trees left, and people's views are unobstructive so they can again see clearly???