There’s little doubt now that Plame investigation is heating up. Tomorrow’s Washington Post has a piece with a run-down about the who’s been before the Plame grand jury and who’s been interviewed by the FBI. The Times‘ piece says that “prosecutors have conducted meetings with presidential aides that lawyers in the case described as tense and sometimes combative.”
If you think about it, it’s sort of astonishing that this story has still received so relatively little attention given that — as the Times notes — multiple White House appointees have been told they are ‘subjects’ of a criminal inquiry.
(The Times actually uses the term ’employees.’ But from the context it seems to me that the people being referred to are more properly styled ‘appointees’.)
I suspect we’re pretty close to one of the big papers having enough of the pieces in place (and well enough sourced — probably more than well enough sourced, given their skittishness) to sketch out the true outlines of the investigation and just who the investigators believe the culprits are.
I hear mutterings that a certain someone has already gotten a ‘target letter.’ So I don’t think it’ll be long before we know the key details of what’s going on.
But there’s another small note in the Post’s piece that may deserve greater attention.
The Post says …
A parallel FBI investigation into the apparent forgery of documents suggesting that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger is “at a critical stage,” according to a senior law enforcement official who declined to elaborate. That probe, conducted by FBI counterintelligence agents, was launched last spring after U.N. officials pronounced the documents crude forgeries.
Now, most people have treated the forged documents affair as somehow separate from the swirl of political maneuverings taking place in the fall and winter of 2002. The fact that these crudely forged documents weren’t more rapidly dismissed by the White House gets a lot of attention. But it’s commonly assumed that the forgers themselves (and those who actually produced the documents during the run-up to war) were just hoaxsters out for money, outside players with no key political role in the larger drama.
I’ve been following this story for months. And I’ve always suspected that that assumption is incorrect. At the end of October last year I noted that a close look at the timeline of events in October 2002 points to the conclusion that the person who got those documents into the hands of Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba had some knowledge — either direct or indirect — of highly secret debates then going in between the Bush White House, the CIA and members of the Blair government in the UK.
This is a circumstantial argument, and one that is certainly not conclusive. But see the the October 31st post to see what I’m talking about. See this earlier post for another part of the puzzle.
My plate’s been full for the last few months. And I haven’t been able to track down as many leads as I’d like. But there are some pretty big clues sitting right there in plain sight. And if those FBI agents have put that puzzle together too … well, let’s just say keep an eye on that story. Maybe I can still beat them to the punch.
