Eh small world small

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Eh, small world, small conspiracy.

This news has been out for a few weeks and I just hadn’t noticed. But the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Fund is being headed up by none other than Mel Sembler, the Cheney-fan and the big-ticket GOP fundraiser from Florida who was the US Ambassador to Italy when all the secret meetings took place and when the forged uranium papers showed up at the US Embassy in October 2002.

Since I’ve reported on this story for almost two years and am still writing a series on it, I need to say explicitly that I’ve never seen any evidence tying Sembler to any bad acts related to the forgeries. So the ‘conspiracy’ crack is mainly a jest. But there’s a lot that’s still really murky about what was happening at the US Embassy in Rome after 9/11 with the forgeries and other matters. That was on Sembler’s watch. And Libby’s bad acts stem from the whole forgeries bamboozlement. (Whacking Wilson was part of the larger White House effort to keep the forgeries scam covered up — a cover up that’s still underway.)

So Sembler just seems like a pretty big part of this story to be collecting money for the one person under indictment for their role in it.

Latest Editors' Blog
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: