Bigfoot (dragging)
Investigative reporter Murray Waas (via Crooks and Liars) reports on former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s foot-dragging during early months of the FBI’s investigation of administration outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
FBI investigators, Waas reports, briefed Ashcroft on suspicions that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove were covering up their roles in leaking Plame’s name. Yet Ashcroft waited more than two months before handing the investigation over the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
Ashcroft's decision to continue overseeing the leak investigation through December of 2003 was a sore point among some federal investigators: Rove and Libby were top aides to the president and vice president at the time, and Rove also had been a political consultant to Ashcroft in his senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns.
Specter v. Cheney
Republican Sen. Arlen Specter gives VP Cheney hell – in a letter. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee was irked that Cheney had worked behind the scenes to thwart the committee’s investigation of the NSA’s deal to obtain phone records from big telcos.
I was advised yesterday that you had called Republican members of the Judiciary Committee lobbying them to oppose any Judiciary Committee hearing, even a closed one, with the telephone companies. I was further advised that you told those Republican members that the telephone companies had been instructed not to provide any information to the Committee as they were prohibited from disclosing classified information.
Here’s hoping that Specter will finally match his deeds to his words.
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