NYT: Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry NYT: Cover-Up Issue Is Seen as Focus in Leak Inquiry

Interesting NYT article. Rove and Libby ready to be hauled off in handcuffs. No one quoted directly. All the information is apparently coming from the lawyers, though no suggestion is made of whose lawyers are talking. And, needless to say, it is all anonymous. There is no indication that any of this is coming from Fitzgerald or his staff.

Yet if you read the article carefully, I see little evidence presented (as yet) that would support an indictment of either. Rove's offense seems to be that, according to the NYT, he was immediately forthcoming with all of his conversations on the subject.

And Libby's? The NYT isn't quite sure, but does seem to be ignoring the latest revelations concerning his discussion by its very own reporter, Judith Miller, where he apparently mistakenly tells her (or she tells him) that "Flame" (misspelled) worked for "Winpac" (Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the C.I.A. that, among other things, analyzes the spread of unconventional weapons). Note though that Winpac is/was an organization on the analyst side of the CIA, when it turns out that she still actually worked on the operative side of the agency. These two facts seem to imply, at least to me, that Libby, at least at that point, was not operating on classified information.

Rereading Judith Miller's NYT article from five days ago, what jumps out at me is that what this case really revolves around is a battle between the CIA and the Administration over who was responsible for the botched pre-invasion Iraqi WMD estimates. Libby apparently was quite incensed that the CIA at that point was trying to backpeddle from its pre-war WMD stance, leaving the Administration out to dry there, after it had relied on CIA estimates.

The other thing that apparently incensed esp. Libby and his boss, Cheney, was that Wilson was using the VP's office as his excuse for going, yet they had never apparently specifically requested it and they had never received a specific response concerning the trip. In other words, the entire trip happened within the bowells of the CIA, and had not trickled up even to the director's (Tenet) attention.