Is That Legal?

> The waiting at this point is undoubtedly a game of
> chicken. It's impossible from the outside to know
> precisely what he's waiting for, but he's surely
> waiting to see if someone will flip.

Isn't he taking the chance that President Bush will issue preemptive pardons, though? I expected him to issue at least one indictment on Friday to start things moving. It seems to me that delay does not necessarily work in Fitzgerald's favor at this point, particularly with the all-hands staff meeting taking place at Camp David this weekend.

Cranky

I had a similar thought the other day as well.

I doubt Fitzgerald would have put up a website just to publish Indictments and plea agreements. Someone big must be holding out. Unless, of course, it's a ploy by Fitzgerald to convince those teetering on the edge of a deal that he means business and this is for real. What better way than to flash the website before the public ahead of time, so each of the holdouts can envision their own dirty laundry up there?

Point of order: Isn't the decision to indict ultimately up to the grand jury, not Fitzgerald himself?

Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(f) says 12 jurors have to vote for indictment. I don't know how many jurors there are --anywhere from 16 to 23, under Rule 6(a)(1) -- but isn't it entirely possible that enough of them are sufficiently Bush-friendly so as not to indict? That number could be as small as five.

I know it's been said that a good prosecutor can indict a "ham sandwich", but does that still apply in a case as politically charged as this one? And if Fitzgerald sought but failed to obtain an indictment, wouldn't that be a huge disaster for him?

Perhaps he's simply taking the time to make his case as strong as possible, so as to avoid this outcome.

You are technically correct about the rules, Mahan Atma, and about who makes the indictment decision.

Two observations.

First, the entire idea of an indictment here smacks of elevating at worst technical violations of some convoluted covert-agent law into a political dragnet to destroy the Bush presidency. C'mon, this was Politics 101 -- Destroy Your Critics. Now we're watching a politcally tin-eared prosecutor use the inevitable fallback in these sorts of cases of screaming "perjury" and "obstruction."

I thought Senator Hutchison had it right today on Meet the Press.

She said, in short, it's perfectly all right to lie to a grand jury so long as you believe what you're being investigated for either wasn't a crime or only a technical violation.

Clearly, why should a federal grand jury be entitled to the truth about anything when politics is involved -- the American people certainly don't get it. It's all just politics.

My second point is this. Lying about covering up a political assasination hardly compares to lying about sex in the Oval Office. Especially when the first concerns defending America from terrorists.

[TONGUE PRESSED DEEPLY IN CHEEK]

Cranky: "Isn't he taking the chance that President Bush will issue preemptive pardons, though? I expected him to issue at least one indictment on Friday to start things moving. It seems to me that delay does not necessarily work in Fitzgerald's favor at this point, particularly with the all-hands staff meeting taking place at Camp David this weekend."

I doubt that Bush will issue pardons this early in his second term - that's traditionally a Christmas thing.

It would put him in a time bind, though - given pardons a few weeks ago, he could subpoena the pardonees, and require them to tell him everything, under threat of fresh charges.

Given a few days to work with, that would be harder, if not impossible.

The thing is that the president has technically unlimited powers of pardon - he could issue a set every Dec 31, pardoning his administratio for all crimes committed in the past year. But the political implications are another thing.