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Thursday, October 06, 2005

Turdblossom is sweating....
Posted by Jill | 4:19 PM

This is interesting:

Federal prosecutors have accepted an offer from presidential adviser Karl Rove to give 11th hour testimony in the case of a CIA officer’s leaked identity but have warned they cannot guarantee he won’t be indicted, according to people directly familiar with the investigation.

The persons, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, said Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has not made any decision yet on whether to file criminal charges against the longtime confidant of President George W. Bush or others.

The U.S. attorney’s manual requires prosecutors not to bring witnesses before a grand jury if there is a possibility of future criminal charges unless they are notified in advance that their grand jury testimony can be used against them in a later indictment.

Rove has already made at least three grand jury appearances and his return at this late stage in the investigation is unusual.

The prosecutor did not give Rove similar warnings before his earlier grand jury appearances.


Sounds like Turdie is pretty sure he's going to be indicted and he's trying to get out of it by singing like a canary.

I wonder how much of that song is going to be about C-Plus Caligula?

The suspense is killing me....

UPDATE: Tim Grieve at Salon's War Room weighs in:

So Karl Rove is returning to testify before the grand jury investigating the outing of Valerie Plame, and he's doing so without any guarantee that Patrick Fitzgerald won't prosecute him. How big of a development is this? "Stunning," a former federal prosecutor tells us. "There is no reason for Rove to make this appearance unless he and his counsel believe he is at serious risk of indictment. None."

It's always risky to go before a grand jury. You can't take your lawyer into the room with you, and you don't know what the grand jury knows or doesn't know. It's especially risky if you've already testified once -- or, in the case of Rove, three times -- before: The odds of introducing inconsistencies into your testimony increase each time you give it. That's why, the former prosecutor tells us, a defense lawyer would advise his client to make a return appearance before the grand jury only in extreme circumstances.

New York University law professor Stephen Gillers offers a similar assessment to the Associated Press. He calls Rove's return trip to the grand jury room an "ominous sign" that suggests Fitzgerald "has learned new information that is tightening the noose" around Rove's neck. "It shows Fitzgerald now, perhaps after [Judith] Miller's testimony, suspects Rove may be in some way implicated in the revelation of Plame's identity or that Fitzgerald is investigating various people for obstruction of justice, false statements or perjury. That is the menu of risk for Rove."

It's possible, of course, that Rove is returning to the grand jury in the hope of saving someone other than himself. Conversely, it's also possible that he's testifying in the hope of implicating someone other than himself.

But what's clear, either way, is that Rove himself is now at risk of prosecution. According to the AP, Fitzgerald has sent Rove's legal team a letter in connection with his upcoming testimony in which the prosecutor says he can't guarantee that Rove won't be charged with a crime. The U.S. Attorneys Manual requires federal prosecutors to issue such a warning before anyone they consider a "target" or a "subject" of an investigation appears before a grand jury. As the manual explains, "target" is "a person as to whom the prosecutor or the grand jury has substantial evidence linking him or her to the commission of a crime and who, in the judgment of the prosecutor, is a putative defendant." A "subject" is "a person whose conduct is within the scope of the grand jury's investigation."

So is Rove a "target" or at least a "subject" now? We don't know for sure, but the fact that Fitzgerald felt compelled to give him a warning suggests that he might be.
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