This is kind of a Zen column.
The problem for a blogger who's even going to mention the name Scooter or Karl is that whatever you write could be moot within minutes.
That was the dilemma facing Washington journalism yesterday (you'll see how I resolved it in a few moments). All anyone inside the Beltway is thinking about is who will get indicted, and when. But with precious little hard information, you find yourself writing stories that are one part informed speculation, one part tea-leaf reading and a whole lot of what reporters call B-matter.
Not that this would stop us, of course. The presses must roll. The newscasts must air. Not to weigh in (Fitzgerald will announce his findings Wednesday! No, Thursday! I meant Thursday!) would be a default of constitutional responsibilities. And some of us might not get paid.
That's why the cable nets went live yesterday morning from the federal courthouse to report . . . no news would be made today! Stay with us!
We'll get to the roundup in a moment. But my little contribution to this vacuum is to explore all these anonymously sourced stories.
Washington is abuzz with talk about what Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby told a grand jury, who they told about Valerie Plame, who told them, whether they told the truth and whether a prosecutor can prove that they did not tell the truth.
And virtually every bit of information, confirmed and alleged,comes from unnamed sources -- ironically, in an investigation of who anonymously outed a CIA operative -- who are trying to shape public understanding of a complicated narrative to someone's advantage.
The result is that after two years of near-total secrecy about the CIA leak investigation, a steady stream of sometimes-conflicting information is now flowing, invariably attributed to "lawyers close to the case" or similarly opaque sources.
As special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald nears a decision on whether to seek indictments of top White House officials, lawyers involved in theinquiry are using the news media to float bits of evidence or interpretations that are favorable to their high-level clients. The maneuvering makes clear that these lawyers are fighting a two-front war, trying simultaneously to avert criminal charges while seeking acquittal in the court of public opinion.
The rush of disclosures in the closing days of an investigation is a time-tested ritual of Washington scandals, and each time the questions are the same: Who leaked and for what reason?
The most dramatic example came Tuesday, when unnamed lawyers told the New York Times that Vice President Cheney had told Libby, his chief of staff, that Plame was a CIA employee weeks before her identity became public in 2003. The account, which referred to notes of a conversation between Cheney and Libby, was the first time the vice president has been tied to a White House effort to learn about Plame, the wife of an administration critic -- and it may have been leaked to cushion the blow of that disclosure.
