Paying attention?

Manifesto

So CNN reports that the Republican angle to explain why there will be no Congressional investigations into the White House leak is... wait for it ..., lack of criminal conduct.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said the investigation showed no one in the White House did anything illegal.

"Apparently, they didn't violate the law in setting the record straight," Graham told CBS's "Face the Nation." "The allegation is that when they told the grand jury about the process they made some misstatements and false allegations."

In the article, the Democrat response cited is a mild one from my senior Senator Chuck Schumer. There is no other refutation of this statement. Admittedly, if Democrats can't explain the illogic of this attack then they don't deserve to win an election. But should the Democrats even have to explain? Or should the media have a memory span of more than 2 days. From Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's Press Conference on Friday:

QUESTION: Mr. Fitzgerald, this began as a leak investigation but no one is charged with any leaking. Is your investigation finished? Is this another leak investigation that doesn't lead to a charge of leaking?

[...]

FITZGERALD: Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray?

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

As you sit here now, if you're asking me what his motives were, I can't tell you; we haven't charged it.

So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.

I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge.

This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.

Wow. So Fitzgerald himself says that one reason there is no criminal charge for the actual leak may be because Scooter Libby obstructed his investigation. He couldn't prove a crime was committed because of the obstruction. The investigation didn't prove that the White House did nothing illegal, just that a crime couldn't be charged because of the other illegal things that the White House did. In fact, Fitzgerald, the man bringing the charges, says that the need to get to the bottom of the actual leak is "extremely important."

Now, I remembered this statement despite hearing the conference on the radio while busily doing other work. Amazingly, the unnamed author of this story at CNN, whose job it is to actually cover these events, doesn't have the same memory. Either I'm some kind of superman or the media is so lazy in reporting that it believes every word spoken by anybody, fact-checking be damned. And, as everyone who reads the blog and hundreds of others can attest, I'm no superman. So here you go CNN, here's a link to Fitzgerald's press conference. Read this, study it, and actually begin to do some reporting. Thanks.