With all that’s going on in the world, it’s sometimes easy to forget the Bush White House is still under a criminal investigation.
And while we’ll soon find out if any indictments will be forthcoming — Matt Yglesias seems to think there won’t be — I certainly won’t be able to complain about Patrick Fitzgerald’s thoroughness. This guy’s talked to everyone.
Over the weekend, for example, we learned that Colin Powell has joined the very long list of administration officials to appear before the grand jury.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has spoken to a grand jury probing whether Bush aides leaked the name of a CIA agent to retaliate against her husband, an Iraq war critic, the State Department said Sunday.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Powell spoke to the grand jury on July 16 about the case of CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose name surfaced in a piece written by columnist Robert Novak after her husband raised questions in public about the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war.
Boucher declined specific comment on the testimony but he stressed Powell had not talked to Novak about Plame. He said the secretary of state was not a subject of the investigation.
[…]
Asked if Powell called or spoke to Novak about Plame, Boucher said: “Of course not.”
That’s fine; no one really suspected Powell in this mess anyway.
Newsweek, which first reported this story, said the Powell testimony demonstrates two things: Fitzgerald’s probe is “highly active and broader than has been publicly known” and that “knowledge about Plame was circulated at the highest levels of the administration.”
Newsweek’s first point seems a little off. The investigation has been seen as quite “broad” and plenty “active” for many months now. Indeed, Fitzgerald has spoken with every key White House staffer imaginable, including the president and vice president themselves. The only reason this hasn’t been “publicly known” is that the national media has generally shown the attention span of a three-year-old when it comes to this story.
For what it’s worth, this report comes about a month after we learned that Plame Game investigators also interviewed Rice and Tenet as part of the inquiry.
U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was interviewed as part of an investigation into whether an administration official leaked a covert CIA officer’s identity to retaliate for her husband’s criticism of the Iraq war, a U.S. official said Friday.
Rice was not under oath during the interview, which, a senior administration official said, took place “early on” in the investigation.
The official, who spoke to reporters traveling with President Bush to Ireland, would not say when the interview took place, but it appears to have been several months ago and had not been previously disclosed.
[…]
Outgoing CIA Director George Tenet was also interviewed in the investigation, a month or so ago, a U.S. official said, but gave no further details.
It shouldn’t be much longer until we learn the results of this investigation. Stay tuned.