What Will Today's Big News Look Like Tomorrow?
When I picked up the New York Times this morning, a little shiver ran through me. There, in the top right-hand column was the headline over the story about Vice President Dick Cheney: "Cheney Told Aide Of C.I.A. Officer, Lawyers Report." After all the rumors, innuendo and speculation, here was a story that seemed to pull the vice president into the grand jury investigation of how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked to the media.
In spite of all the caveats, one sentence of the article, reported by David Johnston, Richard Stevenson and Douglas Jehl, stuck out:
"The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration's handling of intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program to justify the war."Those are the kinds of sentences we often look back on in a year or so and say, ah ha, that was the moment this thing started to get really serious. It falls somewhere between the Washington Post's little-noticed report on the original Watergate break-in and the day that the Monica Lewinsky bombshell exploded. It might not be all-important at the end, but marks a time where the story turned.
By the time I had finished the Times op-ed page, though, I started to wonder about the importance of the Cheney story. There, columnists John Tierney and Nicholas Kristof make cases for why prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald should bring no indictments in the case. Tierney focuses on the internal fights between the White House and the CIA, concluding:
"No one deserves to go to jail for leaking information to reporters without criminal intent. The special prosecutor was assigned to look for serious crimes, not to uncover evidence that bureaucrats blame other bureaucrats when things go wrong."Kristof sees a broader impact on an indictment:
"To me, the whisper campaign against Mr. Wilson amounts to back-stabbing politics, but not to obvious criminality. And if indictments are issued for White House officials on vague charges of revealing classified information, that will have a chilling impact on the reporting of national security issues. The ultimate irony would come if we ended up strengthening the Bush administration's ability to operate in secrecy."While the beltway is abuzz with the Cheney story and pending indictment speculation, it's once again worth reminding ourselves that there is plenty to this story we don't know – most importantly the direction it's heading in. We'll likely know before long how important this morning's Cheney story is. Meanwhile, we hopefully still have a day or two to take a deep breath and brace ourselves for the next shoe to drop. If it does.