You see, I had written an imagined "Peek into Patrick Fitzgerald's Diary" where the Special Counsel was ranting on about how he was going to tighten the legal noose around Rove's pudgy neck and maybe wind up getting Cheney as well.
When I woke up early this morning, the news was out: Fitzgerald apparently wasn't going to indict Rove.
My heart fell. Not just because the Rovester, perhaps the most detested and dangerous member of the Bush Bunker crew, was allowed to skate, but also because the piece I had worked on for days suddenly was behind-the-times and irrelevant.
But that was merely a personal hiccup. The more serious matter was that Rove would be able to devote his full time, attention and dirty-politics skills to the upcoming November election, instead of having to spend inordinate amounts of time in consultation with his legal defense team trying to stay out of the federal slammer.
A DEAL MAY HAVE BEEN STRUCK
That last expression may help explain what is going down here. It may just turn out that Rove was so desperate to escape the likelihood of incarceration that he made a deal with Fitzgerald. He gets to walk away if he testifies against Scooter, and tells what he knows about Cheney and maybe even Bush, among others.
That certainly is one way to interpret the Rove news this morning. The other is that Fitzgerald simply didn't think he could make the charges stick against Rove and felt obliged to cut him loose.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the former interpretation, or maybe even a combination of the two. Even just judging from news reporting on this story, it would appear that an open-and-shut case had been made for charging Rove with, at the very least, perjury and obstruction of justice. Whether or not Fitzgerald was convinced he could make the case stand up in court, he may have convinced Rove that conviction was pretty much a slam-dunk.
Rove's lawyer won't release the text of Fitzgerald's letter that reportedly gives his client a walk. It's possible there are hints in the actual text indicating why Rove is free to go: on condition that he cooperate with the ongoing investigation, that sort of thing.
"SEALED VS. SEALED"
Which brings us to Jason Leopold's story Monday that asserted, with far less bravado than his previous "scoop" weeks ago announcing Rove's "indictment," the likelihood that the indictment had been under seal for nearly five weeks. Leopold even supplied the title under which the likely indictment was kept secret ("Sealed vs. Sealed") and a case number ( "06 cr 128").
Hardly anyone was willing to publish that story. Was Leopold full of crap (again), many editors and bloggers mused? Or is there a more complicated, and compelling, interpretation?
Here's mine: If indeed Rove was told that a sealed indictment had been issued for his arrest in the case, it's possible that Fitzgerald used that scary fact as added inducement to Bush's chief political advisor to use this last chance to cut a deal. Rove, seeing the likely prison handwriting on the wall, made the deal, which took weeks of detailed discussions between Rove's team and Fitzgerald to work out.
DESPAIR AND TRANSFORMATION
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