Justice Department Balks at Turning Over Plame Records
In a letter to House Intelligence Committee Chair Peter Hoekstra yesterday, the Justice Department balked at turning documents related to the Plame investigation over to Congress. It said that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald advised that to do so would interfere with his criminal investigation, which "lawyers close to the investigation" (read, lawyers for those under investigation) expect to be concluded in the next few weeks.
As we reported here, yesterday the House Judiciary Committee and International Relations Committee, in party-line votes, rejected a Congressional Resolution of Inquiry into the leak of the identity of former covert operative Valerie Plame. As expected, the House Intelligence Committee today also rejected the Resolution of Inquiry, again on a party line vote. As Murray Waas says tonight,
Had the resolutions of inquiry been adopted, they would have lead to the first independent congressional inquiries of the Plame affair, and perhaps even the public testimony of senior Bush administration aides, such as Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, and I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, about their personal roles.
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