Breaking Report: Karl Rove Indicted
Posted on Sat May 13, 2006 at 02:23:01 PM EST
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Huge breaking news from Jason Leopold just now at Truthout -- Karl Rove has been indicted.
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.
During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning. Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment.
Leopold reports the charges include lying to investigators and perjury before the grand jury but it is not yet known if obstruction of justice is one of the charges.
If obstruction is off the table, there's still a chance Karl Rove can avoid prison by pleading guilty and continuing to cooperate with Fitzgerald. Only if prison is unavoidable, do I think Karl Rove will fight.
Update: Jason said the meeting lasted 15 hours. That tells me they were hammering out a plea deal to the charges. Were they successful in coming to terms? Stay tuned.
Update: I'm still thinking out the scenarios. If I had to take bets, I'd say efforts at a plea agreement failed. Why? This line from Jason's report:
[Fitzgerald] instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.
It sounds to me like they went round and round for hours and weren't able to come to a meeting of the minds. So my take is Karl Rove will be fighting the Indictment.
Update: Here's another scenario if Jason's article is accurate, and it's just my speculation as to how this could have played out:
The grand jury indicts Karl Rove Wednesday. On Friday, Fitz meets with Luskin to offer a final plea deal. He tells Luskin what the charges are, but does not provide a copy of the actual Indictment. They haggle and haggle but can't come to a final resolution. Fitz gives his final offer, and tells Luskin either he takes the plea by a certain time over the weekend, or the Indictment is unsealed Monday morning and Rove needs to make arrangements to surrender. Fitzgerald then leaves.
Luskin, Rove and other members of Team Rove then spend many hours, perhaps well into the early morning hours of Saturday (hence Jason's 15 hour statement), debating what Rove should do. Rove finally decides to decline the offer, either not willing either to admit to certain facts or believing that some of the charges in the Indictment are unfair and legally unsupportable.
One question I have is whether Fitz would actually deliver a copy of the Indictment to Luskin in advance of its unsealing in Court. If it's sealed, it seems to me he can't share it. He could, howver, hand over a paper with a list of charges -- or a draft of a proposed plea agreement that contains the charges Rove must plead to to get a deal.
Luskin has always maintained that Rove has cooperated fully with Fitz' investigation. I continue to believe a 5k (sentence reduction for cooperation) has been made available to Rove. It may just be the amount of Fitz' proposed reduction Rove won't accept -- in other words, it's not enough to get him out of a prison sentence.
Update: Larry Johnson reports on Democratic Underground:
It is not just Jason Leopold. Joe Wilson heard the same from other sources. And, more importantly, Jason is reporting based on multiple, more than two, sources.
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