CIA Leak Case Heats Up Hazy Summer

WASHINGTON, May 31, 2006 — -- Thermometers have finally hit the 90's, and Washington is getting the lazy, sultry look that comes as May dissolves into June.

We Washingtonians tend to slow down, but the news doesn't. And it won't this summer either, with a decision expected from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald that will finally determine whether a top White House aide will face serious federal charges in the CIA leak case.

Those old enough to remember Watergate will recall the fiercely hot summer of '74, when scandal revelations brought down Richard Nixon's presidency.

Now Washington waits to see what this summer holds for the Bush White House. No one believes the scandal will approach the grand scale of Watergate, but when it hits it will certainly qualify as breaking news.

The Fitzgerald investigation has already produced the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff.

Will there be more indictments? Will President Bush's top political aide, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, escape indictment and continue plotting strategy for Republicans to maintain control of Congress? Or will Rove be indicted and, as Libby did, turn in his White House pass?

Many in Washington who are in a position to know believed we would have an answer by now. But Fitzgerald never set a deadline, so he doesn't have to meet one.

Fitzgerald, so we are told, is carefully, very carefully, sifting through evidence of what happened three years ago when Rove spoke to two reporters about undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Rove appeared five times before the grand jury that heard evidence in the case. He said he did not consciously mislead the grand jury when he failed to disclose a conversation with Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper. Rove said it was simply a faulty memory that caused him not to reveal his conversation about Plame, the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a caustic critic of President Bush who accused the president of using faulty intelligence to help justify the Iraq War.

Fitzgerald has assembled evidence that Rove was active during that period in July 2003 in defending the president's reasons for going to war.