Tangled web

"That Fitzgerald is one helluva digger, able to ferret out this stuff that was in the headlines [three] years ago..."

says a Power Line correspondent that sent on a July 20, 2003 AP story "Declassified CIA documents on Iraq show divided intelligence community” and one the day before by Knight-Ridder, "Bush releases excerpts of top-secret Iraq report" meaning Special Prosecutor Patrick, who has done great things in Chi-town, putting bad guys away from feeding too voraciously at the public trough — they overdid it, you see — but may, just may be in over his head in his Plame-Wison-gate prosecution of Cheney’s top dog.

The stories, says PL, 

show what we all know: the release of the NIE [Natl Intell Estimate] report was part of an attempt to quell the political uproar that was starting to build over what Bush did and did not know before the war. The stories also show that the "leak," while criticized for being "selective," included the State Department minority opinion -- material more than sufficient for most MSM [main stream media] stories written after the briefing to be negative! 

What’s new in the Fitzgerald brief

is that President Bush, according to Cheney according to Libby, authorized the release of the NIE report ten days earlier than the July 18 briefing that was widely reported [italics added], and that they disclosed it to Judith Miller, who didn't write about it.

Ah-hah!

But Bush had nothing to do with the NYT-Miller part, authorizing de-classifying and releasing the NIE report, but that’s all — which is not surprising, unless you think he’s hands-on in such matters, in which case Harvard B-School should ask for his diploma back.  This is from today’s story in, yes, NYT.