[…] Now, as Libby prepares for a trial next year, attorneys and legal experts say the fact that Novak is not critical to the case says a lot about what Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has decided about the alleged original crime - the leak. It also signals that Libby was not one of Novak's sources on the story, they say.
Novak's absence from the case, says attorney Steven Reich, supports the assumption that Fitzgerald decided the leak itself wasn't a crime. Reich was a senior associate counsel in the Clinton White House. He's now with the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.
No one who leaked CIA officer Valerie Plame's name has been charged with a crime for doing so and Fitzgerald has said his investigation is nearly over. It can be illegal to disclose a CIA officer's name, but the laws prohibiting it are very narrowly written and make it very difficult to prove any violation.
'So, given that the case seems to turn squarely on what happened inside the grand jury and in conversations (Libby had) with Mr. Fitzgerald's investigators,' Reich says, 'it seems that what happened with Mr. Novak is essentially beside the point,' because no crime was likely committed by the person who told Novak about Plame. […] [My ellipses and emphasis]
CIA bandits "Bonnie and Clyde" Wilson not doing too well in reality.
But doing magnificently with their co-unindicted co-conspiritors in the mainstream elite media and the elite liberal intelligensia.
