Looks like Patrick Fitzgerald has had to back down on certain explosive claims he made in a recent court filing.

The federal prosecutor overseeing the indictment of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, yesterday corrected an assertion in an earlier court filing that Libby had misrepresented the significance placed by the CIA on allegations that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger.

Last week, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald wrote that, in conversation with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Libby described the uranium story as a "key judgment" of the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a term of art indicating there was consensus within the intelligence community on that issue. In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments and was listed further back in the 96-page, classified document.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, Fitzgerald wrote yesterday that he wanted to "correct" the sentence that dealt with the issue in a filing he submitted last Wednesday. That sentence said Libby "was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Instead, the sentence should have conveyed that Libby was to tell Miller some of the key judgments of the NIE "and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Simply one more bit of evidence that Fitzgerals os out of control -- making false claims in filings to inflate the importance and significance of his work. He has exceeded his mandates as a special prosecutor, and needs to be closed down, and his charges against Scooter Libby dismissed.

By the way -- anyone else struck by the fact that the "correction" by Fitzgerald is buried by the same media sources that highlighted the original claims?

Posted by: Greg at 10:48 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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