Aww, if you have to get somebody, Scooter is volunteering.

Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who has been in prison for 85 days for refusing to testify concerning the Valerie Plame leak, (and not coincidentally served as a conduit for lies about Iraq prior to the war) did testify today before special prosecutor Peter Fitzgerald and a grand jury investigating the leak. According to the story, Miller said she got assurances from her source and from Fitzgerald that enabled her to testify.... Before she agreed to talk to the grand jury, Miller's source, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, gave her assurances she could reveal the contents of their conversations. For his part, Fitzgerald promised to limit his questioning of Miller to the Libby contacts regarding Plame.

Read that again. Now, we all knew from earlier stories that it was Karl Rove who spilled the beans, when he told Matt Cooper when Cooper called him that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA operative, and then called six other reporters including Bob Novak and said the same thing to each of them. Scooter Libby was then mentioned as a secondary source of the information. And keep in mind too, that Fitzgerald's Grand Jury is due to expire on October 28, so Miller could have waited it out until then. So too, could Scooter Libby, unless his agreement to 'let' Miller testify about their contacts is part of a carefully calculated plan. I believe it is. It is a plan to alter the course of the investigation and get the Special Prosecutor and the grand jury to focus on Libby rather than Rove.

What this seems to suggest is, that now that it is clear that someone will have to pay for this act of treason and that the Special prosecutor will indict someone, the tack of the administration has changed, from denial, stonewalling and coverup, to point everything at Libby. Rove, the 'Golden Boy' without whom the Bush administration wouldn't even exist, must be defended at all costs, so it seems as though Libby is being set up to take the fall.

Not that I'd feel sorry for Scooter though-- Republicans take care of their own in these kinds of situations, witness the appointment of John Poindexter, who took the Iran-Contra fall and was convicted of a felony and sentenced on June 11, 1990 to six months in prison (suspended sentence), to work in a choice counterintelligence job in the Bush administration.