White House

Fitzmas: the gift that keeps on giving

The extremely smart Lawrence O'Donnell has some news at the Huffington Post about the coming indictments and the length of the grand jury:

Experienced federal prosecutors are saying today that they expect Fitzgerald to extend the term of the grand jury even if he obtains indictments this week.

Prosecutors sometimes go back to grand juries a few weeks after indictments to ask them to supercede those idictments with additional counts. This happens when the original indictments put pressure on witnesses to give up more information or when defendents decide to turn on each other and give the prosecutor more information during plea bargaining.

So it's entirely possible that Patrick Fitzgerald will indicte Rove and Libby this week AND extend the grand jury to be able to catch some bigger fish and/or make an even stronger case against Scooter and Turd Blossom.

O'Donnell also refutes a bogus fact coming out of the Washington Post:

The Washington Post is wrong. Today's Post says that the grand jury has to unanimously agree to return indictments. HuffPo readers have known since last week that it takes only a majority of grand jurors to indict--12 of 23.

And as O'Donnell noted last week, the grand jury members inside the beltway are not likely to be part of Bush's base:

A typical Washington, D.C. grand jury is about 75% African American. Fitzgerald’s is slightly more than that. This is not the kind of group Karl Rove feels at home with. He has no professional experience trying to appeal to a group like this. He has been so unsuccessful at it that his boss’s job approval rating with African Americans is now 2%, which, factoring in the margin of error, could actually be zero.