I won't dance -- don't ask me

The jury could acquit, on all five charges, the most serious a single count of obstruction of justice. Influential voices [still have to find link to David Broder] have argued for acquittal, mainly by trivializing the offence of obstruction. Call me prejudiced, but I have a feeling that those people haven’t been walking through the testimony day by day alongside the jury that called for Post-Its. All the same, the entirely credible Jeralyn Merrit of TalkLeft, Firedoglake, and Huffington Post has worried intelligently and helpfully over the impact on a jury of the questionable credibility of several witnesses. It would take only one juror to defeat the prosecution’s case against Scooter Libby, which even those who most believe in this investigation concede could stop Patrick Fitzgerald in his tracks.

If you’ve been reading and watching Jane, Marcy, Christy, their FDL colleagues and the guest bloggers assembled at Plame House in Washington, though, not to mention the firepups in comments (a number speaking from backgrounds in the law), and especially if you’ve read Froomkin’s and Blumenthal’s pellucid summaries of Tuesday’s closing arguments, you are not expecting anything like acquittal on all charges. Nor do you believe that Patrick Fitzgerald has gone as far as he means to go, even with a conviction in the case against Scooter Libby. From Froomkin:

After literally years of keeping his public pronouncements about the case to an absolute minimum, Fitzgerald yesterday finally let slip a bit of the speculation that many of us have long suspected has lurked just beneath the surface of his investigation.

Suddenly it wasn't just the defendant alone, it was "they" who decided to tell reporters about Wilson's wife working for the CIA. "To them," Fitzgerald said, "she wasn't a person, she was an argument."

And it was pretty clear who "they" was: Libby and his boss, Cheney.

Back in the summer of 2003, after former ambassador Joseph Wilson had dared suggest that the administration manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq, "they" were obsessed with denying that Wilson had been sent on his mission to Niger as a result of a request for information from the vice president's office, Fitzgerald said.

"They" saw his wife Valerie Plame's role in suggesting him for the trip as a way to cast suspicion on his mission and his claim.

In Fitzgerald's last words to the jury, what had been a somewhat innocuous-sounding memo suddenly became something close to a smoking gun documenting Cheney's encouragement to his minions out to spread the word about Wilson's wife.

As Fitzgerald explained it: Right after Cheney first read Wilson's op-ed -- and wrote the question, "[D]id his wife send him on a junket?" in the margins of his own carefully clipped copy-- Cheney dictated "talking points" for his staff to use with the press about Wilson's mission.

As a result, the lead talking point morphed from "The Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger" in a version drafted the day before by Cheney press aide Cathie Martin to "It is not clear who authorized Joe Wilson's trip to Niger" in the vice president's version.

Without quite coming out and saying so directly, Fitzgerald strongly implied that was an invitation for White House officials to talk about how Plame played a role in her husband's selection for the mission.

"There's something funny about how they want to talk about who sent him, but they don't want to talk about the wife," Fitzgerald said, mocking the defense's position that those two were somehow entirely separate issues.

Fitzgerald proved himself to be as well a great actor and more, a great scriptwriter, when he whirled defence counsel Ted Wells’s melodramatic closing lines and performance (“the madness of this prosecution” ... “Give Scooter Libby back to me” ... *sob*) right back at him in his own startling opening (“Madness! Madness! Outrageous!” – which apparently woke more than a few of the assembled up) and then closed powerfully with his own plea to the jury to “give the truth back” to the American people and their judicial system. I would call that spinning on a dime except, as a commenter at FDL observes, Fitz has been focused on precisely that principle since the press conference of 28 October 2005 at which he announced the Libby indictment.

So now we wait while the jury work away at their Post-Its and portraits. Some eat popcorn; some gnaw on their knuckles; some refresh FDL obsessively; and some look at groovy pics of the Prospero of this drama.

Sorry, but I have to do this. I’ve had two great companions-in-popcorn through the – gosh: is it years? – that I’ve followed Plamegate. The first is pogge hisself, who patiently educated a lot of us, first at babble and then at Bread and Roses, until he had us hooked. As we all know, though, there are some things pogge is not going to be doing, and swooning over Patrick Fitzgerald is definitely one of them.

But then I met Goddamnitkitty of Hope and Onions, and I tell you, she’s ‘way further gone than I am. For one thing she knows more than I do – she actually reads the evidence at the DoJ site. Even better, though, she knows where all the great Fitz gossip and pics are, and she is absolutely shameless in tempting me with fresh tidbits morning after morning. What would I do without her?

So I close by thanking both pogge and GDKitty, and then stealing from her this classic shot of our romantic hero doing a bit of a Monroe-ish flip of the skirts ... on his way to flipping the Cheney conspiracy back into self-destructive hyperdrive.