No orders

Tom Maguire at JustOneMinute turned in another look at Plame-gate filings earlier in the week. I would have written this yesterday were I not so busy feeling awful.

On the heels of his embarrassing correction, it seems that Fitzgerald now finds himself under serious pressure from the defense to open the floodgates of information:

The press had a great time taking a Fitzgerald comment out of context - in making a banal point about the difficulty of delivering documents with the objective of proving a negative, Fitzgerald wrote that "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson." (Here, for example, is the Tuesday Times pretending that Fitzgerald was claiming to have an overwhelming case demonstrating a conspiracy.)

One hopes that Mr. Fitzgerald enjoyed his headlines - now, if the defense is successful in using all that press attention as additional leverage, he gets to deliver the documents he was trying to retain.

Fitz has insinuated the broader of the left's talking points on this issue--that Wilson was targeted by the Administration by virtue of his outspoken opposition and his wife's outing was a deliberate act--for some time now. Meanwhile, Libby and his team have turned up the pressure by announcing that there were no orders--standing or otherwise--from on high to leak Plame's name to the press. Additionally, the defense is asking for--in the most detail to date--for Fitzgerald's documentation as to Plame's standing as a covert officer, among other things.

Byron York over at NRO wrote a piece on that tidbit yesterday. I found this little blurb over at the Corner actually more revealing:

I have a story up on the latest in the CIA leak case, in which Lewis Libby says that neither President Bush, Vice President Cheney nor anyone else instructed him to discuss Valerie Plame Wilson with reporters. That's news. But what is perhaps bigger news is not explicitly stated anywhere in the legal papers, and that is that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald appears to be losing control of the case.

Since indicting Libby on perjury and obstruction of justice charges last year, Fitzgerald has said that he wants to keep the case narrowly confined to the question of whether Libby lied to the grand jury and obstructed the investigation. But actually trying the case -- and we're just in the discovery stage now -- has forced Fitzgerald to put forward a theory of Libby's motive and to try to place Libby's actions in the larger context of an alleged White House plot to punish Joseph Wilson. And doing that has forced Fitzgerald to open the whole pre-war intelligence can of worms and to argue at length about the White House's effort to rebut the arguments of critics like Wilson, which is not specifically part of the charges against Libby.

Yet even as he has fallen into the trap of widening his arguments to include the Bush case for war, making the case seem more and more like a political prosecution, Fitzgerald is still refusing to hand over evidence to Libby -- for example, documents relating to whether Valerie Wilson's CIA status was classified or not -- on the grounds that Libby does not need such evidence to defend himself against the narrow perjury and obstruction charges. So on the one hand, Fitzgerald is increasingly bringing the big picture into the case, and on the other he is desperately trying to keep the case tightly focused on the little picture. It's not going to work. Either through his own errors, or his own lack of insight, or perhaps just the impossible nature of the case, Fitzgerald is moving himself into an untenable position. And the case is really just starting.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if this case actually sees the light of day, that many a screaming-meemie on the left who has been waiting impatiently for Karl Rove's frog-marching is going to be unpleasantly surprised by where things go.