Indicting Rove

According to this report, Rove was indicted on Saturday, May 13th. Or at least he was supposed to be.

One of several folks all over Jason Leopold's cracker-jack reporting, Eric Umansky gives a somewhat sarcastic if not fair account of what's going on at Truthout. Meanwhile, Byron York at NRO tackles the larger issue of speculative reporting in the Plame-game:

...it appears that nothing will stop the sort of viral speculation that is going on about the CIA-leak case. Even if Rove were indicted—and no one outside Fitzgerald’s office can say with any confidence whether or not that will happen—everything that has been reported in this latest round of theorizing would still be wrong. And if in the end Rove is not indicted, there will undoubtedly be confidently worded reports that he was saved only by some sort of corrupt dealing. What this latest round of Internet theorizing shows is that there are people who have a deep emotional investment in the belief that Rove is a criminal, and that those people will suspend their critical faculties to accept almost any scenario that supports their belief. Nothing that happens—or doesn’t happen—will change that.

Why what ever does he mean? Well, this: Yet Truthout is sticking with its story. “We know that we have now three independent sources confirming that attorneys for Karl Rove were handed an indictment either late in the night of May 12 or early in the morning of May 13,” Truthout editor Marc Ash wrote Sunday. “We know that each source was in a position to know what they were talking about.”But how to explain the absence of an indictment? The indictment was, it turns out, a secret. “We believe that the indictment which does exist against Karl Rove is sealed,” wrote Ash. “Rove may be turning state’s evidence."

And this: To take another example, last week Madsen reported that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales went to the U.S. courthouse on Friday, May 12, where he met with the grand jury and was told about the Rove indictment. An announcement of the indictment, Madsen reported, was set for Friday, May 19.But that scenario didn’t work out, either. May 19 came and went, with no indictment. And Justice Department officials told NRO that Gonzales did not go to the courthouse on Friday, May 12. In addition, the attorney general has recused himself from the case and cannot take part in any aspect of it. “Not only am I recused from making decisions or participating in decisions regarding this investigation, I am recused from receiving information about the investigation,” Gonzales said last October. “I do not receive briefings. I do not receive any information about this particular case.”

Joe Wilson gave Bush-haters everywhere the only acceptable outcome in this whole mess when he stated that his aim was to see Rove frog-marched out of the White House. And come hell, highwater or ridiculous theorizing, a frog-marched Rove is what we're gonna get!