Okay, now I've got myself into a full-blown obsess, and I'll never get around to billing hours this weekend. But I'd like to take a close look at Paragraphs 4 and 5 of the indictment (PDF). Because they are clues in those paragraphs which suggest some interesting things. Take a look at these paragraphs:

4. On or about May 29, 2003, in the White House, LIBBY asked an Under Secretary of State (“Under Secretary”) for information concerning the unnamed ambassador’s travel to Niger to investigate claims about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium yellowcake. The Under Secretary thereafter directed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research to prepare a report concerning the ambassador and his trip. The Under Secretary provided LIBBY with interim oral reports in late May and early June 2003, and advised LIBBY that Wilson was the former ambassador who took the trip.

5. On or about June 9, 2003, a number of classified documents from theCIA were faxed to the Office of the Vice President to the personalattention of LIBBY and another person in the Office of the VicePresident. The faxed documents, which were marked as classified,discussed, among other things, Wilson and his trip to Niger, but didnot mention Wilson by name. After receiving these documents, LIBBY andone or more other persons in the Office of the Vice President handwrotethe names “Wilson” and “Joe Wilson” on the documents.

There are a couple of interesting things about these paragraphs. First, consider the scenario it suggests. Kristof's article appears on May 6. And then, 23 days later, Libby started trying to figure out who was behind the column. Now, I think I was wrong and Armando right the other day in our spat over whether the Get Wilson campaign was a direct response to Kristof's column. At least as portrayed in the indictment, the campaign started in May and not--as Wilson has suggested--in March.

Then there's another weird thing. If the scenario spelled out here is complete (I don't really believe it is--I believe Libby started collecting information before May 29), it would suggest Libby asked for information from State before he asked for information from the CIA. And he asked for that information up to 11 days after he asked for information from State. Now maybe that's because Kristof's column portrayed Wilson's leaking as a response to State Department claims that they were fooled by the forgeries.

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a yearago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of theuranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched toNiger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings,that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that theinformation was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had beenforged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whosesignature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of officefor more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program wasstructured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. Theenvoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administrationand seemed to be accepted � except that President Bush and the StateDepartment kept citing it anyway.

Kristof doesn't specify that Cheney's office asked CIA for an investigation of the Niger allegations, he says Wilson reported to both CIA and State, and then emphasizes State in the following paragraph. So if you were working solely from what you found in Kristof's column, you might believe State was the most obvious place to look for information.

But Libby wasn't. He is (sorry, I should say he was) a pretty central member of OVP, after all, which would make it easy for him to find out who OVP asked for more information. The scenarios that try to hide Dick's involvement in this even suggest Libby was the one who asked CIA for more information, so he may have been (probably was) intimately involved in the asking.

Maybe Libby had requested info from CIA before May 29 and was having trouble getting them to release the documents and it wasn't until June 9 that they responded to his much earlier request; this would have you believe that a very cowed George Tenet was resisting a request from the Vice President's Chief of Staff

The third possibility would suggest one of the central Administration assertions in this affair is a lie. They've been saying for years now that they never received a report on this trip. But if Libby already had--and knew he had--a report on the trip, then he wouldn't need to request a copy to make an initial investigation into Wilson's trip. But if Libby already had a report on Wilson's trip, the assertion OVP never got one is an out and out lie. Big surprise.

The fourth possibility (which doesn't necessarily preclude the third) is equally damning. It suggests someone at State--perhaps Bolton, for example--had reason to believe there was information at State that might be useful to Libby's ratfuck. That information would almost certainly be the INR analyst notes that identify Plame as a CIA employee and allege she was behind his trip. In fact, consider this little detail we learned recently:

Attached to the letter were the notes from the INR analyst who hadattended the session, but they were written well after the eventoccurred and contained mistakes about who was there and what was said,according to a former intelligence official who reviewed the documentin the summer of 2003.

Someone out there knows when these notes were written. Is it possible these notes were written between May 6 and May 29? I have wondered whether someone in Bolton's office got to the INR analyst who wrote those notes. It is much more likely someone in Bolton's office got to that analyst if they were written sometime during May 2003.

In any case, Grossman would be an unlikely person to ask for dirt on Wilson. I have no clear evidence they're allies. But they're both career diplomats. They're both UCSB graduates. And they worked together briefly in Turkey. So it is possible, certainly, that Grossman's relationship with Wilson is more than that of a colleague.

But if you wanted to get a document with a particularly damning (you believed) piece of information, but you wanted to obscure the source of that information, then you might launder it through someone like Marc Grossman. All you had to do was make sure the information was there, an obvious source he (or the INR at his request) would consult to respond to Libby's request for more information.

I've already mentioned that it's weird that Libby would request documents from State before he requested them from CIA. But eventually he got some from CIA as well. The faxed document appears to be CIA's report on Wilson's trip, since we know from the SSCI report that Wilson's CIA report doesn't mention Wilson by name.

Now this suggests several things. First, it suggests that two or more people knew Wilson was the envoy described in that report. Either they knew it already (from an earlier report, from discussions). Or Libby revealed Wilson's identity, which he may have learned earlier or he knew from Grossman's briefing, when he distributed the documents. In any case, the handwritten notations prove there was discussion among Libby and "one or more persons" about Wilson's trip. This is not that surprising; after all, we know there was a discussion about how to respond to Pincus' request for information on Wilson's trip before June 12. But it suggests that when they had those discussions, they were directly consulting a set of information they had already collected from the relevant agencies. In other words--it wasn't in response to journalists' inquiries that convinced them to collect this information. They had already done their homework to collect that information.

And one more tiny detail. I'm amused that Fitzgerald doesn't reveal how many people have shown their Wilson report--with their distinct hand-written notes on it--to him. I can just see Libby, wracked with paranoia, trying to figure out how many people have talked about that Get Wilson meeting. Is it just one other person, the other guy who named on that CIA fax? Is it two? Have five people shared this with Fitzgerald? How many, damnit!! How many???