Washington – Associates of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, braced for an indictment today charging him with making false statements to the grand jury in the CIA leak inquiry, lawyers in the case said Thursday.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, will not be charged today but would remain under investigation, according to people briefed officially about the case. As a result, they said, the special counsel in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, was likely to extend the term of the grand jury beyond the scheduled expiration today.
As rumors coursed through the capital, Fitzgerald gave no public signal of how he intends to proceed, further intensifying the anxiety that has gripped the White House and left partisans on both sides of the aisle holding their breath.
Fitzgerald’s preparations for an announcement today were shrouded in secrecy but moved ahead amid a flurry of behind- the-scenes discussions that left open the possibility of last- minute surprises. As the clock ticked down on the grand jury, people involved in the case did not rule out the disclosure of previously unknown aspects of the case.
White House officials said their presumption was that Libby would resign if indicted, and he and Rove took steps to expand their legal teams in case of a court battle.
Among the many mysteries still unresolved is whether anyone in addition to Libby and Rove might be charged and in particular whether Fitzgerald would charge the source who first provided the identity of an undercover CIA officer to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in July 2003.
The investigation appeared to be entering its final hours after nearly two years in which Fitzgerald brought more than a dozen current and former administration officials before the grand jury and interviewed Bush and Cheney to determine how the identity of the officer, Valerie Plame, became public.
Fitzgerald has examined whether the leak of Plame’s identity was part of an effort by the administration to respond to criticism of the White House by her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat. After traveling to Africa in 2002 on a CIA-sponsored mission to look into claims that Iraq had sought to acquire material there for its nuclear weapons program, Wilson went public in 2003 with his conclusion that the Bush administration had “twisted” prewar intelligence.
There was continued speculation that Fitzgerald might seek to extend the investigation and leave the fate of some of the figures involved in it unsettled.