Rove Indictment: Keep Watching The Skies...

Brian Doherty | May 19, 2006

I attended a very entertaining L.A. Press Club event this evening, featuring Allan MacDonell (author of the new book Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine) and Jason Leopold (author of the new book News Junkie), with moderation and some tough questioning from Evan Wright, another ex-Hustler hand and author of Generation Kill (and source of the revelation, delivered personally to our editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie, that Our Troops Need Reason).

Leopold, for those following somewhat under-the-radar scuttlebutt, got tongues a-wagging Internet wide (yet essentially nowhere in any major mainstream media) with his claim last week at Truthout.org that Karl Rove had been indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case. Said indictment, you all might have noticed, has not yet been publicly announced by anyone other than Leopold and those echoing him.

Leopold insists that he's right, and has some confidence it will be made public today (Friday). He admits he'll seem a little foolish if it doesn't. He also granted, in response to an audience question, that often indictments remain sealed for a long time and there is some chance he jumped the gun in insisting in his report that "an announcement by Fitzgerald is expected to come this week." Since the theme of his new memoir is his troubled past as journalist and human being, including some past spectacular misjudgements and flameouts, moderator Wright suggested, with some humor and some venom, that his therapist might owe him his money back.

Leopold's original report. National Review chimes in skeptically. Daily Kos compares and contrasts.