On Sunday, Republicans appeared to be preparing to blunt the impact of any charges. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program "Meet the Press," compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart and her stock sale, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime."Is she kidding? As Political Wire notes, Hutchinson must have forgotten "that she voted to impeach former President Bill Clinton for the same charge."
Ms. Hutchison said she hoped "that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."
Frank Rich had the perfect response to Hutchinson's recitation of the GOP talking points:
I thought they're obviously--I thought they were a real bellwether, that they're extremely nervous. Those are the charges clearly they think are coming, and there's a story in The Washington Post by Walter Pincus today that gives further evidence that that might be the case. And so now they're trying to trivialize those crimes, and the Martha Stewart defense, which Senator Hutchison adds, to me, it's like a Twinkie defense. I don't think it's going to go very far.
And it's clear to me that if there are indictments--and we don't know--this prosecutor has been leak-proof. He's sort of the un-Ken Starr in that way. It almost would have to involve these crimes because we have to assume that Robert Novak, even though he hasn't said so, told the prosecutor who talked to him long ago, and why then would that not be the end of the story if the only crime is the possible leaking of a covert CIA operative's name? There's been something else going on for months.
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