The federal prosecutors trying to determine whether someone in Dubya's administration leaked CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity to the press have broadened their inquiry. Now they're also dealing with the question of whether someone in the White House lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the Plame case. The NY Times reports that contradictions have been found between the statements that various witnesses made to the FBI, and that these conflicts also appear in documents turned over to investigators by the White House.
The broadened scope is a potentially significant development that represents exactly what allies of the Bush White House feared when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from the case last December and turned it over to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago.
Republican lawyers worried that the leak case, in the hands of an aggressive prosecutor, might grow into an unwieldy, time-consuming and politically charged inquiry, like the sprawling independent counsel inquiries of the 1990's, which distracted and damaged the Clinton administration. [emph. added]
Wooooooohooooooo!
Via NY Times.