Republicans circle wagons

This morning's New York Times contains the following story:



Republicans Testing Ways to Blunt Leak Charges



WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 - With a decision expected this week on possible indictments in the C.I.A. leak case, allies of the White House suggested Sunday that they intended to pursue a strategy of attacking any criminal charges as a disagreement over legal technicalities or the product of an overzealous prosecutor....



I guess it's a commentary on the state of journalism today that the press can report this without commentary or hint of irony. We don't know what charges Fitzgerald will bring, right? So isn't it jumping the gun just a bit to start characterizing these charges as a disagreement over legal technicalities?



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."



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."



Let the record show that this is the same Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison who voted to impeach President Clinton in 1999 for "some perjury technality" as well as some "obstruction of justice technicalities", because Ken Starr couldn't find any other way of justifying his five-year Whitewater investigation. Here's Hutchison on Hardball in February 1999:



CHRIS MATTHEWS: It seems to me that...the reason Richard Nixon faced impeachment before the United States Senate in 1974 is because there was a very clear piece of evidence, that smoking gun tape...Is there anything like that in this pile of evidence amassed by the House managers?



HUTCHISON: I think it’s more of a pattern, Chris. I think it’s a pattern on the obstruction of justice issue and I think the things that happened taken together are really overwhelming...



MATHEWS: Do you believe [Clinton] obstructed justice when he talked to Sidney Blumenthal and trashed Monica Lewinsky as a “stalker,” or is that simply rotten public relations tactics used to achieve his own political ends, and it did not have a role in the trial itself?



HUTCHISON: No, once again I think that was tampering with a witness.