Rove-Plame Scandal Linked To Bolton

Well, I told you Joshua Marshall was good, and he is sinking his teeth into this Rove case just as I hoped he would!

Today Marshall links Wilson's trip to Niger with the "invisible hands" of John Bolton:

If you go back and trace out just what happened as the phoney Niger papers, and the reports based on them, made their circuitous way through the executive branch -- and this using both public information and stuff from reporting -- an odd and at first hard to explain pattern emerges.

Confidence in the documents kept getting knocked down. But someone or some group kept giving them fresh life. And, improbably, those someones seemed to be at the State Department.

That's odd because, institutionally, State was the least hawkish in the lead up to the war and their in-house intelligence shop, INR, turned out to be the only outfit in the intelligence community that got most things right about Iraqi WMD.

And yet it was at State that the docs kept seeming to gain new life.

The evidence is circumstantial. But all of it points to Bolton's as, shall we say, the invisible hands...

Marshall also digs up some entertaining dirt on Rove's lawyer, Robert "Gold Bars" Luskin:

Luskin got paid more than $500,000 of his attorney's fees in gold bars from his client who was trying to appeal his conviction on charges that he laundered drug money through precious metals dealers. Who woulda thought that was drug money?

Luskin insisted that he "never have, and never would, knowingly accept a fee that was the proceeds of illegal activities."

But when federal prosecutors finally got a chance to depose Luskin and Saccoccia's other lawyers, they found that their lawyers' fees had come in forms "such as gold bars, cash that was dropped off at hotels and trunks of cars, and money transfers from Swiss bank accounts."

Eventually, in 1998, Luskin came to a settlement with the government in which he agreed to cough up $245,000 of the money...

Go, Josh, go!