CNN.com - Watergate's John Dean on the CIA leak probe

CNN.com - Watergate's John Dean on the CIA leak probe - Jul 14, 2005

Damn! It looks like it might be getting a bit harder on ol' Rove out there. John Dean Nixon's counsel of Watergate fame, he spent four months in jail for it, has been conjucturing on what charges might be coming down the road. It dfoesn't look pretty....

Here' sthe choice quote:

DEAN: We can't tell on the facts we have alone whether we have a law that's been violated or which laws have been violated. The attention is focused on the CIA Identities Protection Act and that hasn't really been my concern.

I think probably the lawyers involved in this case are looking at the other potential concerns. You take the prima facie facts we have and this could very well be a couple statutes that are involved with Mr. Rove.

He could be, well, converting government information to his own political uses and putting it out, and that is a violation of the law. It could be the statute that got a lot of those of us involved in Watergate, which is if he is conspiring with others to do what he's not being paid as a government employee to do, which it would be in this instance, to leak information for political purposes. That in turn, could be a violation as well.

DOBBS: Effectively, fraud and conspiracy.

DEAN: Yes.

The mind boggles.

NOw to be fair there is no way to know if any of this will be true or (more difficult) provable, but it is a very different thing from an innocent gaffe.