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American Morning

Is It Indictment Day in Washington?; President Vowing to Act Fast After Harriet Miers Meltdown

Aired October 28, 2005 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Miles O'Brien. Is it indictment day in Washington? There are reports one top White House official will be charged in that CIA leak investigation. Another one may be spared, for now. We're live at the D.C. courthouse.
ZAIN VERJEE, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Zain Verjee in for Soledad. The president vowing to act fast after the Harriet Miers melt meltdown. Where does he turn next for this next Supreme Court nomination? We're live in Washington, looking at ahead at the battle.

O'BRIEN: And outrage over gas prices. Record-high prices at the pump and record-profit for oil companies. A look at whether this is fair to consumers. We are primed and pumping for the facts, on this AMERICAN MORNING.

You didn't like that line, pumping the facts?

VERJEE: No, I like the way you delivered it.

O'BRIEN: Thank you very much.

VERJEE: I was expressing admiration.

O'BRIEN: It's Friday. You got to finish strong. It's been a long week.

VERJEE: It has. It's been marvelous, though, to be here with you.

O'BRIEN: It's been great to have you. It began with a hurricane. It's been a wild week in Washington as well. What a week for the White House. The White House on edge this morning.

VERJEE: It could be indictment day.

O'BRIEN: Could be, in fact. We are waiting for an announcement today from the special counsel in the CIA leak case. And word is that Lewis Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, is preparing for a criminal indictment. AMERICAN MORNING's Bob Franken, once again, outside the federal courthouse building in Washington.

Bob, you're back in your spot, and apparently, this -- on this day, we're going to know something?

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, wouldn't that be nice? Yes, we're expecting that the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, he's going to be making the results of his investigation known, the results of the investigation thus far. Fitzgerald will be meeting for the last time with the grand jury this morning. We are expecting that there will be some type of public announcement, some type of news conference, we're expecting, where the description of the charges will be laid out.

And as Lewis Scooter Libby left his house this morning, there were strong indications the focus might be on him. A lot of the questioning that has gone on before the grand jury, we know, concerns conversations he had with reporters in the time around the disclosures, the public disclosure, that Valerie Plame was a CIA undercover operative. Now the reason that was important is because that could have violated a law against such disclosures. Plame, the wife of administration critic Joe Wilson.

In any case, Lewis Scooter Libby is known to be somebody who is a focus of the investigation. Many people around him are expecting that there might be some charges levied against him. Libby, of course, is the vice president's chief of staff. The deputy White House chief of staff, Karl Rove, according to "The New York Times," has been inform through official channels he will not be indicted at this time, but the investigation will continue leaving open the possibility that Fitzgerald will not close down the investigative phase, will have to make a connection with the grand jury, a good possibility will be that it will be a new grand jury. So many questions that have been lingering for so long. We're going to get some answers today, and probably be left with some unanswered questions.

O'BRIEN: Now the grand jury is supposed to be there at 9:00. How quickly will we hear, do you think?

FRANKEN: Well, that's one of the little secrets. I would -- let's take a little pool here. I'm expecting we're going to hear something by 11:00 a.m.

O'BRIEN: All right, no wagering, though, Bob, 11:00 a.m. All right, thank you very much, Zain.

VERJEE: Miles, while the White House waits for news on today's grand jury deliberations, President Bush is promising to move fast, selecting a Supreme Court nominee to replace Harriet Miers.

Dana Bash is live for us this morning at the White House.

Dana, there's a lot on the president's plate this morning, a lot of anxiety, too, then.

DANA BASH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, a lot on the president's plate, Zain, and none of it is particularly appetizing at all right now. No one here is trying to sugarcoat what a bad, bad week this has been for the White House. This morning, we've already seen the vice president arrive well before the sun has come up on a day where, as Bob was just mentioning, his chief of staff may face indictments, and people here expect that would mean he would tender his resignation.

But they're being very tight-lipped here at the White House about it, but Bush aides have contingency plans to deal with whatever political fallout might come from today's announcement that we expect.

We know that Karl Rove, for example, his team has been talking with somebody to deal with their PR, Mark Corolla, the former Justice official. It is very also interesting today that we are going to see Harriet Miers come to the White House to be in her old job. She is now going to be talking to the president about who to put in her place to be the next Supreme Court nominee. Bush aides acknowledge a slew of missteps when it comes to Miers. Number one is taking the bait, as one person said it, that people actually didn't want somebody with a judicial record. They realize that is a lesson learned. They clearly are going to be looking for somebody with a long judicial record, unclear when that is going to happen -- Zain.

VERJEE: Dana Bash reporting from the White House -- Miles.

O'BRIEN: This morning a surprise development this morning in a high-profile California murder case, a teenager charged with murder, and now the boy's mother also behind bars.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN (voice-over): Police in California arrested Esther Fielding, the mother of 16-year-old murder suspect Scott Dyleski. She's accused of being an accessory to the crime. Authorities say Dyleski killed 52-year-old Pamela Vitale, the wife of prominent attorney Daniel Horowitz. On the night of the crime, Esther Fielding warned her son there were police roadblocks in the area and told him to stay at his girlfriend's house. According to court documents, Dyleski claims he was at his girlfriend's house the evening of the murder. The girlfriend's attorney is Gloria Allred.

GLORIA ALLRED, ATTORNEY: My client is a potential witness in this case. And I don't think, at this time, it would be appropriate to say for whom...

O'BRIEN: Court documents also say investigators found clothing and a glove with traces of blood in a duffel bag inside a van parked at Dyleski's home. Scott Dyleski did not enter a plea at his arraignment on Thursday. He simply nodded as the judge formally charged him with first-degree murder.

Dyleski was this couple's babysitter as recently as a few weeks ago. They, like so many here, are stunned.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's broken a lot of hearts, you know, even people that cared about him like me, but didn't love him like, you know, family or anything. It broke my heart.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: So as of right now, the plan is Scott Dyleski will be tried as an adult. He will be back in court November 9th, his mother being held on a $500,000 bail -- Zain.

VERJEE: Miles, it's really a test of patience now in Florida. Days after Hurricane Wilma, gas remains scarce. Millions of homes don't have power. That phone lines are down, and people are still lining up for food, water and ice.

J.J. Ramberg is at a distribution center at the Orange Bowl Stadium in Miami.

J.J., what is going on there exactly is going on there?

J.J. RAMBERG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Zain.

Well, right now, trucks are just starting to come in. They've been coming in for about the last hour. It's gotten a lot more organized here. You can see behind me, there are trucks. The gates are here. They're not letting us in because they really want it to be organized. They don't anybody in their way. There are palates water. There are trucks. And things have really gotten a lot better here in the past few days. You know, earlier in the week, tempers were flaring because there was so much confusion about where to go and what time supplies would be there. In many cases, supplies didn't even come. By yesterday here, there were definitely adequate supplies, the lines were moving very quickly, and the tempers were not anywhere near they were earlier in the week.

Now also yesterday, President Bush yesterday visited the region. He took a helicopter tour of the region. He visited the National Hurricane Center, and then he also stopped at a relief-supply center and talked to Floridians, telling them that things are going to continue to improve.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Things don't happen instantly, but things are happening. Right here on this side, people are getting fed. Soon, more and more houses will have their electricity back on and life will get back to normal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAMBERG: Right now, there's still about 1.7 million customers without power. They are continuing to put up power, but power is the big issue, and that leads to the gas lines here. The gas lines are still long. I spoke to people yesterday who waited in line anywhere from one hour to four hours, and gas relates to power, because there's enough gas here; it's just that there's no power to pump that gas out. I spoke to one official from Chevron yesterday who said they're bringing in generators, if you can believe it, Louisiana and Texas, where the generators were being used recently -- Zain.

VERJEE: J.J. Ramberg for us in Miami.

(WEATHER REPORT)

O'BRIEN: Coming up on the program, more on the developing story out of Washington. A potential indictment, or indictments, today in the CIA leak investigation. Jeffrey Toobin will guide us through the legal maze.

VERJEE: Plus, fallout of "The New York Times" over that alleged leak. Some of Judith Miller's biggest supporters become her biggest critics.

O'BRIEN: And later, how to make sure the plans have you for a nice retirement don't get swept away by a hurricane. That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Well, as we've been saying, it's a very important day in Washington, D.C., and we thought this might be a good time to sort of backtrack just a little bit and give people a sense of how this case got to where it is, and then have Jeff Toobin weigh in and give us a sense of the legalities of it.

Jeff is here. Let's go back to the beginning, shall we? Because a lot of times, we make assumptions, that we all remember these things.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SR. LEGAL ANALYST: And this is a pretty complicated story.

O'BRIEN: It is a complicated story.

TOOBIN: So I think you're wise to do a little quick teaching here.

O'BRIEN: Well, thank you so much. You can come on the program any time if you continue with that.

Let's start with January of 2003, the president's State of the Union Address. And these are the 16 words that we have heard so much about, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," State of the Union.

All right, flash forward, July 6th, 2003, "New York Times" op-ed. Joseph C. Wilson, the person who went to Niger to check that out before that speech was ever given, he wrote this column, which said, among other things, "Some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," in other words, saying the president might have said the wrong there in the State of the Union Address. The White House gets very upset.

Shortly thereafter, Robert Novak's column, among other things said -- this is July 14th, 2003, the Novak column, and this is the one that got the investigation going -- "Wilson," meaning Joseph Wilson, "never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons on mass destruction."

And therein lies the beginning of the investigation. Somebody reads that paragraph and says, wait a minute, that's a crime, potentially.

TOOBIN: George Tenet, the head of the CIA, says we want a criminal investigation, somebody has destroyed her career, endangered her life, who did it, let's have an investigation. Patrick Fitzgerald is hired.

O'BRIEN: All right, and that is the way it works now, the special prosecutors now, used to be a different...

TOOBIN: Used to be independent counsel, right.

O'BRIEN: Independent counsel, which was a different thing. It kind of got phased out. Nonetheless, Patrick Fitzgerald, who's kind of outside the Beltway radar screen.

TOOBIN: He's now the U.S. attorney in Chicago, used to be a prosecutor here in New York.

O'BRIEN: Tough guy, right?

TOOBIN: Very tough, very apolitical, which may turn out to be very significant.

O'BRIEN: Which is interesting in Washington. There aren't many apolitical creatures.

TOOBIN: Well, and he's not a Washington person. He doesn't live in Washington. He now lives in Chicago. So he's, as you say, outside the Beltway.

O'BRIEN: So almost two years now, he has been continuing this investigation. You know, one thing that comes to mind here -- you've worked in U.S. attorney's offices -- it seems like a long time for an investigation of this nature. Why does it take so long?

TOOBIN: It is a very long time. I think the main reason this investigation took so long is that one of his major witnesses was Judith Miller, "The New York Times" reporter, and there was this extended legal battle over whether she would testify. She said she had a journalistic privilege not to reveal her sources. She went to prison for more than two months. That legal fight occupied the better part of the year.

O'BRIEN: And as long as we're reminding people of this, it was important that they talk to other reporters to see what potentially the administration people were saying to them. That is the key.

TOOBIN: What made this so complicated and got journalists involved is this an investigation of leaking which, by definition, means giving information to journalists. Journalists don't like to testify, so there's been a lot of legal wrangling.

O'BRIEN: OK, so now, that brings us today to the possible charges. If we had a menu of possible charges, and of course one of the choices would be nothing, thank you, no charges at all. Perjury and false statements, which means that somewhere along the way, people might have deliberately, because perjury is deliberate.

TOOBIN: Correct, absolutely. Yes. And this would be lying to Fitzgerald's investigation. Perjury is lying under oath, and the grand jury making false statements is lying, but not under oath, say in an interview with an FBI agent.

O'BRIEN: And then obstruction of justice would be perhaps counseling a witness, telling people, hey, would you do me a favor and do this?

TOOBIN: Destroying documents, withholding evidence, some way of interfering with the investigation.

O'BRIEN: And then of course the crime which is at the beginning of all this, which is the exposing of a covert operative. That's a difficult one to prove.

TOOBIN: There has never been a successful prosecution under that law. There's never been a trial where someone is convicted. One person has pled guilty, but that law is tailored in such a narrow way, you have to know the person was undercover. You have to intentionally put out their identity. It's very difficult to prove that crime, and most people seem to think that there will not be charges under that statute.

O'BRIEN: Win, lose or draw today, and the two people we have named so much of course are Lewis Scooter Libby, Karl Rove. Win, lose or draw this story has legal legs, because no matter what happens with the indictments or not, there is the possibility that Wilson and Plame will file a civil suit?

TOOBIN: It will. I don't think there is much chance for a civil suit to go anywhere. But "The New York Times" is reporting that Lewis Libby is likely to be indicted today. Rove, not to be indicted today, however, even though this grand jury that Fitzgerald is working with expires today, the "Times" and others are saying that it will be extended, or the investigation will be extended, so Rove is not off the hook.

O'BRIEN: Jeff Toobin, thanks for clearing it up for us.

TOOBIN: Could be a big day.

O'BRIEN: Yes, it could. Yes, it could -- Zain.

VERJEE: A big day and potentially catastrophic. Politically speaking at least, this is probably the worst week in five years for the White House. So what direction does President Bush take now?

Ron Brownstein is a CNN political analyst and a columnist for "The L.A. Times." He's joins us from Washington this morning.

Thanks so much, Ron.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN POL. ANALYST: Good morning.

VERJEE: So what does the president do now?

BROWNSTEIN: How was your week, huh?

VERJEE: Not that bad.

BROWNSTEIN: Well, look, with -- especially with the withdrawal of Harriet Miers this week, what we're seeing in Washington is the tangible ebbing of presidential power. It's not dissipated, it's not entirely gone, but it is clearly diminished. And he now faces a situation where a variety of fronts, the Republicans in Congress, who have been very willing to follow his lead, are resisting initiatives that he is putting forward.

So his first priority is to reassert leadership within his own party. And the likelihood that will mean a turn toward trying to mollify and consolidate his conservative base.

VERJEE: By picking someone that they can energize them, someone that really they can rally around?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, I think -- I mean, look, obviously, we don't know what the president is going to do. He certainly has shown the capacity to surprise us with nominations, and not only surprise us, but surprise basically everybody in his party. But the initial word from people close to the White House is that the president understands he has to pick someone who will, in fact, energize his conservative base.

And of course the risk in that, is that even while he's facing this uprising on the right, you can lose sight of the larger picture. His standing with voters in the middle, with independent voters, with moderate voters, has fallen to the lowest point of his presidency. And the danger is if he provokes a very polarizing fight over a very conservative nominee, he could further narrow his appeal at that end. It's not easy to solve the problem when your boat is leaking at both ends.

VERJEE: There's a report in "The New York Times" today that says Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, could be indicted, Karl Rove could remain under investigation. If that is the case, what will that do to the White House and to the GOP?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, you know, I think it's an interesting statement of the situation you're in, where you would feel it would be a good day if only the chief of staff to the vice president gets indicted. Look, this is another cloud over the president that makes it harder for him to get back on the offense and to move forward with an agenda.

In a strange way, it may help hip rally Republicans around him, because I do think that would be the initial reaction of many Republicans. But I -- it can't be anything but another big distraction and something that forces them on the defensive at a time when they very dearly need to regain public confidence.

VERJEE: Thank you so much, Ron Brownstein, CNN's political analyst and an "L.A. Times" columnist -- Miles.

O'BRIEN: Still to come on the program, something to get your blood boiling. Are you sick of sky-high gas surprises? Well, of course you are. But wait until you hear about the profits the oil companies are raking in. Andy, "Minding Your Business" with that next on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: So while you're pumping gas and you're watching that meter spin and you're thinking about the cash coming out of your wallet, where is it headed? Andy Serwer is here to tell you, and get you a little outraged, unless you own a bunch of Exxon stock or something, which you might be happy with this, right?

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: That's right. It heads right to the coffers of Big Oil companies, and you know, I was saying this months and months ago. Whenever you start paying for lots of gas at the pump, guy oil stocks, because that's where the money is going.

Exxon yesterday reported a profit of -- here is the net income numbers, first of all, of the Big Oil companies the past couple of days. Look at that, the first company in the United States to report nearly a $10 billion profit. Then you've got Royal Dutch, British Petroleum, ConocoPhillips, the number three company. These are just staggering numbers. Exxon, the first company ever to report $100 billion in revenue in a quarter. That's three months, a hundred billion dollars. That's bigger than the GDP of most countries in the world.

Of course the price of oil is up 40 percent. You can see here, this is how Exxon makes its money per day, per hour, per minute, per second. Every second of every day, Miles, while you're asleep, while you're awake, 1,250 -- while we're talking, it's made -- well, you can just imagine.

O'BRIEN: I can't do that math that quickly.

SERWER: You can just imagine.

Now Senator Bill Frist has called for hearings about the high profits and revenues that these companies are making.

O'BRIEN: Profiteering is the term? Could this be something that there is some law they have violated?

SERWER: I don't think there's any -- going to be any smoke or fire here. The price of oil has gone up 40 percent this year, and these companies are making more money. That's it, pure and simple.

O'BRIEN: Straight and simple. But it must mean that the price they're charging us is going up faster than the price of oil. I mean, I'm not an economist, but that would be...

SERWER: Yes, you could -- I think you could surmise that.

O'BRIEN: Thank you. Thank you very much.

SERWER: Yes.

O'BRIEN: Andy Serwer, outrage moment of the moment.

Coming up, the leading lady of the Republican right, Ann Coulter. She got her wish when Harriet Miers stepped aside. She called Harriet Miers the cleaning lady at one point. Now she says it's time to pick a fight with the Democrats. She's always ready for some kind of fight. Ann Coulter will joins us live ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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