As TalkLeft readers know, I try to stick to analyzing news rather than breaking news. I'm just not that kind of journalist. But Jason Leopold's article today reporting Rove has been indicted was filled with such unique detail (analysis here) I wanted to know if it was true. Who better to ask than Robert Luskin, even though I don't know him from Adam. I got his phone number from Jason, and here's what happened. Shorter version: I doubt I'll ever do this again.

******
7:55 pm. I just got off the phone with Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin. I'm sure I made a new enemy. I called at 7:47 pm my time which is 9:47 his time. In a run-on sentence, I introduced myself as a criminal defense lawyer and said I was calling about Jason Leopold's article because if it wasn't true, I wanted to write that it wasn't true. He said, "Why are you calling me at 10:00 on a Saturday night. It's so inappropriate." I apologized and said because it's an important story and if it's not true I wanted to say so. I looked at the clock on my computer and saw it was 9:48 or so his time.

He said something like "It's completely not true and you shouldn't be calling me at 10:00 on a Saturday night. You should be calling Mark Corallo [Rove's media strategist.]

But here's the thing. I didn't even have a chance to explain which of Jason's articles I was writing about or that Jason had reported Rove was indicted. For all I know, Luskin hasn't seen that article and his denial pertained to an earlier article written by Jason.

Luskin continued to chastise me for calling so late on a Saturday night, saying "This is Washington, you don't call people at 10:00 on a Saturday night." I apologized again and said I was in Denver and it was two hours earlier and it hadn't occurred to me that it would be too late to call Washington. He said "Well it should have occurred to you." I asked if I could call him tomorrow. He said "No" and hung up.

The defense lawyers wouldn't say it, but ABC News has no such reservation: The DNA found on the vaginal swab of the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse case belongs to her boyfriend.

I've been told (and this may be common knowledge, I have no idea) that the boyfriend drove her to the party and went to see her in the hospital the next day. What wasn't known when I got the information was whether the boyfriend went back to pick her up that night and whether he saw anything at the house.

So....score another point for the defense. Nonetheless, DA Nifong is expected to indict a third player Monday.

Huge breaking news from Jason Leopold just now at Truthout -- Karl Rove has been indicted.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning. Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment.

Leopold reports the charges include lying to investigators and perjury before the grand jury but it is not yet known if obstruction of justice is one of the charges.

Is Dick Cheney the next "Official A"?

Late Friday, Patrick Fitzgerald filed a new pleading in the Scooter Libby case. Empty Wheel at Next Hurrah posts the pleading and analyzes the contents, including this exhibit, a copy of Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed with Cheney's handwritten notations.

In the notations, Cheney writes,

Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?

DLR Group

Zacarias Moussoui flew by private jet today from Alexandria, Virginia to the Supermax (AdMax) at Florence, Colorado, the most secure prison in the country.

He will spend his days alone in a 8 by 10 or 7 × 12 foot cell, in 23 hour a day isolation. His meals will be delivered through a slot in his cell door. The shower will be brought to his cell. His one hour a day of exercise will be with a guard, not other inmates. He will have no contact with other inmates.

The New York Times reports Sunday:

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

A Newsweek poll has been released on the NSA warrantless surveillance of Americans.

According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA's surveillance program "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.

New Jersey lawyers Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer filed suit yesterday in Manhattan federal court against Verizon for contracting with the Government to provide it with customer phone records. They are contemplating additional suits against AT&T and Bell South.

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order.

"This is not a happy day for the general counsels" of the phone companies, he said. "If you have a class action involving 10 million Americans, that's 10 million times $1,000 -- that's 10 billion."

Lawyers for the Duke Lacrosse players held a press conference yesterday to respond to reports of new DNA testing implicating one or two of the players. You can view it here. Here's more from WRAL today:

The nail was found in a bathroom trash can at the off-campus house where the party took place, and was among items -- such as Q-Tips and Kleenex -- that defense attorneys suggested might have contaminated the nail."Does it absolutely exclude all of the Duke lacrosse players with absolute certainty from this one fingernail? No," Cheshire said. "Does it say that any of the Duke lacrosse players' DNA is conclusively on this fingernail? No."

What an ugly story. Allegation: Robert Ray, former Ken Starr associate independent counsel in Monica-gate, is charged with stalking his former lover after they broke up while he was still married. He's also a former N.J. candidate for the U.S. Senate.

The ex-lover says he lied while they were dating and said he was divorced.

His ex-girlfriend, Tracy Loughlin, had told police that Ray - a former GOP Senate candidate from New Jersey - had obsessively followed her and blanketed her with unwanted calls and e-mails after their breakup four months ago.

Interesting side-note:

by TChris

TalkLeft has repeatedly (e.g., here, here, and here) called attention to the Census Bureau's unfair practice of counting prisoners as residents of the counties in which the prisons that house them are situated. The practice boosts the population counts of the rural areas in which the prisons are located, which boosts their representation in Congress and state legislatures, and increases their share of government spending. Rural areas tend to vote Republican, so Republicans have little incentive to change the system.

The good news is that courts may be willing to remedy the problem, even if legislators fail to act.

[L]ast week, a federal appeals court in New York hinted that counting prisoners as upstaters might illegally dilute the voting rights of downstaters.

If that legal argument is pursued and upheld, the political implications could be profound. Republicans now have a four-seat margin in the [state] Senate. A shift in only a few seats could give the Democrats, who already control the Assembly, a majority in the Senate, and with it, enormous power over legislative and Congressional redistricting.

by TChris

On Thursday, BlackBoxVoting released this report exposing security flaws with Diebold's electronic voting touch-pad terminals.

"It is like the nuclear bomb for e-voting systems," said Avi Rubin, computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. "It's the deal breaker. It really makes the security flaws that we found (in prior years) look trivial."

States have been slow to respond to the problem, as this report describes. Pennsylvania was the first state to recognize the need to act. Iowa and California have also directed local election officials to take additional security steps to prevent unauthorized software from being loaded into the machines.