From talkingpoinstmemo.com

“One case that jumps out at you is his representation of Stephen A. Saccoccia.

Saccoccia and his wife Donna were eventually convicted of laundering more than a hundred million dollars for various Colombian drug kingpins. Stephen is currently serving a 660 year sentence. Their racket was laundering drug money through companies which traded in precious metals.

Saccoccia was convicted in 1993. And Luskin took up his case on appeal.

Eventually the Feds got the idea that the money Saccoccia had paid Luskin and his other attorneys for their services was itself part of the $137 million in drug money he was ordered to forfeit. Now, on the face of it this seems a bit unfair since under our system everyone is entitled to good representation and how was Luskin to know it was tainted money.

Well, the prosecutors thought he should have gotten some inkling when Saccoccia started paying Luskin’s attorney’s fees in gold bars.

Yep, you heard that right. 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? ”

I wonder if Rove has to pay with gold bars as swell.

By AltHippo
From: Top Reader Blogs
I suspect we’ll all be looking into this Washingtpon Post article in more detail tomorrow.

For now, I’ll quote the lede:

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame’s role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove’s lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.

The conventional wisdom is that Rove would put up a defense saying that he didn’t know Valerie Plame was a covert agent for the CIA.

This is completely different. Rove’s lawyer is saying that he didn’t refer to her by name.

I’m not one to parse the judicial codes here, but I don’t think anyone is going to see a difference between “Valerie Plame” and “Joe Wilson’s wife, and here’s a phone book if you can’t connect the dots.”

2 hours, 3 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Top White House aide Karl Rove discussed a former US ambassador and his CIA agent wife with a Time magazine reporter, according to a report.

The Newsweek weekly quoted Rove lawyer Robert Luskin as confirming that Rove was the source who gave information to Time reporter Matt Cooper under a pledge of confidentiality, and last week released him to testify about that conversation to a grand jury.

Cooper had been ordered by a US federal judge to testify before the grand jury investigating whether the agent’s identity was illegally leaked.

Rove, President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson or his wife, Valerie Plame.

And Luskin told Newsweek last week that his client “never knowingly disclosed classified information” and that “he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.”

Plame’s was first published in a column by veteran reporter Robert Novak in 2003, which cited senior administration officials.

Wilson claimed she was outed as punishment for his contradiction of Bush’s assertion in the 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Africa.

Miller researched the story, but didn’t write it, and Cooper only mentioned it in passing

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050710/pl_afp/usjusticemediarove_050710203623;_ylt=Ajb5DrqZl3BUTdgL2ywJOXNZJ_wA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Alright – so it’s settled. He lied about it several times under oath, and the leaking of this information caused a CIA counter-terrorism effort to fold and cost the life of one person that we know of. The cover of agents across the world who worked under this shell CIA company was blown all at once, with all of them jeopardized…of course, without the luxury of being able to call on the embassy for help.

This man is pond scum, and this ‘game’ of politics he’s been so celebrated for manipulating over the years…who’s proud of this guy now?

They ruined her career. And for what? What did she do to deserve such a thing. Better yet, what right did Rove have to destroy her?

Rall’s editorial:

KARL ROVE: WORSE THAN OSAMA BIN LADEN
By Ted Rall
Mon Jul 4, 7:00 PM ET

NEW YORK–In war collaborators are more dangerous than enemy forces, for they betray with intimate knowledge in painful detail and demoralize by their cynical example. This explains why, at the end of occupations, the newly liberated exact vengeance upon their treasonous countrymen even they allow foreign troops to conduct an orderly withdrawal.

If, as state-controlled media insists, there is such a creature as a Global War on Terrorism, our enemies are underground Islamist organizations allied with or ideologically similar to those that attacked us on 9/11. But who are the collaborators?

The right points to critics like Michael Moore, yours truly, and Ward Churchill, the Colorado professor who points out the gaping chasm between America’s high-falooting rhetoric and its historical record. But these bête noires are guilty only of the all-American actions of criticism and dissent, not to mention speaking uncomfortable truths to liars and deniers. As far as we know, no one on what passes for the “left” (which would be the center-right anywhere else) has betrayed the United States in the GWOT. No anti-Bush progressive has made common cause with Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or any other officially designated “terrorist” group. No American liberal has handed over classified information or worked to undermine the CIA.

But it now appears that Karl Rove, GOP golden boy, has done exactly that.

Last week Time magazine turned over its reporter’s notes to a special prosecutor assigned to learn who told Republican columnist Bob Novak that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. The revelation, which effectively ended Plame’s CIA career and may have endangered her life, followed her husband Joe Wilson’s publication of a New York Times op-ed piece that embarrassed the Bush Administration by debunking its claims that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger. Time’s cowardly decision to break its promise to a confidential source has had one beneficial side effect: according to Newsweek, it indicates that Karl Rove himself made the call to Novak.

One might have expected Rove, the master White House political strategist who engineered Bush’s 2000 coup d’état and post-9/11 permanent war public relations campaign, to have ordered a flunky underling to carry out this act of high treason. But as the Arab saying goes, arrogance diminishes wisdom.

Rove, whose gaping maw recently vomited forth that Democrats didn’t care about 9/11, is atypically silent. He did talk to the Time reporter but “never knowingly disclosed classified information,” claims his attorney. But there’s circumstantial evidence to go along with Time’s leaked notes. Ari Fleischer abruptly resigned as Bush’s press secretary on May 16, 2003, about the same time the White House became aware of Ambassador Wilson’s plans to go public. (Wilson’s article appeared July 6.) Did Fleischer quit because he didn’t want to act as spokesman for Rove’s plan to betray CIA agent Plame? Another interesting coincidence: Novak published his Plame column on July 14, Fleischer’s last day on the job.

If Newsweek’s report is accurate, Karl Rove is more morally repugnant and more anti-American than Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, after all, has no affiliation with, and therefore no presumed loyalty to, the United States. Rove, on the other hand, is a U.S. citizen and, as deputy White House chief of staff, a high-ranking official of the U.S. government sworn to uphold and defend our nation, its laws and its interests. Yet he sold out America just to get even with Joe Wilson.

Osama bin Laden, conversely, is loyal to his cause. He has never exposed an Al Qaeda agent’s identity to the media.

“[Knowingly revealing Plame's name and undercover status to the media]…is a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and is punishable by as much as ten years in prison,” notes the Washington Post. Unmasking an intelligent agent during a time of war, however, surely rises to giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies–treason. Treason is punishable by execution under the United States Code.

How far up the White House food chain does the rot of treason go? “Bush has always known how to keep Rove in his place,” wrote Time in 2002 about a “symbiotic relationship” that dates to 1973. This isn’t some rogue “plumbers” operation. Rove would never go it alone on a high-stakes action like Valerie Plame. It’s a safe bet that other, higher-ranking figures in the Bush cabal–almost certainly Dick Cheney and possibly Bush himself–signed off before Rove called Novak. For the sake of national security, those involved should be removed from office at once.

Rove and his collaborators should quickly resign and face prosecution for betraying their country, but given their sense of personal entitlement impeachment is probably the best we can hope for. Congress, and all Americans, should place patriotism ahead of party loyalty.

I, nor you, have to consider Rove worse than Osama Bin Laden – - – this is the type of over-reaching I generally dislike about Rall’s opinions, but the points he makes in this article in terms of what Rove actually did is entirely apt.

Is Rove worse than Osama? NO!!!! But that’s not the point I wanted to make in posting this. I hate when my work is snipped and crossposted, so I’m going with the second commandment here…the golden rule if you will, by posting his editorial in it’s entirety.

Rove is only worse than Osama in a patriotic sense, in that he did wrong by the organization he represents by selling out one of his own.

Those very same people who want Newsweek to go out of business for the Koran story should consider how hypocritical it would be to look the other way with Rove.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and it’s becoming obvious to me that the fix was in since day one. These two journalists were taking the fall for what’s hopefully going to come out in the next few weeks.

Let’s hope it’s still not ‘fixable’ – because what happened here was as shitty as it gets. The whole concept of ‘fixed’ intelligence is a black eye for America.