Matthews on Indictments

Here is a piece from Chris Matthews' Hardblogger on the magnitude of the Plame Leak investigation:

The vice president has made the case for war very effectively on programs like 'Meet the Press,' that we had to go to war with Saddam Hussein because he possessed the potential to make nuclear war against the United States - to somehow deliver a nuclear weapon to this country.

For a lot of people, that was the deal maker for the war. They had a lot of problems invading a third-world country, but they said 'Well, if he has a nuclear program over there that is threatening us, we have to act.'

Well, we got over there, and our troops took that country, and there was no WMD, no nuclear, no nothing, so there is a lot of concern about how we could have gotten into a war based on false pretenses.

All of the sudden, Joe Wilson comes up and starts leaking to the New York Times' Nick
Kristoff, 'Wait a minute, they not only don't have any WMD to justify the war, they knew there wasn't going to be any WMD because they knew, based upon my trip over there, that there was no deal to buy uranium by Saddam Hussein in Africa.' That's the big picture here.

What happens (then) is that the president of the United States gets upset, apparently, and wants to know what happened with the WMD, why there isn't any -- the vice president's office had said there are going to be WMD, the CIA was going along with it, even.

So there's a huge problem for the vice president to justify his behavior. Why didn't he pay attention to this trip that had been made to Africa? Why didn't he see that there was no WMD before we went to war, no uranium deal?

That's the heat about this. What did the vice president and his people do, faced with the hot seat that they were sitting on, that they had somehow gotten accused of taking us into war under false pretenses.

That's the environment in which this whole thing may have been hatched. If there was law-breaking, it came out of the vice president and his people's determination to protect themselves against the charge that they led us into a corrupt war, a war based on false pretenses.

That's how hot this thing is.

If there are indictments, they're going to be probably in the vice president's office, they're probably going to come next week and they are going to blow this White House apart.

It's going to be unbelievable.

I think the people watching right now who are voters better start paying attention to this issue. It's not just about whether somebody's name was leaked, it's about whether we went to war under false pretenses or not, whether people knew about that or not, and what they did when they were charged against that kind of offense against the United States.