Plamegate: Grand Jury subpoenas issued

Whoa. It looks like the Grand Jury is serious. And it looks like the White House is just as serious.

The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer's name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday. Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman's press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets.

  Newsday article

But don't get excited yet...the White House is refusing to provide subpoenaed documents. Surprised?

The subpoenas required the White House to produce the documents in three stages -- the first on Jan. 30, a second on Feb. 4 and the third on Feb. 6 -- even as White House aides began appearing before the grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C. The subpoena with the first production deadline sought three sets of documents. It requested records of telephone calls to and from Air Force One from July 7 to 12, while Bush was visting several nations in Africa. The White House declined Thursday to release a list of those on the trip. That subpoena also sought a complete transcript of a July 12 press "gaggle," or informal briefing, by then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer while at the National Hospital in Abuja, Nigeria. That transcript is missing from the White House Web site containing transcripts of other press briefings. In a transcript the White House released at the time to Federal News Service, Fleischer discusses Wilson and his CIA report. Finally, the subpoena requested a list of those in attendance at the White House reception on July 16 for former President Gerald Ford's 90th birthday. The White House at the time announced the reception would honor Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, but said the event was closed to the press. The White House Thursday declined to release the list and the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, which paid for the event, did not return phone calls.

Where do we go from here? I don't know.

Stay tuned.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.