Must ... stop ... getting .... hopes .... up .....

Yowza...this is getting good. Screw the popcorn; I'm going for the Raisinets AND the ice cream bonbons with my small Diet Coke.

As promised by Raw Story, the Wall Street Journal is reporting an investigation into a larger conspiracy:

The New York Times reporter who went to jail to avoid testifying in the CIA leak case was quizzed by the special prosecutor again yesterday and has agreed to return to the grand jury today.

Judith Miller's additional testimony comes as the endgame is intensifying in the legal chess match that threatens to damage the Bush administration.

There are signs that prosecutors now are looking into contacts between administration officials and journalists that took place much earlier than previously thought. Earlier conversations are potentially significant, because that suggests the special prosecutor leading the investigation is exploring whether there was an effort within the administration at an early stage to develop and disseminate confidential information to the press that could undercut former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Central Intelligence Agency official Valerie Plame.

[snip]

Until now, Mr. Fitzgerald appeared to be focusing on conversations between White House officials such as Mr. Libby and Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political adviser, after Mr. Wilson wrote his op-ed. The defense by Republican operatives has been that White House officials didn't name Ms. Plame, and that any discussion of her was in response to reporters' questions about Mr. Wilson, the kind of casual banter that occurs between sources and reporters.

Mr. Rove, who has already testified three times before the grand jury and was identified by a Time magazine reporter as a source for his story on Mr. Wilson, is expected to go back to the grand jury, potentially as early as today, to clarify earlier answers.

Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group. Formed in August 2002, the group, which included Messrs. Rove and Libby, worked on setting strategy for selling the war in Iraq to the public in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. The group likely would have played a significant role in responding to Mr. Wilson's claims.

What this means is that this investigation is now about more than just whether anyone leaked the name of Joseph Wilson's wife or if she was just referred to as "Joe Wilson's wife" -- parsing the definition of "name", as it's been. Now it's about whether the attempt to discredit Joseph Wilson was part of a larger policy to sell a false justification for war.

What's amazing to me is that this Administration has allowed Fitzgerald to take the investigation this far. Were they really that arrogant that they thought a bulldog like this would just do a whitewash? Had they become THAT overconfident?

I love the smell of Schadenfreude in the morning...