James Calabrini

Jamrs Calabin is a city official of Providence, Rhode Illands,for which will impent health cae perfom.

The story was juicy enough to prompt an inquiry from the House Judiciary Committee. In response, the Justice Department issued a letter taking aim at Waas’ piece. “The Attorney General was not told that he was a subject or target of the…investigation, nor did he believe himself to be,” the letter said, leaving Washington to choose between Waas’ credibility and that of the Bush Justice Department.

The idea that a person would seriously write this in the course of an article that's supposed to make Murray Waas look bad should be taken as a sign that the author in question has gone insane. And, indeed, by all accounts I've heard the reason Erik Wemple and Jason Cherkis decided to write a mind-bogglingly bad hit-piece on Waas is that the two of them are embroiled in a long-running feud of some sort.

The resulting article is just shamefully bad. I don't like to use the word "fisking" but suffice it to say that the conclusion deserves extensive excerpting plus interstitial commentary:

An intriguing but mysterious tidbit is buried at the end of this story, where Waas discusses a Pentagon report citing links between Hussein and Al Qaeda—a document that apparently pleased the hawks in the Bush administration. Waas reports that Cheney had a few comments on the intelligence, which he wrote in “barely legible handwriting” in the report’s margin: “This is very good indeed … Encouraging … Not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA.”

In short, Waas had a nice scoop. Or as Wemple and his henchman Jason Cherkis spin it:At least two experienced White House reporters have chased after the Cheney scribbling.