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(Photo credit Larry Downing/Reuters)

Hey there, MI girl here--a little bit better prepared for the cold day out there than CA girl Jane.

I gotta say you, it was a pretty cool scene with Fitz and his team walking out of the court room. It made you believe, at least for this day, there was justice. I'm pretty happy about the events of the day. I'm relieved, more than anything else.

Fitz was his typical self, not saying more than he could. He will not do a report. Will not file further charges unless something new comes up. He will not give his materials to Congress unless they ask for it (Hey, John Conyers! Did you hear that?) He would not comment on a pardon. He said that if Libby wanted to plea, he would treat him like any other defendant. Which sounds like, if Libby really expects a pardon, the firewall will have worked.

Fitzgerald expressed both satisfaction and sadness. Which I guess is about right.  Satisfaction with the verdict. Sadness that it came to this.

Some more notes from Dennis Colins. It sounded like there was a lot of regret on the part of the jury. They sympathized with Libby. None of them (Dennis is the journalist--and not even him) knew what Libby did. And they were wondering why Rove wasn't there, why Ari wasn't there, why Armitage. In short--Wells' attempt to nullify the jury might have worked. And they even wondered, with Wells' statements, where Bush would have testified. 

I asked him what he--as a former journalist--thought about the journalists testifying. He didn't answer it that directly. He did say that he thought Ari was reasonably credible, even though he was Mr. Slick. They asked, apparently, why else he would talk about how many journalists didnt' take him seriously.  They said the parade of journalists didn't have much effect--they didn't say anything controversial. He said they actually had sympathy for Judy Miller, because she got badgered so much by Wells. Huh. Go figure.

They were not impressed by the GJ testimony. They said Libby sounded polite and nice on the testimony. Maybe it would have helped them some of Libby had testified. Then of course, maybe not. 

Most of all, though, it sounds like they were a methodical jury working narrowly within the scope of the trial. He seemed very aware that he was only seeing the very edges of what was going on--not the controversy behind it. He talked a lot about how the people on this jury were managers in their day jobs (thus all the post-its and so forth).  And it really seemed that--in spite of all the things that might have gone wrong--they just approached the matter at hand, deciding whether Scooter Libby had lied to the FBI and the Grand Jury.