There are a lot of rumors flying around the left side of the blogosphere about a Karl Rove indictment. (He’s among the top Technorati searches today.) The New York Sun reports otherwise.

But unhinged Democrats are already partying hard. The Detroit Free Press report:

Was it an improbable outside-the-Beltway scoop on the ultimate inside-the-Beltway story? A criminal leak concerning the grand jury investigation of a criminal leak? Or just a red-hot rumor that caught fire in the dry tinder of too many trial attorneys?

Whatever it was, the news that White House adviser Karl Rove had been indicted for perjury electrified the 700 or so lawyers, judges and elected officials (including featured speakers Gov. Jennifer Granholm and U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.) gathered at the Dearborn Hyatt Regency for Saturday night’s annual banquet of the Michigan Trial Lawyers Association.

Until they found out that maybe he hadn’t been.

MTLA Vice President Robert Raitt was heading toward the podium to introduce Clinton, the banquet’s keynote speaker, when Gerald Acker, a Southfield trial attorney and prominent Democratic fund-raiser, mentioned Rove’s indictment.

Raitt didn’t question the report. “Gerry is pretty connected,” he explained Sunday, “and I thought, well, that’ll get this crowd going.”

A couple of minutes later, Raitt brought the heavily Democratic audience to its feet with the, um, news.

Among those who declined to join the standing ovation was Michigan Court of Appeals Chief Judge William Whitbeck, one of the few Republican officeholders in attendance. He said it struck him as odd that federal prosecutors had chosen to announce such a significant development on a Saturday night, but he left the banquet convinced that Rove’s indictment was a fait accompli.

Twenty-four hours later, that was still in doubt. A few Democrat-friendly Web sites, including www. truthout.org, reported as early as Saturday afternoon that Rove’s arrest was imminent. But by Sunday evening no reputable broadcast or print outlet had published the rumor.

Sunday, an embarrassed Acker told me he’d passed along the report of Rove’s indictment after hearing it from Mark J. Bernstein, an Ann Arbor lawyer whose resume includes a stint in the Bill Clinton White House.

Bernstein told me he was meeting with Hillary Clinton and several members of her staff in a Hyatt Regency reception room early Saturday evening when “everybody began reaching for their BlackBerrys at roughly the same time.”

He insisted that simultaneous e-mails reporting Rove’s indictment were based on Internet speculation, not unauthorized disclosures of grand jury proceedings.

“Did anyone speak to the special prosecutor? No. Would I have published the report? No,” Bernstein said Sunday. He learned the rumor had been disseminated only when his father, prominent personal injury lawyer Sam Bernstein, phoned from the banquet hall downstairs with an excited bulletin: “Karl Rove has just been indicted!”

How will they survive without him?

Drudge has Rove’s comments at an AEI speech today.

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E-mail feedback:

That is why I, a trial attorney by trade, refuse to join the MTLA and ABA
and wish that membership in the Michigan Bar Association was not required.
Please do not tell me any of these orgs are not liberal.

The ABA lost my respect when they named Bill Clinton their convention Key
Note Speaker the day after his license to practice law was revoked by the
Arkansas Supreme Counrt for perjury.

God bless the Federalist Society and tort reform.

Mike from Michigan
WSU Law School ‘02

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