I think it really is a mistake to read too much into the Fitzgerald website.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in NY where I worked was one of the last holdouts (until around 2002) against having a website. This proved to be a nightmare for the press office and for prosecutors handling cases, because they would have to field individual calls from goo-gobs of press people and then fax press releases and any documents that were part of the public record. It takes untold hours. It is also counterproductively annoying: press people generally don’t want to sit and read through all these materials – they want you to walk them through the juicy parts.

With a website, of course, you never have to think about it – you post the stuff, and people can access it in their own time. Since you thus spend much less time on the phone with them, they are not taking up skads of your time with a million questions about what it all means. That’s why DOJ itself and many (if not most) district U.S. Attorney’s now have websites.

Remember, too, that there has been a lot of chatter recently about whether Pat’s investigation has ever been limited to or targeted on the act protecting the identities of covert agents. Because of that, as we get close to the grand jury’s expiration date, you can be certain that there have been tons of media requests for information about the permissible scope of the probe (such as this Feb 6, 2004 letter from the Deputy Attorney General). I would bet, with all the speculation that this past week was going to be the week when final decisions were made, and with more of the same guaranteed for next week, Fitzgerald’s press office was just overwhelmed. (His press office, incidentally, also has the day-job of dealing with the media in connection with all cases brought by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago – one of the biggest in the country.) Putting documents up on the Internet is the obvious way to deal with that problem, whether charges ultimately get filed or not.