Next He's Joe Wilson's Biographer?

Jason Leopold yet again scoops the world with the Karl Rove imminent indictment:

...the second part of the federal investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is nearly complete, with attorneys and government officials who have remained close to the probe saying that a grand jury will likely return an indictment against one or two senior Bush administration officials.

These sources work or worked at the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council. Some of these sources are attorneys close to the case. They requested anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the details of the investigation.

In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

But even a cat has only nine lives [emphases the FLUBA throughout]:

Let me start off by saying that I'm hated by many, many mainstream and independent journalists. My exposes are routinely discredited by the public figures I write about and by the journalists I routinely scoop. I'm a lightning rod. Oh, I should also tell you that I've got a rap sheet. I'm a convicted felon. I was charged with grand larceny almost ten years ago.... I wrote a book about ...my double life exposing oily politicians and corporate crooks in my investigative news stories while hiding my own past criminal behavior.... Perhaps you've also heard my publisher canceled it after receiving a threatening letter from the former press secretary to Governor Gray Davis ....a week ago I did a really stupid thing. ....well-known journalists -- like investigative reporter Murray Waas....questioned my credibility as a reporter because of my criminal record.

....He said I was a "poor man's Jayson Blair," a reference to the discredited New York Times reporter who fabricated and plagiarized dozens of stories during his tenure at the paper. First off, that's an outright lie. I'm no Jayson Blair. Secondly, what he wrote about me is libelous. I know it is because I've got experience with libel. I was sued for libel by an attorney who represented producer Aaron Spelling. But let me back up for a minute and put this all into context.

In August of 2002, I wrote a story for Salon.com tying former Army Secretary Thomas White to the fraud at Enron, where White once was a vice president. A month later, the story was picked up by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and immediately came under fire by every right-wing hack journalist in the country. No joke. Without so much as doing a shred of investigative work to follow up my story, the mainstream media zeroed in on a smoking gun email I used in my story and said it was phony, doctored, forged. ....Salon removed that story I wrote from its website saying it couldn't vouch for the authenticity of the email. ....Then the bastards at Salon called me a plagiarist because I failed to credit the Financial Times adequately in my piece. I credited the paper two times, but I should've credited them four times. That's hardly a case of plagiarism. ... journalists started writing about me in a negative light ....

Believe it or not, posts about me like Waas' have really hurt my career. Even the so-called independent media, the progressive magazines like In These Times and The Progressive won't run anything I write because of the carnage left by that whole debacle back in the fall of 2002. The stigma that's attached to me has been like a cancer for almost three years now. I can't get rid of it. I would love nothing more than to beat a guy like Murray Waas senseless for writing crap about me. The same goes for Howard Kurtz, Bob Novak, Andrew Sullivan, and everyone at the National Review. ....Journalism is my passion. I don't make money from doing this. I think I earned about $5,000, maybe less in the past three years and I've written close to 100 stories. They're published on websites and in magazines that can't afford to pay its writers. ....

My point in telling you this story, particularly the stuff about my past, is that I feel that by coming clean I'll be able to earn your trust as a reader. Journalists and the average Joe will contiinue to write harsh things about me. Some of it may be true. But it won't change the fact that the investigative stories I have written and will write are my best efforts to present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.