Nor do we know how a destitute Darrell Condit, the fugitive ex-con, who had supposedly not been seen since 1996, since skipping bail in Broward County, Florida, on a drug charge, could afford the price of one John Sale, an attorney who worked in the Watergate investigation. Attorney Sale did say that his client (Darrell Condit) had not been in contact with his Congressman brother for around a year, prior to his recent capture, but did not say whether the Congressman--as is his duty, to police and to the taxpayers--reported any contact between himself and his brother between 1996 (the year of Darrell's ostensible disappearance) and 2000 (the last time, according to Mr. Sale, Darrell Condit had contact with his brother).

No, it will be necessary to charge Gary Condit with murder or with being an accessory to murder, before charges of "obstruction of justice" can be applied to him. And as this is still a missing persons case, and we have no crime yet declared, Condit has committed no "obstruction" of justice per se. Nevermind that the two hour "constituents" meeting in which Condit is purported to have been engaged, between 3:00-5:00 PM on 1 May 2001, has now been downgraded to a "telephone meeting" by his Congressional staff (translated: nobody is on-record as having seen Mr. Condit between 1:00-5:00 PM, 1 May 2001--the Michael Issikoff/Newsweek-issued "scoop" that had Vice President Dick Cheney serving as alibi for Condit, thankfully, did not stick, all 25 minutes of it . . .); further, until the case becomes officially one of a criminal nature, that senior aide Michael Dayton is the same man who told another Condit mistress, Joleen Argentini McKay, over several phone calls bearing the same message, that she should "put the affair behind her," or that "it would ruin her," will also not avail prosecution; nor will, as it appears now, Mrs. Condit's explosive phone conversation with Chandra Levy on or about April 24, when the Modesto housewife phoned Condit's apartment, only to find Levy on the other end--when, initially, Mrs. Condit told D.C. police that she had never met or heard of Chandra Levy.

We have, again, a Congressman, his wife and his senior aide, each of whom have either attempted to destroy evidence and/or who have told very brazen lies to Washington D.C. police and/or FBI investigators. We have a Congressman who initially floated a terribly distracting report to the media and D.C. police, which has been, the face of later meetings with police investigators, retracted by Condit. According to the Washington Times, "Condit reportedly told police he broke off his "close friendship" with her April 28. One of his lawyers told reporters she then harassed the congressman by phone, calling five times the next day and trying his pager some 20 times over two days. He portrayed her as 'extremely disappointed and distraught, refusing to take no for an answer.'" Weeks later, Condit would would tell police and media that he never did break off the relationship, and that Ms. Levy showed no sign of being depressed.

But none of this is apparently enough for an arrest. In this Imperial-era in our nation's history, it is clear that not even the "live boy or dead girl," of which Huey Long joshed, is enough to get a politician in trouble.

But will he be charged with murder or of eing an accessory thereto?

Legal novices insist that where there is no body, there can be no murder case . . . but Thomas Campano, a former Delaware District Attorney, would disagree, and is currently serving a life sentence for murdering his mistress Anne Marie Fahey in Delaware, her body--according to Campano's brother--entombed in a cooler and at the bottom of a lake.

The greater question is, therefore: Does the FBI (whose yearly operating budget comes from Congress) have the mutt for to make Condit a suspect? And as, as FDR was so fond of saying, "Nothing in politics happens by accident," we should know the Agency's strategy by the man it appoints to lead the Levy investigation.

Enter agent Bradley J. Garrett, the FBI's lead investigator in the "Levy case":

· The first thing you should know about this gentleman is, that he was the prosecution's closing witness in the case against Mir Aimal Kasi, the Pakistani national who offed two CIA agents at an intersection in front of the Company's Langley headquarters, and was the FBI agent dispatched to Pakistan for the safe return of Kasi back to the United States, and who is also credited as receiving Kasi's confession of said crime. Involvement in such a case, at minimum, reveals Mr. Garrett's "sensitivity-training" to things related to National Security.