Former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, plan to take their civil lawsuit against Bush administration officials to the Supreme Court after a federal circuit court refused to rehear the case on Monday.

Wilson v. Cheney, filed in 2006, charges that Bush administration officials such as Vice President Cheney, and aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, violated Plame's constitutional rights in allegedly engineering the outing Plame, who was undercover at the time, as retaliation against her husband, an Iraq war critic, who had been sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate the possible sale of yellowcake uranium to Iraq.
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In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a district judge's dismissal of the suit saying that it failed to establish a constitutional issue.

"There must be consequences when government officials abuse their power and endanger national security for political ends," said CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan on Tuesday. "This is an issue worth fighting over and we will not give up."

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday said the 2006 firings of U.S. attorneys were orchestrated by the “highest political ranks” in the White House.

The report named former deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove as among those involved.

“The evidence shows that senior officials were focused on the political impact of federal prosecutions and whether federal prosecutors were doing enough to bring partisan voter fraud and corruption cases,” the report said.

The committee’s majority also concludes the Justice Department’s publicly stated reasons for the firings were “contrived as part of a cover-up.”

Rove did not respond to an e-mail asking for comment.

The findings were released by committee chairman Sen. Pat Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. The full report will be filed with the Senate today.

In a statement, Leahy said the report demonstrated why the Senate should pursue contempt citations against Rove and former White House official Josh Bolten for failing to comply with committee subpoenas in the case.

Rove and Bolten have claimed executive privilege in declining to testify.

Cheney is charged with engaging in an organized criminal activity related to the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds financial interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees because of his link to the prison companies.

Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on Tuesday, saying that the vice president had not yet received a copy of the indictment.

The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons.

George W. Bush "is not a big pardon guy," [ ] says a Fox News legal analyst, but there has been increasing speculation that he might wield the pardon power more generously as he prepares to leave office. However, there are some pardons that Bush either cannot or will not issue.

"The president can still pardon anybody he wants at any time he wants for anything done in their past for a federal violation," former judge Andrew Napolitano explained to the hosts of Fox and Friends on Tuesday. "He has so much absolute pardon power, he could pardon himself."

But although Bush might even pardon individuals who have not yet been charged -- as Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon -- Napolitano insisted that he cannot issue a blanket pardon to everyone who may have engaged in extreme interrogation techniques. "You've got to name them," Napolitano explained. "You can't pardon somebody without saying who it is."