Chrissee wrote:Timberlandko is regurgitating the freeper artgument which requires one to suspend all logic and believe that a Grand Jury was impaneled to investigate something that is not even a crime. It is an absurd contention.
BTW why aren't reporters camped out at Rove's house trying to get a statement from "silent Karl?"
You are a closet freeper aren't you? I bet you have a poster of Bush on your wall somewhere. You have conservative tendancies and you read far too many websites like Free Republic.
You'll probably try to deny it, but we see the writting on the wall, or the fora as it is. You should just allow your self to be the conservative you really are. There's no shame in it really. Some of my best friends are conservatives and the do just fine out in the open.
Rove 'Knowingly' Refusing Interviews on Plame Leak
Rove 'Knowingly' Refusing Interviews on Plame Leak
By Editors & Publishers Staff
Published: July 04, 2005 6:20 PM ET
NEW YORK Two days after his lawyer confirmed that his name turned up as a source in Matthew Cooper's notes on the Valerie Plame/CIA case, top White House adviser Karl Rove refused to answer questions about the development today.
Rove traveled with President Bush when he spoke at a July 4 event in West Virginia today, but refused all requests for interviews about his role in the controversy that threatens to send Cooper, of Time magazine, and Judith Miller of The New York Times to jail this week for refusing to reveal sources.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had called on Rove to clear the air on Sunday. "We've heard it from his lawyer, but it would be nice to hear it directly from Mr. Rove that he didn't leak the identity of Valerie Plame, and that he didn't direct anyone else to do such a dastardly thing," said Schumer.
Outside the presidential rally in Morgantown, one protester made reference to the case, holding a sign that read: "Jail Karl Rove," according to a New York Times dispatch.
Rove's lawyer has asserted that while he was interviewed by Cooper he was not the key source who revealed Plame's identity as a CIA agent. Rove's critics, however, suggest that he could be charged with perjury if he did not tell the truth about this to a grand jury.
Several dozen other protesters demonstrated against the war in Iraq, the paper said, chanting, "Please support our troops, not the president!" But a large turnout for the president more than countered that.
Meanwhile, Lawrence O'Donnell, the MSNBC analyst who first broke the Rove/Cooper link on Friday, wrote on the Huffington Post blog today, that Rove's lawyer had "launched what sounds like an I-did-not-inhale defense. He told Newsweek that his client 'never knowingly disclosed classified information.' Knowingly.
"Not coincidentally, the word 'knowing' is the most important word in the controlling statute ( U.S. Code: Title 50: Section 421). To violate the law, Rove had to tell Cooper about a covert agent 'knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States.'"
July 5, 2005
Private Spy and Public Spouse Live at Center of Leak Case
By SCOTT SHANE
New York Times
WASHINGTON, July 1 - For nearly two years, the investigation into the leak of a covert C.I.A. officer's name has unfolded clamorously in the nation's capital, with partisan brawling on talk shows, prosecutors interviewing President Bush and top White House officials, and the imminent prospect that reporters could go to jail for contempt of court.
But the woman at the center of it all, Valerie E. Wilson, has kept her silence, showing the discipline and discretion that colleagues say made her a good spy. As her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, has become a highly visible critic of the administration and promoted his memoirs, Ms. Wilson has ferried their 5-year-old twins to doctors' appointments, looked after their hilltop house in the upscale Palisades neighborhood of Washington and counseled women with postpartum depression.
On June 1, after a year's unpaid leave, Ms. Wilson, now known to the country by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, returned to a new job at the Central Intelligence Agency, determined to get her career back on track, her husband said. Neither the agency nor Mr. Wilson would describe her position, except to make what might seem an obvious point: she will no longer be working under cover, as she did successfully for almost 20 years.
"Before this whole affair, no one would ever have thought of her as an undercover agent," said David Tillotson, a next-door neighbor for seven years who got to know the Wilsons well over back-fence chats, shared dinners and play dates for their grandchildren with the Wilsons' children, Trevor and Samantha.
"She wasn't mysterious," Mr. Tillotson said. "She was sort of a working soccer mom."
He recalled his incredulity on July 14, 2003, when his wife, Victoria, spotted in The Washington Post, in a syndicated column by Robert Novak, a line identifying their neighbor by her maiden name and calling her an "agency operative." Ms. Tillotson kept calling out: "This can't be! This can't be!"
The Wilsons' neighbor on the other side, Christopher Wolf, was similarly aghast. As he sat on his deck staring at the Novak column, Mr. Wilson came out his back door.
"I said: 'This is amazing! I had no idea,' " Mr. Wolf recalled. "He sort of motioned to me to keep my voice down."
A Jaguar-driving, cigar-smoking, silver-haired former ambassador, Mr. Wilson, 55, interpreted the leak of his wife's C.I.A. connection as an act of vengeance from White House officials for his public accusations of deceit in building a case for the Iraq war. Days before the leak, he had gone public in a New York Times Op-Ed article and television appearances to charge that the administration had covered up his own debunking of reports that Iraq had bought uranium in Africa.
What he calls a "smear campaign" against the couple has catalyzed his transformation from nonpartisan diplomat - he worked closely with the first President Bush and his top aides during the first gulf war - to anti-Bush activist.
On Wednesday, a federal judge is expected to decide whether two reporters, Judith Miller of The Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine, will go to jail for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigation into the leak. That the leaker appears willing to permit journalists to be incarcerated rather than taking public responsibility for his actions simply shows the leaker's "cravenness and cowardice," Mr. Wilson said.
It is not known what information, if any, Mr. Novak supplied to prosecutors, but he is not facing jail time.
Meanwhile, Ms. Wilson, 42, whose husband said she has used her married name both at work and in her personal life since their 1998 marriage, declined to speak for this article. She has guarded her privacy, with rare exceptions. She posed with her husband for a Vanity Fair photographer, wearing sunglasses and with a scarf over her blond hair. She drafted an op-ed article to correct what she felt were distortions of her and her husband's actions, but the C.I.A. would not authorize its publication, saying it would "affect the agency's ability to perform its mission."
Former C.I.A. officers differ on the impact of Mr. Novak's identification of Ms. Wilson, who had been working against weapons proliferation in Europe and elsewhere while posing as an analyst for a shell company in Boston, Brewster Jennings & Associates, set up by the agency.
Clandestine service officers working under such "nonofficial cover" - rather than the traditional guise of diplomat - are considered to hold the most sensitive and vulnerable jobs in intelligence, lacking the protection of diplomatic immunity if they are unmasked overseas. Disclosing the C.I.A. employment of officers under cover can endanger the officers, their operations and their agents, as well as violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, the law that prompted the current leak investigation.
"This situation has been very hard on her, professionally and personally," said Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former C.I.A. case officer and a friend of Ms. Wilson. "Not only have you removed from the playing field a very knowledgeable counterproliferation officer at a time when we really need her services. But before this she was on a fast track as a candidate for senior management at the agency. With something like this, her career will never recover."
But other former C.I.A. officers say that by 2003 Ms. Wilson's cover was already thin. Any serious inquiry would have revealed that Brewster Jennings was little more than a mailbox. Though she traveled regularly, Ms. Wilson, who speaks French, German and Greek, had been working for some time at agency headquarters in Langley, Va. And her marriage to a senior American diplomat, Mr. Wilson, ended any pretense of having no government ties.
"At that point, she looks, walks and quacks like an overt agency employee," said Fred Rustmann, a C.I.A. officer from 1966 to 1990, who supervised Ms. Wilson early in her career and calls her "one of the best, an excellent officer."
Yet outside the spy world, word of her real employment came as a shock. To have such a carefully nurtured identity shattered in a single stroke was traumatic, Mr. Wilson said. "Your whole network of personal relationships over 20 years are compromised," he said.
Ms. Wilson had to explain to friends and relatives that she had never leveled with them since joining the agency shortly after graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in journalism in 1984.
"My sister-in-law turned to my brother," Mr. Wilson recalled, "and said, 'Do you think Joe knew?' "
Joe knew. As their relationship grew serious after they met at a 1997 reception at the Turkish ambassador's residence, Valerie Plame revealed her real job to Mr. Wilson, who had a top secret clearance. Three months after they married, he retired from the State Department after a 23-year career that included an ambassadorship to two countries, Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe. Now he consults on business projects in Africa as J. C. Wilson International Ventures.
Their marriage was her second and his third; he is also the father of 26-year-old twins from his first marriage. Friends say that after the birth of their twins in 2000, Ms. Wilson suffered postpartum depression, which prompted her to become active in helping other mothers.
The Wilsons have had a low-key social life, friends say. Mr. Wilson said they had attended only one "A-list Washington party," given by Ben Bradlee, the retired Washington Post editor. Before July 2003, some neighbors knew them from the playground only as "Trevor and Samantha's mom and dad."
Their turn in the limelight changed that temporarily, as liberal celebrities embraced them; they were honored in late 2003 at a dinner at the guesthouse of the television producer Norman Lear, with guest list that included Warren Beatty.
The couple's actions in 2002 have become, in the polarized politics of the Iraq war, subject to divergent interpretation. All agree that Mr. Wilson traveled to Niger in February 2002 at the C.I.A.'s request to assess reports that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium there. There the agreement ends.
In the version of his Republican critics, laid out in part by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, Mr. Wilson's trip was a junket orchestrated by his wife. Further, the critics say, Mr. Wilson's findings on the uranium question were equivocal. But as a partisan Democrat, they say, he exploited his minor involvement to attack the president, asserting that Mr. Bush misled the American people by citing the questionable uranium claim in his 2003 State of the Union address.
Mr. Wilson has laid out his own account in interviews and in his memoir, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's C.I.A. Identity." The 514-page book, which features on the back cover photographs of Mr. Wilson with the first President Bush, President Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein, has sold 60,000 copies in hardcover, according to the publisher, Carroll & Graf. The just-published paperback includes an 11,000-word essay by Russ Hoyle, an investigative reporter recruited by Carroll & Graf to examine factual disputes raised by the case.
Mr. Wilson said that though his wife wrote a memorandum describing his expertise at the request of a C.I.A. superior, she did not propose him for the Niger trip. He scoffs at the notion that a trip to one of the poorest countries on earth, for which he was paid only his expenses, was some kind of prize.
He has acknowledged he may have misspoken about a few details, like the date he became aware of forged documents purporting to show a uranium sale. But conservatives' attacks on his credibility, he said, are merely an effort to distract Americans from a far graver fact: that the United States went to war on the basis of flimsy, distorted evidence.
"I'm deeply saddened that the debate before the war did not adequately take into consideration issues that a number of us had raised," Mr. Wilson said.
While his wife has shunned publicity, he has become an always-available news media voice, lending the weight of international experience and insider status to criticism of Mr. Bush's conduct of the war.
Despite conservatives' efforts to portray him as a left-wing extremist, he insisted he remained a centrist at heart. But after his tangle with the current administration, he admits "it will be a cold day in hell before I vote for a Republican, even for dog catcher."
Mr. Wilson ended a long interview in a downtown hotel when he realized he was late to pick up the twins. As the first gulf war loomed, and Mr. Wilson was the last American official to meet with Saddam Hussein, his older twins, Joe and Sabrina, were 12 years old, and worried that their father might not make it out of Baghdad to join them in the United States, he said.
During this war with Iraq, the gravest danger to him has been political vilification. He and his wife, Mr. Wilson said, have tried to insulate their children from the hubbub that followed the leak of her name.
It has not always been easy. Once, when Trevor was 3, he recognized his father on yet another show.
"He banged on the TV," Mr. Wilson recalled, "and said, 'Dad, get out of the box!' "
---------------------------------
Lynette Clemetson contributed reporting for this article.
Media lax as feds go on free press attack
Media lax as feds go on free press attack
July 1, 2005
BY CAROL MARIN
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
I just can't figure it out. Why in the world is New York Times reporter Judith Miller headed to jail next week while my Sun-Times colleague Robert Novak is not? Why is a reporter who has written not one single word about a CIA operative about to be sent to the federal slammer while another reporter, the one who actually broke the story, isn't in similar trouble?
Don't get me wrong. I like and respect Bob Novak and don't want to ever see him in an orange jump suit. Or think about him being strip-searched upon intake to federal prison. Then again, I never even met Judith Miller, and I don't want that happening to her, either.
I called Novak in Washington Thursday to see if he could help me make sense of all this. "I can't say anything," he said, citing advice of counsel and the pending federal investigation.
This is a confusing story that centers on two critical and, in this case, competing values: the rule of law vs. the need of reporters to protect their sources. This is, in my opinion, also a story of an over-zealous federal prosecutor and a mostly timid press corps.
It was two years ago this month that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson tore into the Bush administration for going to war with Iraq, in part, on claims that Saddam Hussein was in hot pursuit of yellow cake uranium from Africa. Wilson said the administration's claim was bogus because he was the guy the CIA sent to find out.
It was Novak who then wrote a column citing "two senior administration officials" who cast doubt on Wilson's mission. They told Novak it was Wilson's wife, a CIA operative named Valerie Plame, who sent him to Africa. The implication was that it was a meaningless junket.
Who were those "two senior administration officials" and what business did they have outing a supposedly "covert" CIA operative?
Enter Chicago's own U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who was appointed special prosecutor to find out. With a federal grand jury at his disposal, Fitzgerald began questioning not only administration officials but members of the press.
Now, two years later, the investigation is heading to a close. And for some reason that most of us have trouble understanding, two reporters other than Novak are risking jail. Though Matthew Cooper of Time magazine wrote about Plame after Novak did and Judith Miller of the New York Times never wrote about her at all, they refused to identify sources with whom they discussed the matter, and so a federal judge has ordered them to jail.
As I write this, Time magazine has caved and, against Cooper's wishes, handed over his notes. Miller is now the lone holdout.
What no one understands, myself included, is Novak's silence.
Can he confirm he got a subpoena?
"I can't do that," he told me.
Can he explain the distinction between himself and these two reporters?
"I can't get into that," he said.
For 41 years, Novak built his career and reputation by asking the toughest of questions. Now, the tables turned, he refuses to answer them. Isn't that, I asked, grounds for criticism?
"No," Novak told me, "because this is a criminal investigation."
By any standard, it is a curious criminal investigation. Even the authors of the 1982 federal law that made it illegal to disclose the identity of a "covert" CIA operative have gone on record saying in this particular case the law does not appear to have been broken. Why? Because, according to federal legal experts Victoria Toensing and Bruce Sanford, Valerie Plame wasn't working covertly, and the CIA, when contacted by Novak in advance of his story, never offered any objection to him publishing her name.
OK, if that's true, what's the law that's been broken?
It boils down to this. Fitzgerald, in his zeal, has made reporters the criminals here and taken them to federal court to force them to disclose their sources. Though there are reporter shield laws in 49 states, there is no similar protection federally. By that standard, Cooper and Miller, ordered in court to give up their sources, break the law by not disclosing. With Time magazine buckling, Cooper may not go to jail, but it looks like Miller will.
Has there been a hue and cry about all of this from the media? Not enough. Not even we at the Sun-Times, in my view, have done enough to trumpet what I think should be our profound outrage at what's going on. Novak is certainly entitled to protect his legal rights as he sees fit, but this is an issue that affects every working journalist.
But I fear it's too late. The damage has been done, or as the Bush administration likes to say, "Mission Accomplished." Our profession, which relies on anonymous sources for everything from Watergate to Hired Truck investigations, looks lame and weak and fearful. And any budding Deep Throats, these days, have far less reason to risk a trip to the parking garage.
McGentrix wrote:Chrissee wrote:Timberlandko is regurgitating the freeper artgument which requires one to suspend all logic and believe that a Grand Jury was impaneled to investigate something that is not even a crime. It is an absurd contention.
BTW why aren't reporters camped out at Rove's house trying to get a statement from "silent Karl?"
You are a closet freeper aren't you? I bet you have a poster of Bush on your wall somewhere. You have conservative tendancies and you read far too many websites like Free Republic.
More snide remarks. I never visit Free Republic, I am sent there constantly though when I research right-wing lies.
Even O'Donnell, the loudest barker among the Rove-ophobes, acknowledges there's damned little, if any, "THERE" there:
Quote:
Lawrence O'Donnell: No Crime in Plame Case
MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell, who broke the news Friday that notes taken by Time magazine's Matthew Cooper indictate that top Bush adviser Karl Rove leaked the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak, said Sunday it's likely that Rove broke no laws.
Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, acknowledged on Saturday that his client had indeed spoken to Cooper before the Novak column hit in July 2003. But Luskin insisted that Rove never revealed Plame's identity.
Speaking to WABC Radio host and Internet guru Matt Drudge late Sunday, O'Donnell noted: "What [Luskin] has said is very careful lawyer language. ... We live in a world where we have to discover, in the '90s, that there are people who aren't sure what the meaning of 'is' is."
The MSNBC talker posited:
"That could simply mean he did not use the words 'Valerie Plame.' He may have said '[Joseph] Wilson's wife,' for example. He may have said all sorts of things that still fit what we're talking about."
But even if Rove was behind the disclosure, it doesn't mean he broke any law, he argued.
"[Luskin] is insisting that Karl Rove did not commit a crime," O'Donnell told Drudge. "That may very well be the case."
The MSNBC talker said he had studied extensively the statute allegedly broken in the Plame case, concluding that is "a very difficult statute to violate."
For one thing, he said, "Perhaps [Plame] really wasn't a covert agent - doesn't fit the statute's definition of covert agent. I think that's possible."
Another factor that could mitigate allegations of an illegal disclosure, said O'Donnell, was that whoever revealed Plame's identity "would have had to intentionally disclose it knowing that the CIA is trying to hide it."
"Karl Rove may not have known that," he added.
If indeed Rove was behind the disclosure, "All [of the above] would add up to the fact that no crime was committed in the transmission of this information by Rove to Cooper," O'Donnell said.
Luskin's (Rove's attorney) remarks are "Old News": From Oct, 2004:
Quote:Rove Testifies in Wilson Leak
The president's advisor appears before a federal grand jury
By VIVECA NOVAK
Friday, Oct. 15, 2004
Karl Rove, one of President Bush's top White House aides, testified this morning before a federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative's name by administration sources. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald questioned Rove about his contacts with journalists in what a source familiar with Rove's situation said was his third appearance before the grand jury. "My client appeared voluntarily before the grand jury and has cooperated with the investigation since it began," said Rove's attorney Robert Luskin. "He has been assured in writing as recently as this week that he is not a target of the investigation."
Fitzgerald is trying to find out who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative married to former ambassador Joe Wilson, to several journalists in July 2003. Conservative columnist Robert Novak was the first to disclose Plame's name in print. In a July 14, 2003 column in the Washington Post, Novak said that two unnamed administration sources had told him that Plame was involved in the CIA's decision to send her husband to Africa in 2002 to investigate a tip that Iraq had tried to purchase enriched uranium from Niger for its nuclear weapons program. In early July 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times accusing President Bush of relying on discredited intelligence when he cited the Niger-Iraq link in making the case for invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein. Novak suggested in his column that Plame's role in dispatching her husband to Niger undermined the credibility of Wilson's accusations against the President. Wilson, in turn, accused Bush administration officials of trying to intimidate him and smear his reputation by leaking his wife's identity.
Under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, it is a crime for someone with authorized access to classified information to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert agent. Shortly after the investigation started, Bush ordered everyone in the administration to provide "full cooperation" with the investigation, and Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said the disclosure of Plame's name could be worse than Watergate "in terms of the real-world implications of it." But nobody has come forward to admit to being a source for Novak's column. Besides Rove, a number of other White House aides, including counsel Alberto Gonzales, have gone before the grand jury.
Rove's grand jury appearance comes as Fitzgerald is aggressively pursuing the testimony of two other journalists ensnared in the case, Time's Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller of the New York Times. Three days after Novak's column appeared, Cooper and two colleagues wrote an article for Time Magazine's Website saying that "government officials" had told them that Wilson's wife was a CIA official. Miller was subpoenaed to testify about sources she spoke to while reporting on Wilson, though she never published anything on the subject.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan found Cooper in contempt of court on Wednesday, for the second time, for refusing to testify. (Cooper's first contempt citation was rescinded when he gave limited information to prosecutors after a source, Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, authorized him and several other journalists to discuss their confidential conversations.) Miller was found in contempt last week. She and Cooper, citing the need for journalists to be able to protect their sources, are appealing the rulings jointly, but no decision is expected from the appeals court until mid-to-late November. They could each face up to 18 months in jail if they lose their appeal.
Novak's status continues to be a mystery; neither he nor his lawyer, Jim Hamilton, will talk about their contacts with prosecutors. Lawyers for other witnesses in the case have concluded that Novak is cooperating, since he has not been held in contempt. But even if Novak is cooperating and has revealed his sources, these lawyers say, Fitzgerald would want to talk to other journalists to strengthen any case he might bring. And the prosecutor may be seeking to substantiate a Sept. 2003 Washington Post story, which quoted an administration source saying that two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists in retribution for Wilson's comments. The leak was "meant purely and simply for revenge," the official said. Fitzgerald might want to learn if those two officials were the same ones who talked to Novak. Each instance of disclosure of Plame's identity would be a separate crime.
Whatchya really got here is a witch hunt - which is "Old News" as well, a witch hunt based, as is typical, on inuendo, supposition, and wishful thinking. Here, incoprporating all of that, is a wonderfully slanted piece from 2003, which confirms the point:
Quote:Leaking With a Vengeance
Did someone in the Bush Administration unmask a CIA spy to punish her husband for challenging the case for war? A classic tale of whispers, retribution and rivalries
By Michael Duffy -- Washington
Time
Sunday, Oct. 5, 2003.
It is easy to imagine that Valerie Plame had it all, even if no one was allowed to know it. She was smart and beautiful and disarming, married to a former ambassador and the 40-year-old mother of 3year-old twins. Best of all, she had a job that let her try to save the world. At least she did until July 14. That's when her role as a CIA spy tracking weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was revealed by columnist Robert Novak after two Bush Administration officials leaked her identity to him. Her exposure was more than just a personal tragedy, though it was certainly that too. "Her career as an undercover operative is over," says former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski, now a prosecutor in Royal Oak, Mich. He was a classmate of Plame's during the year rookie spies spend at the Farm, the Camp Peary, Va., school where CIA recruits learn how to read code and sneak through checkpoints and memorize secret documents. At the Farm, Plame stood out, he recalls, for being the best shot with an AK-47 in the entire class. "She will no longer be safe traveling overseas," he says. "I liken that to the knee-capping of an athlete."
But the reverberations of the latest scandal to rattle a presidency go far beyond the destruction of one covert officer's career. The charge on the table is that the White House leaked her name as an act of revenge, to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for suggesting in public that the Bush Administration had stretched the evidence about Saddam Hussein's nuclear arsenal in order to justify a new kind of war. With the latest polls showing support for that war waning and anger over its price tag rising, the Wilson flap fueled the perception that the White House cared more about selling its case for war than ensuring that the case was right in the first place.
What shook up the intelligence community also roiled the capital and set in motion the now familiar chain of scapegoating and backstabbing that has poisoned the past two presidencies. Having fumbled around in the drawer for months looking for a weapon to use against Bush, the Democrats saw an opening. On top of a moody economy, a messy war, a swelling budget deficit and a deeply polarized electorate, the leak charges came as Bush's poll numbers had sunk to the lowest point in his tenure. Indeed, with the presidential election a little more than a year away, only 37% of Americans believe the country is on the right track, according to the latest New York Times/CBS poll. When word spread last week that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was launching a full criminal probe into who had leaked Plame's identity, Democrats immediately raised a public alarm: How could Justice credibly investigate so secretive an Administration, especially when the investigators are led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose former paid political consultant Karl Rove was initially accused by Wilson of being the man behind the leak? A TIME review of federal and state election records reveals that Ashcroft paid Rove's Texas firm $746,000 for direct-mail services in two gubernatorial campaigns and one Senate race from 1984 through 1994. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove's peddling information are "ridiculous." Says McClellan: "There is simply no truth to that suggestion."
Recalling the torture inflicted on Bush's predecessor by a squad of special prosecutors, congressional Democrats demanded that a special counsel be appointed in this case. By Wednesday some had christened the scandal Intimigate and were trying to link it to every political issue in sight. New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who had been among the first to call for an investigation back in July, announced that he would offer a nonbinding amendment to be attached to the Administration's bill for the $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, calling for the naming of a special prosecutor. It is a vote Republican Senators dread. "You can't ignore the political side of this," says a Senate Democratic aide. "Yeah, we're going to play it up. And so long as the Republicans continue to assert that this is going to be handled by Ashcroft, I don't think the scandal will end." In reality, even if a special prosecutor is appointed, the scandal will continue to fester.
Democrats know they could overplay their hand if they appear too partisan, a line they came close to crossing last week. House Democratic leaders canceled a meeting with Wilson this week because they realized its politics could potentially backfire on them. "The issue for Democrats is not to make this look like it's partisan," insists a senior Senate Democratic staffer, "because it really is serious."
The Dems are convinced they've grabbed onto the perfect "payback" for the impeachment of Clinton, and have committed themselves to pushing the issue. They're in for yet another disappointment, IMO. The resolution of The Plame Game will see no inconvenience inflicted upon the Current Administration, will prove an embarrassment for those who pressed the matter, and likely will have consequences of great inconvenience to Wilson, the CIA, and to some in The Media who ran with the Democrat's witch hunt, consequences which will even further dismay the bewildered Democrats, who once ahain will find themselve's hoisted by their own petard.
I really think I'm gonna enjoy this a lot more than those who think they've got something.
Edit to add: Man, I really gotta use "Preview" - that'd save me a buncha editing - timber
Your headline is a lie:
Quote:Lawrence O'Donnell: No Crime in Plame Case
He NEVER said that.
And your source is a blog propaganda site, not a news source. I am really shocked that you try to mislead people like this!
Some reporters actually get a "lead" and then investigate. Rove could've said that Wilson's wife got him the Niger gig.
Then Novak could've said--how did she do that?
Rove could've said--she's in a position top do things like that--Look into it.
You don't know what Rove could've said. But there are several ways he could've tipped Novak off to her without naming her as a covert spy.
He could've said she was fair game because he thought she was fair game--meaning not undercover.
Chrissee wrote:More snide remarks. I never visit Free Republic, ...
You've been there a lot more than I have.
Chris (currently posting as Chrissee) has more problems than he lets on.
In re Valerie Plame: she donated $1,000.- to a Democratic candidate listing as her employer a company believed to be an old CIA cover which had been defunct for years - each donor is investigated for "fronts" btw in compliance with applicable law.
So much for the bathetic Ambassador Wilson claim that his wife's "life was endangered" - the woman was all those years living at her home near DC, having children, occasionally attending an overseas conference in such terrorist hideouts as Paris and London, and the validity of her "cover" can best be judged by the fact nobody bothered to tell her her "cover company" had vanished years before she used it to make a contribution.
No offense, but where do you newly-found supporters of overseas US intel efforts get your "facts"?
Yeah, that's bullsh*t Helen. But we'll see how this plays out, won't we?
Lash
Quote:Some reporters actually get a "lead" and then investigate. Rove could've said that Wilson's wife got him the Niger gig.
Then Novak could've said--how did she do that?
Rove could've said--she's in a position top do things like that--Look into it.
You don't know what Rove could've said. But there are several ways he could've tipped Novak off to her without naming her as a covert spy.
He could've said she was fair game because he thought she was fair game--meaning not undercover.
Why should anyone be 'fair game?'
Why is it fair game to out the wife of someone who is speaking badly about the Administration? Even if they are not secret (which she was)?
I really can't believe the lengths you people will go to to justify the misbehavior of your leaders...
Cycloptichorn
Replying to me, Chrissee wrote:Your headline is a lie:
Quote:Lawrence O'Donnell: No Crime in Plame Case
He NEVER said that.
And your source is a blog propaganda site, not a news source. I am really shocked that you try to mislead people like this!
Ahhhhh, but he did say that, Grasshopper, in precisely those words:
Quote: .... no crime was committed in the transmission of this information by Rove to Cooper," O'Donnell said.
As for NewsMax, your obvious distaste for the publication not withstanding, it is among the accredited media, a news organization which publishes a hard-copy periodical, available on news stands as well as mailed to subscribers, complete with accredited reporters and mainstream (as in widely published and cited elsewhere, and regular participants on network television and radio news/commentary shows) commentators, hardly a blog.
Nevertheless - go ahead and enjoy the cloud you think you're on. Its gonna be great fun when it evaporates beneath you. Get your parachute ready.
I would have to see the full interview before I believed anything Newsmax wrote; they publish half-truths with every article that they don't sink to downright lies.
There is a good possibility that O'Donnell went on to discuss the ways Rove COULD be guilty, and that part was simply cut out. This seems rather more likely given the things he's been saying lately.
Also, none of what he says precludes the possibility of a Perjury charge, not even necessarily against Rove, either.
Don't think this is going to go away simply because you Righties have declared it so, hehehehehhhehee
Cycloptichorn
Cycloptichorn wrote:Yeah, that's bullsh*t Helen. But we'll see how this plays out, won't we?
Cycloptichorn
Please let us all know Cycl that you're the resident "bullshit" intel sage so we can take cover
Never in my life have I read such godawful drivel as posted by the fact-free fanatics here, starting with you.
I expect there will be charges, Cyc - but not against any of the folks your side would prefer to see charged - quite the contrary, really. We shall see.
Quote:Please let us all know Cycl that you're the resident "bullshit" intel sage so we can take cover
Never in my life have I read such godawful drivel as posted by the fact-free fanatics here, starting with you.
Shrug. Your constantly condescending tone has relegated you to irrelevancy long ago, Helen. But please feel free to continue your denials of any wrongdoing so that I may repost them later on in a thread specifically designed to show how wrong people were on this issue.
Timber
Quote:I expect there will be charges, Cyc - but not against any of the folks your side would prefer to see charged - quite the contrary, really. We shall see.
I agree with this. I have no idea whether they will be able to make anything stick against anyone important.
Politics is a slippery game. There are a lot of ways out of a trap. The only problem is to get out without seeming like you are TRYING to get out of the trap.
As I said earlier, I don't blame you for rooting for the home team as I'm sure you don't blame me for rooting against them. So I'm sure you'll understand that many of us who have disdain for the dirty politics of the Bush admin are happy to see such an investigation come about. Not just because of the initial scandal that will tar yer party, but because... well, things like this have a way to leading to OTHER things being learned, dontcha know?
I'm gonna stick with the Perjury charge being my leading candidate for action right now. There are several different people that this could apply to or there could be major contradictions in the testimony given by different people. Either one would be grounds for greater investigation, and I happen to believe that greater investigation of the WH could hardly lead to anything BUT problems for Bush and Co.
But, as you say, we shall see.
Cheers
Cycloptichorn
timberlandko wrote:Replying to me, Chrissee wrote:Your headline is a lie:
Quote:Lawrence O'Donnell: No Crime in Plame Case
He NEVER said that.
And your source is a blog propaganda site, not a news source. I am really shocked that you try to mislead people like this!
Ahhhhh, but he did say that, Grasshopper, in precisely those words:
Quote: .... no crime was committed in the transmission of this information by Rove to Cooper," O'Donnell said.
As for NewsMax, your obvious distaste for the publication not withstanding, it is among the accredited media, a news organization which publishes a hard-copy periodical, available on news stands as well as mailed to subscribers, complete with accredited reporters and mainstream (as in widely published and cited elsewhere, and regular participants on network television and radio news/commentary shows) commentators, hardly a blog.
Nevertheless - go ahead and enjoy the cloud you think you're on. Its gonna be great fun when it evaporates beneath you. Get your parachute ready.
Wow! I cannot believe someone would try to mislead by quoting out of context.
Quote:"All [of the above] would add up to the fact that no crime was committed in the transmission of this information by Rove to Cooper," O'Donnell said.
1) Newsmax edited the quote "[all of the above]" and 2) O'Donnell's statement is based on some unknown contingency that Newsmax does not want to reveal.
The headline is a lie.
Cycloptichorn wrote:Quote:Please let us all know Cycl that you're the resident "bullshit" intel sage so we can take cover
Never in my life have I read such godawful drivel as posted by the fact-free fanatics here, starting with you.
Shrug. Your constantly condescending tone has relegated you to irrelevancy long ago, Helen. But please feel free to continue your denials of any wrongdoing so that I may repost them later on in a thread specifically designed to show how wrong people were on this issue.
Timber
Quote:I expect there will be charges, Cyc - but not against any of the folks your side would prefer to see charged - quite the contrary, really. We shall see.
I agree with this. I have no idea whether they will be able to make anything stick against anyone important.
Politics is a slippery game. There are a lot of ways out of a trap. The only problem is to get out without seeming like you are TRYING to get out of the trap.
As I said earlier, I don't blame you for rooting for the home team as I'm sure you don't blame me for rooting against them. So I'm sure you'll understand that many of us who have disdain for the dirty politics of the Bush admin are happy to see such an investigation come about. Not just because of the initial scandal that will tar yer party, but because... well, things like this have a way to leading to OTHER things being learned, dontcha know?
I'm gonna stick with the Perjury charge being my leading candidate for action right now. There are several different people that this could apply to or there could be major contradictions in the testimony given by different people. Either one would be grounds for greater investigation, and I happen to believe that greater investigation of the WH could hardly lead to anything BUT problems for Bush and Co.
But, as you say, we shall see.
Cheers
Cycloptichorn
And your fact-free quotes made sure, Cycl, that your posts could NEVER be "relegated" to the garbage heap to which they so obviously belong - they went there directly upon posting
Chrissee wrote:
Wow! I cannot believe someone would try to mislead by quoting out of context.
Quote:"All [of the above] would add up to the fact that no crime was committed in the transmission of this information by Rove to Cooper," O'Donnell said.
1) Newsmax edited the quote "[all of the above]" and 2) O'Donnell's statement is based on some unknown contingency that Newsmax does not want to reveal.
No, NewsMax did not edit the quote as you imply - your assertion in such regard is unfounded. Look again at the item cited. The article says "All [of the above]", not "[all of the above]", as you claim. You are in error.
Quote:The headline is a lie.
No, it isn't - O'Donell said precisely that, and that precisely is the context of the article.
While I wouldn't go so far as to characterize your commentary as a lie, it is not founded in truth.
