Fitzgerald Investigation of Leak of Identity of CIA Agent

BBBBBB
Good facsimile of Bush :wink:

December 2, 2005
Lobbyist's Role in Hiring Aides Is Investigated
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 - With a federal corruption case intensifying, prosecutors investigating Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist, are examining whether he brokered lucrative jobs for Congressional aides at powerful lobbying firms in exchange for legislative favors, people involved in the case have said.

The attention paid to how the aides obtained jobs occurs as Mr. Abramoff is under mounting pressure to cooperate with prosecutors as they consider a case against lawmakers. Participants in the case, who insisted on anonymity because the investigation is secret, said he could try to reach a deal in the next six weeks.

Many forces are bearing down on Mr. Abramoff. Last week, his closest business partner, Michael Scanlon, pleaded guilty to conspiracy in exchange for cooperating in the inquiry, being run by an interagency group, into whether money and gifts were used in an influence-peddling scandal that involved lawmakers.

Despite charging Indian tribes that were clients tens of millions of dollars in lobbying fees, Mr. Abramoff has told friends that he is running out of money. In a new approach that could contribute to the pressures, prosecutors are sifting through evidence related to the hiring of several former Congressional aides by a lobbying firm, Greenberg Traurig, where Mr. Abramoff worked from 2000 to last year, according to people who know about the inquiry. That course could impel a new set of Mr. Abramoff's former associates to cooperate to avoid prosecution.

Investigators are said to be especially interested in how Tony C. Rudy, a former deputy chief of staff to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, and Neil G. Volz, a former chief of staff to Representative Robert W. Ney of Ohio, obtained lobbying positions with big firms on K Street.

The hiring pattern is "very much a part of" what prosecutors are focusing on, a person involved in the case said. Another participant confirmed that investigators were trying to determine whether aides conducted "job negotiations with Jack Abramoff" while they were in a position to help him on Capitol Hill.

Prosecutors are trying to establish that "it's not just a ticket to a ballgame, it's major jobs" that exchanged hands, the participant in the case said. Also under examination are payments to lobbyists and lawmakers' wives, including Mr. Rudy's wife, Lisa Rudy, whose firm, Liberty Consulting, worked in consultation with Mr. Abramoff, people involved in case said.

What began as an inquiry into Mr. Scanlon and Mr. Abramoff's lobbying has widened to a corruption investigation centering mainly on Republican lawmakers who came to power as part of the conservative revolution of the 1990's. At least six members of Congress are in the scope of the inquiry, with an additional 12 or so former aides being examined to determine whether they gave Mr. Abramoff legislative help in exchange for campaign donations, lavish trips and gifts.

It may be difficult for prosecutors to translate certain elements of the case into indictments. Bribery, corruption and conspiracy cases are notoriously difficult to prove. But the potential dimensions are enormous, and the investigation, at a time of turmoil for the Bush administration, threatens to add a new knot of problems for the party heading into the elections next year.

Several people involved in the case, insisting on anonymity because of the plea negotiations, said they anticipated that Mr. Abramoff would try to reach an agreement with the prosecutors in a rapidly closing window of time before he is scheduled to stand trial in a separate federal case in Florida.

Mr. Abramoff and another business partner, Adam Kidan, were indicted in August on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy for reportedly defrauding their lenders as they sought to buy a company in Miami, SunCruz Casinos, that operated a fleet of gambling boats.

That trial is to begin on Jan. 9.

A lawyer for Mr. Abramoff in the case, Neal R. Sonnett, declined to comment on whether his client is conferring with prosecutors, indicating that he is moving ahead as though there will be no plea agreement.

"I'm preparing for trial," Mr. Sonnett said.

After more than a year of slow progress in what initially appeared to be a case of lobbying excess, the larger scope of the inquiry started to come into view toward the end of September with the arrest of David H. Safavian, chief procurement official in the administration.

Mr. Safavian is accused of lying to investigators and of obstruction of justice. He is pleading not guilty, his lawyer has said. Prosecutors contend that Mr. Safavian did not disclose to investigators business that Mr. Abramoff had before his agency at the time of a golfing trip to Scotland arranged by the lobbyist.

The focus also expanded from Mr. Abramoff's work for Indian tribes with the end of hearings by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. The hearings set out to examine whether the tribes, which paid $82 million to Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon, had been defrauded. The panel, headed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, avoided looking at the ties between the lobbyists and specific lawmakers, leaving that to the inquiry's interagency group.

The Senate hearings uncovered many patterns of Mr. Abramoff's activities, including his offering favors to officials while making deals on government work. In one case, a former senior Interior Department official, J. Steven Griles, testified that Mr. Abramoff had offered him a position at Greenberg Traurig while Mr. Griles was in a position to affect decisions involving Mr. Abramoff's Indian clients. Mr. Griles said he reported the offer to his department's ethics division and rejected it.

Prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Abramoff made similar overtures to other well positioned government workers, especially former aides to Republican leaders in of the House and Senate. Such gestures could be considered as bribery or a conflict of interest, especially if the interests of the two parties were entangled.

Of particular interest, according to several people involved in the case, are how Mr. Rudy, who left Mr. DeLay's office in 2001 to join Greenberg Traurig, and Mr. Volz, who left Mr. Ney's office in 2002 for that firm, obtained their positions. Investigators believe Mr. Abramoff may have solicited help from both men and their supervisors on Capitol Hill while helping arrange for high-paying positions, people familiar with case said.

Mr. Rudy now works for the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm run by Ed Buckham, another former senior aide to Mr. DeLay. Alexander Strategy is also under scrutiny for its ties to Mr. Abramoff and for putting Mr. DeLay's wife, Christine, on its payroll for several years.

As investigators try to unravel the web of relationships between the lawmakers and the lobbyists, they are considering spouses' roles, people involved in the case said.

Neither Mr. Rudy nor Mr. Volz returned calls and e-mail messages seeking comment on Thursday.

Hiring patterns offer a rich and complicated field for investigators. Congressional staff members routinely leave for the private work, with the sole prohibition a one-year ban on lobbying their former supervisors. Mr. DeLay is so renowned for funneling his skilled staff members into lobbying firms across Washington that his political network is known as "DeLay Inc."

Although Mr. DeLay was reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee in the late 90's for pressuring a lobbying firm to hire a Republican, the practice has become so standard in an era of Republican dominance that partisans have given it a name, the K Street Project.

What investigators seek is evidence of a quid pro quo between Mr. Abramoff and the lobbyists he helped hire, lawyers and others involved in the case said. They are especially interested in evidence that Mr. Abramoff discussed hiring Mr. Rudy, Mr. Volz or other staff members before they left the government or around the time they or their bosses were doing favors for Mr. Abramoff's clients.

In C.I.A. Leak, More Talks With Journalists
December 2, 2005
New York Times
In C.I.A. Leak, More Talks With Journalists
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON

A conversation between Karl Rove's lawyer and a journalist for Time magazine led Mr. Rove to change his testimony last year to the grand jury in the C.I.A. leak case, people knowledgeable about the sequence of events said Thursday.

Mr. Rove's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, spoke in the summer or early fall of 2004 with Viveca Novak, a reporter for Time. In that conversation, Mr. Luskin heard from Ms. Novak that a colleague at the magazine, Matthew Cooper, might have interviewed Mr. Rove about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the case, the people said.

Time reported this week that the prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has summoned Ms. Novak to testify about a conversation she had with Mr. Luskin, but provided no explanation of what Mr. Fitzgerald might be looking for. The account provided Thursday by people with knowledge of the discussions between Ms. Novak and Mr. Luskin suggests that Mr. Fitzgerald is still trying to determine whether Mr. Rove was fully forthcoming with investigators and whether he altered his grand jury testimony about his dealings with reporters only after learning that one, Mr. Cooper, might identify him as a source.

Ms. Novak declined to comment, as did Mr. Luskin and Randall Samborn, Mr. Fitzgerald's spokesman. Jim Kelly, Time's managing editor, said he would not comment on the matter. Mr. Cooper and James Carney, the magazine's Washington bureau chief, also declined to comment.

The people who agreed to discuss the case were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and could face reprisals if they did so. Ms. Novak's involvement is the latest twist in a case that has cast light on the close relationships between journalists, lawyers and government officials in Washington. I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is the only person who has been charged with a crime, in an indictment that says he misled a grand jury and investigators about his conversations in 2003 with journalists about the Central Intelligence Agency officer, Valerie Wilson.

Lawyers in the case have said that Mr. Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, remains in legal jeopardy because his initial statements to investigators and to the grand jury were not accurate.

Months before the conversation between Ms. Novak and Mr. Luskin, Mr. Rove testified to the grand jury that he had held a conversation about the C.I.A. officer with only one journalist, Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist. Mr. Rove did not disclose that he had also spoken to Mr. Cooper either in his first grand jury testimony, in February 2004, or in an earlier interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But after his conversation with Ms. Novak, who is not related to the columnist, Mr. Luskin asked Mr. Rove to have the White House search for any record of a discussion between Mr. Rove and Mr. Cooper around the time that Ms. Wilson's identity became public in July 2003.

The search turned up an e-mail message from Mr. Rove to another senior White House official, Stephen J. Hadley, who was the deputy national security adviser, that recounted a conversation between Mr. Rove and Mr. Cooper. On Oct. 14, 2004, Mr. Rove went before the grand jury again to alter his earlier account, by saying he had also discussed the C.I.A. officer with Mr. Cooper.

Associates of Mr. Rove said that he did not initially recall the conversation with Mr. Cooper amid the hundreds of calls and e-mail messages he deals with each day, and that once the message to Mr. Hadley was uncovered he took it to prosecutors and testified fully.

They have said that Mr. Rove had signed a waiver to allow reporters to testify about their confidential discussions with him and that he testified about his conversation with Mr. Cooper long before Mr. Cooper did.

But Mr. Fitzgerald appears to be evaluating whether Mr. Rove came forward with the e-mail and his new testimony only after it became apparent that Mr. Cooper might be compelled to testify about it. It is not clear precisely what Ms. Novak told Mr. Luskin, or what the context for their conversation had been.

People involved in the case said that at a minimum Ms. Novak communicated to Mr. Luskin that Mr. Rove might face legal problems because of potential testimony from Mr. Cooper, her colleague. They said Ms. Novak had told Mr. Luskin that Mr. Cooper might have been in contact with Mr. Rove about Ms. Wilson in the days before her identity became public. Mr. Cooper helped write an article on Time's Web site in July 2003 that was among the first, after Mr. Novak's column, to divulge Ms. Wilson's identity, using her maiden name, Valerie Plame.

The article said "some administration officials" had told Time and the syndicated columnist Robert Novak that "Valerie Plame is a C.I.A. official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

The article also noted that she was the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had recently written an article in the Op-Ed page of The New York Times questioning one of the rationales, on Iraq's weapons program, offered by the Bush administration for the Iraq war. Mr. Wilson based his criticism on a trip he had taken to Niger for the C.I.A.

More than a month after he indicted Mr. Libby, Mr. Fitzgerald continues to weigh whether to indict Mr. Rove on charges related to lying or misleading investigators. He appears to be focused most intently on two months in the late summer and fall of 2004 and the events leading up to Mr. Rove's altering his testimony.

Good reporting there. Suddenly the pieces go ka-ching.

Sometimes, the posts are hilarious. "The lawyer who knows that his client is guilty and gets him off is just as guilty as his client"

That would immediately indict the lawyers for O. J. Simpson and Robert Blake.

After all of this discussion about the Libby case, there have been very few comments regarding the fact that he may be found innocent or, at the most, guilty of perjury. That would put him on a par with Bill Clinton who lied over and over to the grand jury. But Clinton was the president and politics saved him. So much for justice and equal application of the law.

Here we go again. The Clinton defense.

when their side is in doubt,
and their arguments all run out
they'll attack us and demean us,
and cite the mighty Clinton Penis

kuvasz

Nice poesy, Kuv.

And by the way, those fukking spiders over on the right are freaking me out.

Fitz To Plame Leak Court:Keep Some Grand Jury Records Sealed
Fitz To Plame Leak Court: Keep Some Grand Jury Records Sealed
By Mark Fitzgerald and The Associated Press
Published: December 02, 2005 9:00 PM ET
CHICAGO

The prosecutor in the CIA leak case on Friday opposed public release of some details about the criminal investigation, while supporting the disclosure of information regarding I. Lewis Libby, the indicted former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

In court papers, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said continued secrecy is not necessary with respect to portions of a federal appeals court ruling from 10 months ago that "directly relate to Mr. Libby." Libby was indicted on Oct. 28 on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI.

Secrecy is necessary for other material in the court ruling to protect witnesses or subjects of the investigation from public embarrassment or ridicule "as well as to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation," Fitzgerald argued.

Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is seeking release of redacted portions of an appeals court decision from Feb. 15, 2005. In it, Judge David Tatel affirmed that New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper were in contempt of court for refusing to testify in Fitzgerald's investigation. Both subsequently testified.

In the months before the courts moved against Miller and Cooper, the prosecutor provided the federal judiciary detailed descriptions of the investigation's progress, and some of those details became part of Tatel's written opinion. The investigative material was removed from the opinion before it was released.

Fitzgerald's response states: "However, the Special Counsel has concluded that secrecy continues to be necessary with respect to the remainder of the redacted pages, in order to protect from public embarrassment or ridicule individuals whose status as grand jury witnesses or subjects has not been publicly disclosed, as well as to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation."

The response filed Friday describes the "redacted" pages this way:

"The redacted pages of Judge Tatel's separate opinion contain a detailed analysis of evidence collected by the grand jury with respect to the grand jury's need for the information sought by the challenged subpoenas to reporters, the existence of alternative sources of that information, and the public interest in enforcing the subpoenas. The redacted pages make extensive reference to the identity of grand jury witnesses, the substance of their testimony, and the strategy and direction of the investigation."

Lawyers for Dow Jones could not be reached for response Friday evening.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Fitzgerald and The Associated Press ([email protected])

You guys are all forgetting that Clinton's cigar was apparently mightier than his penis.

tico, Have you seen both? LOL

I've seen neither, but it was apparently his weapon of choice with Monica. I figure there's a reason.

Not only that, but he is apparently fixated on them.

Ahhhhhhh!!! Conservative men. Gotta love 'em. They all have their little fetishes.

tpn, You're not far off the mark; look at his avatar! LOL

I don't want to impersonate Lash Larue and attempt to diagnose someone from her or his posts but I have found conservative men to be particularly kinky. My very strong intuition and reading between the lines tell me this is the case here.

Look at your avatar, c.i.

What do you think that says about you?

LOL

Why are you so fixated on homosexuality, Mr. Anderson?

...and the lovefest continues...