Fitzgerald Investigation of Leak of Identity of CIA Agent

I am very much afraid, that if one uses the "Mr. Imposter Political Qualification Syndrome" as Mr. Imposter used it on a link to a marvelous essay by John Porhoretz( which utterly destroyed the idea that President Bush lied about Iraq) then Mr. Waas is also to be completely disregarded( as Mr.Imposter suggested that John Podhoretz be disregarded because he was a neo-conservative) since he is on the staff of "The American Prospect"--a magazine founded in 1990 to disseminate LIBERAL ideas.

BernardR, You must learn to read before attacking what I post. 1. I outlined why your neo-conservatives claim is bull shet. 2. He's trying to rewrite history. 3. Only people like you will never see the truth.

Interesting that fools cannot tell the difference between an opinion piece, and reporting.

Cycloptichorn

Cheney may be called in CIA leak case

Interesting development.

That article also said that the case will be going to court next year.

Well, Truthout, hasn't been asked to retract their statements and I think Truthout is right on target, but it remains to be seen. Stay tuned!

Mr. Waas has had a nice string of hits.

It'll be interesting to find out if this will be the next one.

Rove-Novak Call Was Concern To Leak Investigators

National Journal: Novak Assured Rove He Would Protect Him
National Journal: Novak Assured Rove He Would Protect Him
Robert Novak
By E&P Staff
Published: May 25, 2006 1:20 PM ET

Murray Waas, who has broken so many key stories in the Plame/CIA leak case for the National Journal, has been rather quiet this month, but emerged today with another bombshell.

On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, "columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men," Waas writes.

"Suspicious that Rove and Novak might have devised a cover story during that conversation to protect Rove, federal investigators briefed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft on the matter in the early stages of the investigation in fall 2003, according to officials with direct knowledge of those briefings....

"Sources said that Ashcroft received a special briefing on the highly sensitive issue of the September 29 conversation between Novak and Rove because of the concerns of federal investigators that a well-known journalist might have been involved in an effort to not only protect a source but also work in tandem with the president's chief political adviser to stymie the FBI."

According to Waas, Rove testified to the grand jury that during the phone call, Novak said words to the effect: "You are not going to get burned" and "I don't give up my sources." Rove was one of the "two senior administration" officials who were sources for the July 14, 2003, column in which Novak outed Plame as an "agency operative." Rove and Novak had talked about her on July 9.

Rove also told the grand jury, according Waas' sources, "that in the September 29 conversation, Novak referred to a 1992 incident in which Rove had been fired from the Texas arm of President George H.W. Bush's re-election effort; Rove lost his job because the Bush campaign believed that he had been the source for a Novak column that criticized the campaign's internal workings.

"Rove told the grand jury that during the September 29 call, Novak said he would make sure that nothing similar would happen to Rove in the CIA-Plame leak probe. Rove has testified that he recalled Novak saying something like, 'I'm not going to let that happen to you again,' according to those familiar with the testimony."

James Hamilton, an attorney for Novak, said he could not comment. A spokesman for Rove, Mark Corallo, told Waas, "Karl Rove has never urged anyone directly or indirectly to withhold information from the special counsel or testify falsely."

Waas quotes Mark Feldstein, the director of journalism programs at George Washington University: "A journalist's natural instinct is to protect his source. Were there no criminal investigation, it would have been more than appropriate for a reporter to say to a source, 'Don't worry, I'm not going to out you.' But if there is a criminal investigation under way, you can't escape the inference that you are calling to coordinate your stories. You go very quickly from being a stand-up reporter to impairing a criminal investigation."

The rest of the lengthy article can be found at:

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0525nj1.htm

I am very much afraid, Mr. BumbleBeeBoogie, that your source, Mr. Waas, is not acceptable.

I have it on the highest authority( Mr. Imposter, to be precise) that a writer who is clearly partisan cannot be in possession of the truth.

Mr. Podhoretz, who I referenced in his excellent article, was judged by Mr. Imposter to be a neo-conservative, and therefore ineligible to have his opinion considered.

I therefore charge, Mr. Waas, A staff writer for The American Prospect, a publication founded in 1990 to explicitly put forward the LIBERAL viewpoint as also ineligible to have his opinion considered.

Of course, I do not agree with Mr. Imposter,but we must be consistent, must we not.

I will be happy to honor and thoroughly read Mr. Waas' contribution and comment on it, as soon as Mr. Imposter and others on the left read and comment on Mr. Podhoretz' article.

Thank You, Bumble Bee Boogie.

BernardR:

This means, of course, that you must remain silent until we do your bidding.

Joe(Have a nice life)Nation

I already responded to Podhoretz's article; he's a conservative neocon that starts out his article with the wrong premise based on rewriting of history. For most people, what he wrote is garbage.

Um, I Forgot 7 People Talked of Spy - Libby
Um, I Forgot 7 People Talked of Spy - Libby
By James Gordon Meek
The New York Daily News
Friday 26 May 2006

Washington - Borrowing a defense used by tax evaders and schoolkids who don't do their homework, Vice President Cheney's indicted former top adviser told a grand jury he forgot that seven people told him about CIA spy Valerie Plame.

Lewis (Scooter) Libby is charged with lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he first learned of Plame's identity. Cheney, his boss, was among those who told Libby that an Iraq war critic's wife worked at the CIA, prosecutors allege.

But Libby said in his now-unsealed 2004 testimony that "it seemed to me" he heard about Plame "for the first time" from NBC broadcaster Tim Russert in July 2003.

Russert denies telling Libby that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife was an undercover spy - a disclosure now at the center of a scandal rocking the White House.

On March 5, 2004, a prosecutor asked Libby if it was "fair" to say he knew Plame's CIA identity a month before Russert supposedly revealed it to him.

"I had forgotten it," Libby explained.

Solomon Wisenberg, a lawyer who probed the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said, "Barring some unusual mental condition, to make a claim like that is not likely going to fly."

Libby allegedly discussed Plame with six others besides Cheney in June 2003, including CIA briefer Craig Schmall.

But Libby's lawyers blame any "errors" in his testimony on "confusion, mistake or faulty memory."

In the case of Libby's chats with Cheney about Wilson - such as one after he spoke to Russert - he said, "When I had that conversation I had forgotten about the earlier conversations in which [Cheney] told me ... that the wife worked at the CIA."

Time Magazine Ordered to Turn Over Libby Documents
Time Magazine Ordered to Turn Over Libby Documents
The Associated Press
Friday 26 May 2006

Judge orders Time to hand over information in CIA leak case.
Washington - A federal judge on Friday ordered Time magazine to turn over documents for a White House aide to use in his defense to perjury and other charges in the CIA leak case.

The order by US District Reggie B. Walton also said the New York Times might have to turn over some information but reduced the scope of documents the newspaper and other news organizations would have to provide to lawyers for the defendant, former top vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Citing a lack of relevancy, Walton said that Judith Miller, a former Times reporter, doesn't have to provide two notebooks, her phone records or appointment calendars to lawyers for Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. Walton also said NBC News does not have to provide Libby's defense team with one page of undated notes taken by correspondent Andrea Mitchell because she is unlikely to testify at Libby's perjury trial, which is set for January.

In granting in part and denying in part Libby's subpoenas for the media's records, Walton ruled that reporters do not have a right to refuse to provide notes, drafts of articles or other information in a criminal case.

"The First Amendment does not protect a news reporter or that reporter's news organization from producing documents ... in a criminal case," Walton wrote in a 40-page ruling.

Inconsistencies Noted

Walton said Time magazine must provide Libby's lawyers with drafts of first-person stories that reporter Matthew Cooper wrote about his conversations with Libby because the judge said he noticed inconsistencies between them.

All of the news organizations had asked Walton to review the materials sought by Libby - including e-mails, drafts of articles and reporters' notes - in hopes of convincing him that they were not relevant and that the defense was on a "fishing expedition."

During that review, Walton said, he found "a slight alteration between the several drafts of the articles" Cooper wrote about his conversations with Libby and the reporter's first-person account of his testimony before a federal grand jury.

"This slight alteration between the drafts will permit the defendant to impeach Cooper, regardless of the substance of his trial testimony, because his trial testimony cannot be consistent with both versions," Walton wrote.

It is unclear from Walton's ruling what those inconsistencies are.

Libby, 55, is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. He is accused of lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned about CIA officer Valerie Plame and what he subsequently told reporters about her.

Syndicated columnist Robert Novak named Plame in a column on July 14, 2003, eight days after her husband, former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

The CIA sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Saddam Hussein's government had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports. But the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

Libby's indictment grew out of conversations he had with Cooper, Miller and NBC's Tim Russert in June and July 2003, a two-month period in which the White House, according to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, was mounting a campaign to undermine Wilson's charges about the Iraq war.

Different Stories Remembered

The key to Libby's defense is whose memory is correct - Libby's or the three reporters.

At the trial, Libby's lawyers will try to raise questions about the credibility of Miller, Russert and Cooper and whether they could have learned about Plame and her CIA connection from other reporters at their respective news organizations or government officials besides Libby.

"These three news reporters did not simply report on alleged criminal activity, but rather they were personally involved in the conversations with the defendant that form the predicate for several charges in the indictment," Walton wrote. "Their testimony is critical to the government's case, and challenging it will likely be critical to the defense."

Walton also said he won't require the Times to immediately produce materials it has regarding Wilson or a transcript of an interview the paper's reporters did with Miller in a review of her role in the Libby matter. He said he will wait until trial to decide whether the materials are relevant to Libby's defense.

The judge insisted that his narrowing of Libby's subpoenas will not have a "chilling effect" on the press because his ruling "does not swing open the gates for either the government or a criminal defendant to learn the identity of all sources of a reporter or to gain access to all information a reporter has amassed."

Experts Says Cheney Can't Avoid Testifying
Experts Says Cheney Can't Avoid Testifying
By Toni Locy
The Associated Press
Thursday 25 May 2006

If a prosecutor calls him as a witness, Vice President Dick Cheney probably can't avoid testifying in his former chief of staff's perjury trial, legal experts said Thursday.

"There may be significant issues of executive privilege and significant issues of classified information. But there are obviously significant factual issues that bear on the charges the prosecutor has brought" in the CIA leak investigation, said former federal prosecutor E. Lawrence Barcella Jr.

"So there is a far better than average chance that you are going to see the vice president sitting in the witness chair" if he is summoned, Barcella said.

In a court filing late Wednesday, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald suggested Cheney would be a logical prosecution witness because he could authenticate notes he jotted on a copy of a New York Times opinion column by a critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Fitzgerald said Cheney's state of mind at the time he jotted those notes is "directly relevant" to the perjury and obstruction of justice charges against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's former top aide.

Libby faces trial in January on charges that he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he learned CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity and what he later told reporters.

But former federal prosecutor Ty Cobb said Fitzgerald's revelation about using Cheney as a witness seems like an act of desperation. "You don't play that card unless you think you are in danger of being shut down," Cobb said.

Cobb said he doubts Libby's case will go to trial because of the enormous amount of classified evidence involved. A key element of Libby's defense is that he was too preoccupied with heady, national security issues to leak Plame's CIA affiliation to reporters as a way to strike back at her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for his criticism of the administration's push to invade Iraq.

Fitzgerald's filing, Cobb said, was a signal to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who has expressed concern about the amount of classified information the prosecutor may try to keep Libby from using in his defense.

"Now Fitzgerald's pitch is, 'This goes all the way up in the White House. Judge, don't shut me down,'" Cobb said.

The prosecutor has already raised the possibility that Libby's lawyers are trying to commit "graymail," a term used to describe how former government officials force the government to dismiss their cases or see its biggest secrets revealed during their trials.

White House spokesman Tony Snow referred questions about Cheney's possible testimony to the Justice Department, which, in turn, referred reporters to Fitzgerald's office. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the prosecutor, declined comment.

In the Times op-ed on July 6, 2003, Wilson accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

In 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger to determine whether Iraq tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports. But a version of the allegation, attributed to British intelligence, wound up in President Bush's State of the Union address in 2003.

Cheney wrote on the article, "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an ambassador to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

Libby told a grand jury that Cheney was so agitated about Wilson's allegations that they discussed them daily after the article appeared.

Eight days after Wilson's article, syndicated columnist Robert Novak identified Plame and suggested that she had played a role in the CIA's decision to send Wilson to Niger.

Fitzgerald wants to use Cheney's notes on the Wilson article to corroborate evidence that he says shows Libby knew about Plame's CIA status - from Cheney and other government officials - and lied when he told a grand jury that he learned about her from reporters.

Cheney would have a tough time arguing that his notes on Wilson's article qualify as a national security secret, said attorney Stanley M. Brand, a former general counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives.

"He's commenting on something he read in the press, and that is hardly a national security issue," Brand said.

Can you use the 5th in grand jury testimony?

sumac, Good q. If they don't speak in their own defense, the prosecution will use everything at their disposal to find them guilty. If they speak up, they can always ask for mercy.

Mr. Cicerone Imposter wrote:


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I already responded to Podhoretz's article; he's a conservative neocon that starts out his article with the wrong premise based on rewriting of history. For most people, what he wrote is garbage.
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I do hope that I did not miss Mr. Imposter's EVIDENCE which clearly showed that Mr. Podhoretz's article was( as Mr. Imposter puts it) "an article with the wrong premise based on rewriting of history.". I went through the threads carefully to find Mr. Imposter's EVIDENCE that Mr. Podhoretz's article had a "wrong premise based on rewriting of history"

I can not find anything written by Mr. Imposter that gives evidence that Mr. Podhoretz's article had a "wrong premise based on rewriting of History. The only thing I can find is Mr. Imposter's claim that Mr. Podhoretz's article had a "wrong premise based on rewriting of history, but I am willing to be convinced.

Mr. Imposter, would you please be so good as to give EVIDENCE that Mr. Podchoretz's article had, as you put it, "A wrong premise based on rewriting of History".

If you wish, I will be glad to replicate the article for you but I am certain you can find it...I am expecially interested in the "wrong premise" and "rewriting of history" sections.


Oh, and if you do not or cannot help me in your response with SPECIFIC evidence to bolster your claim, I will replicate Mr. Podhoretz's article sinced someone else may be able to take on the task based on your claim

Thank you, sir, Mr. Imposter!!