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Fitzgerald Investigation of Leak of Identity of CIA Agent

 
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Fri 8 Sep, 2006 05:05 pm
joefromchicago wrote:
Ticomaya wrote:
Leftists and journalists give more aid and comfort to our enemies every single day of the week.

An assertion for which you have absolutely no evidence.


Not much to say or point out to tico on this one. The spirit's moving in him, his hair is on end and he's got The Certainty.

We have lots of information to indicate how attuned osama and the top echelon of al qaeda are to major american news media. But a far more complex question to ask what it is they might be paying attention to and why. Tico's assumptions have to do, one guesses, with some consequence in motivation...they'll fight harder or perhaps that recruitment might be facilitated.

But if that's what he's worried about, then it is more likely he's got hold of the wrong end of the stick. For example, as Suskind notes in his recent book, the conclusion of the top CIA team working with Tenet on Osama/al qaeda was that the pre-election release of the Osama video tape was designed to help Bush's re-election chances. Bush, in his actions and in his words, provides the ideal foil for Osama's PR purposes re motivation and recruitment. I suppose it is possible that Tico understands al qaeda and the middle east more deeply and completely than this CIA team, but I think that somewhat less than probable.
0 Replies
 
Thomas
 
  1  
Reply Sat 9 Sep, 2006 08:21 am
blatham wrote:
joefromchicago wrote:
Ticomaya wrote:
Leftists and journalists give more aid and comfort to our enemies every single day of the week.

An assertion for which you have absolutely no evidence.


Not much to say or point out to tico on this one. The spirit's moving in him, his hair is on end and he's got The Certainty.

You have to give Joe a break, Blatham -- he doesn't understand the concept of truthiness yet. Probably never watched the Daily Show, the poor fella, or else he would understand.
0 Replies
 
Advocate
 
  1  
Reply Sat 9 Sep, 2006 08:54 am
Thomas, what do you think is the real truth.

Novak said he got his information on Plame from two high-level government officials. We now know that they were Armitage and Rove. Thus, they outed a working NOC CIA agent monitoring nuclear research and development in Iran and Iraq. It is clear that the law was broken.

Thomas, please tell me what I am missing.
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BernardR
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 03:17 am
Advocate is spewing Bovine Excrement again when he? she? says:

"We now know they were from Armitage and Rove"

That is incorrect. Do you have some evidence or documentation from a reliable source to show that this is completely true?
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BernardR
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 03:19 am
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 07:45 am
thomas

I get to watch these two guys (Colbert and Stewart) every night. How lucky am I?
0 Replies
 
Advocate
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 10:26 am
0 Replies
 
Thomas
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 03:36 pm
Advocate wrote:
Thomas, please tell me what I am missing.

You have missed the irony in my last post. Apart from this, I don't think you missed anything. I agree with your account of the Rove's and Armitage's outing of Valery Plame.

Advocate wrote:
I get to watch these two guys (Colbert and Stewart) every night. How lucky am I?

Luckier than you deserve. But go ahead, rub it in that I can only get snippets from the web. I can handle it. (Bastard!)
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 04:05 pm
Actually, I almost never get to watch all of either of them. They sit in the same hour time-slot as Olbermann (msnbc) and O'Reilly (fox) so I tend to be flicking back and forth to see who is covering what and how.
0 Replies
 
BernardR
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 11:42 pm
0 Replies
 
BernardR
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 11:46 pm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ticomaya wrote:

Quote:
The flameout of the Plame game
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published September 5, 2006

The expectation on the left that the Valerie Plame affair would blossom into another Watergate, bringing down a second Republican presidency, has fizzled.
Liberals expected that convictions of one or more persons in the Bush administration for leaking or confirming to columnist Robert Novak that Mrs. Plame, the wife of Bush critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, was an undercover CIA operative. Echoing Mr. Wilson's claims, prominent liberals and leftists, most of them in the press, accused the White House of orchestrating a smear, and sought to drive Karl Rove either out of office or into prison, or both.
Three years on, none of that has happened, and the "scandal" is played out.
Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, urged on by the pundits and the mainstream press, delved into the city's culture of reporters and their confidential sources. He issued subpoenas for all types of e-mails and documents to find out which Bush administration officials were talking to which reporters. He threatened reporters with jail -- and imprisoned one of them -- which may have set a precedent for future prosecutors to compel reporters to disclose their confidential sources.
But in the end, the exhaustive investigation produced no criminal charges against any official for leaking Mrs. Plame's name in violation of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Moreover, it has recently emerged that the official who first revealed her name to Mr. Novak, for a July 2003 column, was not a White House official, but Richard Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state to Colin L. Powell.
Rather than being part of a smear, Mr. Armitage mentioned her name, in response to a Novak question, as the person who got her husband sent to Niger on a 2002 CIA mission on reports of Saddam Hussein's Iraq trying to acquire uranium. Mr. Armitage, now in private business, had never publicly acknowledged his role in the previous three years.
Mr. Novak recently wrote, "After the federal investigation was announced, he told me through a third party that the disclosure was inadvertent on his part."

Hopes shattered
David Corn, the Washington correspondent for the left-wing Nation magazine, was one of the first columnists to suggest that the Plame matter was a scandal, orchestrated to punish critics of the Iraq war.
"Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security -- and break the law -- in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?" Mr. Corn asked in the Nation two days after the Novak column appeared. "It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted."
Last week, Mr. Corn, co-author of a new book that revealed Mr. Armitage as Mr. Novak's original source, took a different view, acknowledging Mr. Armitage's reputation as an "inveterate gossip" rather than a partisan hit man.
"The outing of Armitage does change the contours of the leak case," he wrote in the Nation. "The initial leaker was not plotting vengeance. He and Powell had not been gung-ho supporters of the war. Yet Bush backers cannot claim the leak was merely an innocent slip. Rove confirmed the classified information to Novak and then leaked it himself as part of an effort to undermine a White House critic."
Internet bloggers wrote hopefully of many indictments. One blogger even reported that Mr. Rove had been indicted, which he had not. Tom Matzzie, Washington director of the leftist MoveOn.org wrote in July 2005, "This conspiracy clearly reaches into the highest levels of our government. This could be among the worst presidential scandals in our history. ... Again, we call on the president to keep his promise and fire Karl Rove. How long will the cover-up continue?"
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean likened the scandal to Watergate, which brought down President Richard Nixon.
"This is like Watergate," he said in November. The deed was done and then the cover-up came with [former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis] "Scooter" Libby being charged with the cover-up because that's an easier charge to prove, but the truth is, had the president not misled the American people about the war, this wouldn't have happened. They got in trouble when they tried to discredit people telling the truth like Joe Wilson."
Stacie Paxton, a spokesman for the committee, argues now that the Armitage disclosure does not vindicate the White House of misconduct. "Nothing changes the fact that the White House had an Iraq working group whose sole purpose was to sell the war, that Karl Rove leaked the name of a covert secret CIA agent in a time of war and still has a security clearance. Nor does it change the fact that George Bush said he would fire anyone who would release classified information, and he did nothing."

The motive
Another facet of the Plame affair also has become clearer: the motive. Nearly all the accounts in the mainstream press quoted Mr. Wilson as saying the leak was an attempt to punish him and his wife. Few other explanations were offered.
Why were Mr. Armitage, Mr. Rove and others talking about Mrs. Plame? Rather than a smear, the mentioning of Mrs. Plame's name now appears to have been an attempt to set the record straight on this issue: how it came about that Mr. Wilson, a Bush critic who later joined Sen. John Kerry's campaign and who was not a trained intelligence investigator, was chosen by the CIA to travel to Niger to investigate an important question for the administration as it planned to go to war in Iraq.
The question: Did Baghdad approach Niger about buying yellowcake, a refined uranium that can be further processed into weapons-grade material?
Mr. Wilson said he found no such evidence and went public with his findings in summer 2003. In an op-ed essay in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, he disclosed his CIA mission and said he found no evidence of a deal.
To some, the column left the impression that he was on a mission for the vice president. His aim was to chastise the president for citing a British intelligence report in his January 2003 State of the Union address about a possible Niger-Iraq connection.
He wrote, "In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. ... The agency official asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office."
Mr. Wilson had first revealed his trip to Niger to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Mr. Kristof wrote a May 6, 2003, column that said, "I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger."
Mr. Wilson's op-ed prompted questions from reporters, including Mr. Novak, on why Mr. Wilson had been sent. Mr. Novak wrote a July 14, 2003, column that reported that Mrs. Plame was instrumental in obtaining the assignment for her husband.
Actually, neither the White House nor the office of CIA Director George J. Tenet knew of the trip. When the White House, seeking to contain damage, inquired how Mr. Wilson was chosen for the assignment, the CIA said that Mrs. Plame, who worked in a counterproliferation office, had recommended him. This version of how he got the job was later confirmed in 2004 in a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Breaking his silence in July, Mr. Novak told Fox News Channel's Brit Hume that he had an hourlong interview with his initial source, now known to be Mr. Armitage, and asked questions about the Niger mission.
Mr. Novak told Mr. Hume, "In the course of that interview, I said, 'Why would they send Joe Wilson to Niger? Why would the CIA send him there? He's not a CIA agent. He is not anybody who knows Niger that well; he served there a long time ago.' He said his wife worked in the Office of Nuclear Proliferation at the CIA, and she suggested he go."
Mr. Novak said he then called Mr. Rove to talk about the Niger trip. Mr. Novak, not Mr. Rove, brought up the issue of his wife getting him the trip.
"I called him about the mission to Niger, but in the course of asking about the mission to Niger, I said, 'I understand that his wife works at the CIA and she initiated the mission,'" Mr. Novak told Fox News. Mr. Rove answered, "You know that, too?" Mr. Novak said Mr. Rove never belittled or criticized Mr. Wilson.

Other reporters
Another reporter on the case was Matthew Cooper, then of Time magazine. Mr. Cooper, in a dispatch for Time in July 2005 recounting his grand jury testimony (which is perfectly legal), said that after Mr. Wilson's op-ed appeared in the New York Times, but before Mr. Novak's column, he telephoned Mr. Rove and asked him about the Niger trip.
He said Mr. Rove discounted the importance of Mr. Wilson's findings and said that his wife at the CIA, not the White House, got the assignment for him. He said Mr. Rove never mentioned her name or that she was a covert officer.
Mr. Cooper wrote that he later talked to Mr. Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff. Mr. Libby has been charged with lying to Mr. Fitzgerald's grand jury in testimony about the leak, but not for the leak itself.
Mr. Cooper said he brought up Mr. Wilson's wife's role in the Niger trip and Mr. Libby replied: "Yeah, I've heard that, too."
Judith Miller of the New York Times is the third reporter known to have discussed Mrs. Plame with an administration official, in this case, Mr. Libby. She initiated an interview to ask why no large stocks of weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. They had two subsequent meetings. She later wrote in the New York Times that Mr. Libby mentioned Mr. Wilson's wife briefly, but did not think that Mr. Libby divulged the name.
Most of the discussion on Mr. Wilson centered on Mr. Libby's criticizing his post-Niger trip report as inadequate and complaining about CIA leaks to discredit Mr. Bush. She never wrote a story.
An early newspaper story asserted that two White House officials actively contacted six Washington reporters to reveal Mrs. Plame's identify and that she worked at the CIA. This was accepted as fact by liberal bloggers. There is no mention of these events in the Libby indictment, which summarizes the incident. But Mr. Novak, Mrs. Miller and Mr. Cooper said they initiated the contacts with administration officials -- not the other way around.
Bob Woodward of The Washington Post later said he, too, heard Mrs. Plame's name from "a person," later reported elsewhere to be Mr. Armitage. Mr. Woodward dismissed the incident as mere gossip, not a smear.
All available evidence now suggests that the White House was blindsided by news of the Wilson trip and sought answers from the CIA on how it came to be. Several Bush officials talked of Mrs. Plame for the purpose of disabusing reporters of the idea the White House authorized Mr. Wilson to go to Niger.
Although officials should not have mentioned Mr. Wilson's wife, since she was in the clandestine service, Mr. Fitzgerald did not find sufficient evidence that officials knowingly revealed her name to expose her position, as legal charges would require.

The Plame role
In July, on the third anniversary of the Novak column, Mr. Wilson, his wife, and attorney Christopher Wolf held a press conference to announce a civil suit against Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney.
Mr. Wilson had written a best-selling book, appeared on TV frequently and called for Mr. Rove to be driven from the White House. He and his wife, her face concealed, had posed in a provocative Vanity Fair photograph. But Mrs. Plame was now outed in full. She blamed the White House for ending her CIA career by "blowing her cover."
"I and my former CIA colleague trusted our government to protect us as we did our jobs," she said. "That a few reckless individuals within the current administration betrayed that trust has been a grave disappointment to every patriotic American."
The trio took questions, none of which touched on the fact that a 2004 report cast doubt on some of Mr. Wilson's claims.
In 2003-04, the Senate Intelligence Committee spent considerable time investigating why the CIA got the intelligence wrong on Iraq. As part of that mandate, staffers delved into the Niger mission.
First, it reported that, despite Mr. Wilson's denials, he did get the Niger assignment because of his wife. When her unit, the Counterproliferation Division, got word that Mr. Cheney wanted the yellowcake report investigated, Mrs. Plame recommended him to her boss, and she put it in writing.
The committee, which wrote a bipartisan report, turned up a memo to her superior which said, "My husband has good relations with both the [prime minister] and the former minister of mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The report said that the next day her unit arranged for Mr. Wilson's trip to Niger.
She approached her husband with the remark that "there's this crazy report" on a deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. Niger had sold yellowcake to Saddam two decades ago, and some of it was still in Iraq when U.S. troops arrived in the Gulf war in 2003.
The Senate investigators reported that Mr. Wilson did, in fact, find evidence that an Iraqi overture to buy yellowcake may have occurred. To Republicans, this meant Mr. Wilson's op-ed in the New York Times -- the essay that triggered the whole affair -- was inaccurate, just as Mr. Libby contended to Mrs. Miller that it was.
In an addendum to the bipartisan report, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, wrote that "public comments from the former ambassador, such as comments that his report 'debunked' the Niger-Iraq uranium story, were incorrect and have led to a distortion in the press and in the public's understanding of the facts surrounding the Niger-Iraq uranium story. The committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal."

Wilson at fault
The Wilsons are now represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Melanie Sloan, executive director and a former Democratic Senate and House staffer, said in an e-mail to The Washington Times it's wrong to infer that Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger on the suggestion of his wife. The Senate report "clearly indicates that the CIA decided to send Wilson to Niger."
Ms. Sloan said the Armitage disclosure does not affect the Wilson lawsuit, "which is premised on the deliberate and unlawful actions of top White House officials to publicly discredit Mr. Wilson and retaliate against him by deliberately disclosing the classified identity of Ms. Wilson. Mr. Armitage's conduct in no way alters the fact that VP Cheney, Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove were engaged in a concerted effort to violate the rights of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson and they should be held accountable for their actions."
Perhaps the biggest remaining question is why Mr. Armitage -- and his boss, Mr. Powell -- stayed silent about the inadvertent Armitage leak of Mrs. Plame's name while the administration was pilloried in the press and key Bush-Cheney staffers ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.

At the end of the affair, some liberal voices concede the fizzle. In an editorial last week, The Washington Post observed that "It now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously."




BernardR wrote:


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note-


No indictments have been brought on the charge Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate, because it is clear there was no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The act applies only to those who are operating under cover overseas, or who have done so within five years of the disclosure of their identities. Ms. Plame had been manning a desk at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. for longer than that.


Now, if Fitzgerald chooses to pursue the charge of Perjury or, perhaps, obstruction of Justice, with regards to Libby, he may well do so, but he will certainly be lampooned even more than Ken Starr!!


My view is that the left wing felt they had an issue with which to prove the derelictions of the GOP and this issue blew up in the faces of the left wing.

Again, after the Cheney/Energy Meetings debacle, the USSC finding which caused the Congress to work on procedures to be used in the trials of those at Gitmo and the abortive attempt to show that the Administration is illegally utilizing wire taps, the left wing just can't do anything right!



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timberlandko wrote:

parados wrote:
... Fitzerald's indictment has come directly from false testimony concerning what he was charged to investigate. Libby lied about what he told reporters and when. That is central to the case of whether it was a crime when people revealed Plame's name to reporters. I don't see how you can reasonably argue it has nothing to do with it.
end of quote


Timberlandko wrote:
You presume much here - to this point, there is allegation and indictment, not trial and conviction. Further, in the matter of the Plame Game, to this point no finding of criminality has been made whatsoever, no individual apart from Libby is under indictment, and there is no indication additional indictments will follow, irrespective of whether pertaining to Libby or to others.
end of quote
0 Replies
 
BernardR
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 11:48 pm
Anything written by David Corn is highly suspect, of course. He is a writer for the "Nation" magazine--that rag is so left wing that it was called Pravda West before the Soviets imploded.
0 Replies
 
BernardR
 
  1  
Reply Sun 10 Sep, 2006 11:54 pm
Plame and Wilson are suing:


Plame v Cheney-Rove-Libby
Valerie Plame and husband Joseph Wilson filed a complaint (http://americablog.blogspot.com/File_Stamped_Complaint.pdf) July 13, 2006, in U.S. District Court, accusing Vice President Dick Cheney, President George W. Bush's former top aide Karl Rove, and Cheney's former aide I. Lewis Scooter Libby of "participating in a 'whispering campaign' to reveal Plame's CIA identity and punish Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq," the Associated Press's Toni Locy reported (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2189932).

"The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame.

"'This lawsuit concerns the intentional and malicious exposure by senior officials of the federal government of ... (Plame), whose job it was to gather intelligence to make the nation safer and who risked her life for her country,' the Wilsons' lawyers said in the lawsuit.

"Specifically, the lawsuit accuses the White House officials of violating the Wilsons' constitutional rights to equal protection and freedom of speech. It also accuses the officials of violating the couple's privacy rights," Locy wrote.

***********************************************************
WHEN THIS BOGUS SUIT IS THROWN OUT OF COURT, MORONS LIKE ADVOCATE WILL STILL BE WRITING ABOUT THE PLAME SCANDAL.

When Fitzgerald's investigation is complete and the LIbby trial is over and NO ONE IS INDICTED FOR ANYTHING REMOTELY APPROACHING THE CRIME OF "OUTING" A COVERT CIA AGENT, LEFT WINGERS---D E S P E R A T E that they cannot find some mud to sling, will just have to go somewhere else!
0 Replies
 
SierraSong
 
  1  
Reply Tue 12 Sep, 2006 08:04 am
From Martin Peretz, Editor of The New Republic...

No one is interested in the case of the "outed spook" and her "outer" any longer. And that is because we now know who exposed the lady to Robert Novak, and he isn't and never was part of the Cheney White House. He was part of the anti-Cheney State Department, liberal heroes, sort of. That man is Richard Armitage, latterly deputy secretary of state and multi-lateralist par excellence. He has now expressed his soulful contrition for the leak. One thing everybody in Washington knows about Armitage is that he doesn't take another kind of a leak without asking Colin Powell first. So there is now added to this weird case the question of what were Armitage's--and Powell's--motives in this exposure.

....Let me concede: I am a friend of Scooter Libby. But I do not like his boss. And I do not like his boss's wife. I know this gets me no credit with the all-or-nothing crowd. Still, I like Scooter, who is quite brilliant, very honest, and brave. Also funny. I've contributed to The Libby Legal Defense Fund and have joined the fund's advisory committee, which is not large because in Washington old pals dessert when even their college roommate gets into trouble. In a time when self-styled civil libertarians are giving money to defend Muslim terrorists, I am happy to help defend an American patriot, some of whose politics I do not share and some of whose politics I do, from a cynical onslaught of the special prosecutor who put journalists into jail for not telling him what he already knew.

The campaign of wrath and virtue against Libby was mostly fueled by simulated outrage. Now that everybody knows who committed the offense, such as it was, the charges against Libby should go into the trash.
0 Replies
 
Advocate
 
  1  
Reply Tue 12 Sep, 2006 08:37 am
It is pretty amusing that Bernard attacks the writer David Corn, saying he writes for a liberal rag. At the same time, Bernard posts a piece by a writer for the Washington Times, which is owned by Rev. Moon's Univeralist Church. The paper is truly a right-wing rag in every sense of the term.
0 Replies
 
Advocate
 
  1  
Reply Wed 13 Sep, 2006 05:25 pm
The Wilsons add Armitage as a defendant in their lawsuit. I hope all the bast*rds are ruined.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2431255
0 Replies
 
blueflame1
 
  1  
Reply Fri 15 Sep, 2006 05:02 pm
Robert Parry | New Clues in the Plame Mystery
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091506R.shtml
Robert Parry says, "A well placed conservative source has added an important clue to the mystery of the Bush administration's 'outing' of CIA officer Valerie Plame." This source reveals a detail, continues Parry, that, "... undermines the current 'conventional wisdom' among Washington pundits that Armitage acted alone - and innocently - in July 2003 when he disclosed Plame's covert identity to right-wing columnist Robert Novak, who then got Rove to serve as a secondary source confirming the information from Armitage."
0 Replies
 
Advocate
 
  1  
Reply Fri 15 Sep, 2006 10:47 pm
McCain could be helpful in the Plamegame.



Will the media ask McCain about Armitage and the Plame leak?
Summary: Sen. John McCain has taken on former deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage -- who was recently revealed to be syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak's primary source for the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame -- as one of the foreign policy advisers for McCain's potential 2008 presidential candidacy. Will the media ask McCain any of the numerous questions raised by the recent disclosures about Armitage's role in the Plame leak?
The New York Times reported on August 21 that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) "is locking up a cast of top-shelf Republican strategists, policy experts, fund-raisers and donors, in a methodical effort to build a 2008 presidential campaign machine," and that one of his foreign policy advisers is former deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage. It was recently revealed that Armitage was syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak's primary source for the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame, whom Novak outed as a CIA employee in his July 14, 2003, column. McCain himself was quoted in a September 30, 2003, Boston Globe article saying of the leak: "If that happened, that is a very wrong thing to happen."

Armitage has apologized for disclosing Plame's identity and has claimed that the leak was inadvertent. However, Armitage's role in the controversy is disputed and, as yet, unclear. In a September 7 interview with CBS News, Armitage claimed that his disclosure to Novak of Plame's identity was offhand and that he "didn't put any big import on it," denying that he had deliberately outed Plame in an effort to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Bush administration's use of pre-Iraq war intelligence. According to the Associated Press, Armitage has also claimed that he did not know Plame was covert, and that "he assumed Plame's job was not a secret because it was included in a State Department memo." In his CBS News interview, Armitage acknowledged that the document was classified. According to a CBS News online article about the interview: "Armitage adds that while the document was classified, 'it doesn't mean that every sentence in the document is classified. I had never seen a covered agent's name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government,' he says." As Media Matters for America has noted, however, the paragraph from that 2003 memo mentioning Plame and her status as a CIA operative was reportedly marked "S" for secret. According to the New York Sun, a declassified copy of the memo, obtained by that newspaper, showed that she was identified specifically as a "CIA WMD manager." David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation and co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, the book that originally identified Armitage as Novak's source, revealed in a September 6 article for The Nation Plame's role at the CIA -- she was director of operations for the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit within the CIA's clandestine service responsible for investigating pre-war claims regarding Iraq's alleged WMD programs.

Given Plame's status within the CIA, Armitage's presumed sophistication on matters of intelligence and foreign policy, and Armitage's acknowledgment that he read the memo in which her identity is contained within a paragraph marked secret, it seems highly implausible that Armitage was not aware that Plame's identity was sensitive information. Plame and Wilson made this case in the civil suit they filed against White House senior adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, which has since been updated to include Armitage.

In light of recent disclosures about Armitage's role in the leak, why haven't the media asked McCain a number of questions, including the following:

Have you gotten to the bottom of what exactly Armitage knew?
Have you inquired of Armitage how he could not have been aware that Plame's identity was sensitive, and its disclosure potentially damaging?
Given the implausibility of Armitage's claim not to have known the information was sensitive, do you not have concerns about whether Armitage has been honest in his disclosure of what happened?
Can you trust your campaign foreign policy adviser with sensitive information?
Given the implausibility of Armitage's claim that he was not aware of the sensitivity of the information he reportedly disclosed, have you asked him further about allegations that he was part of a coordinated effort to expose Plame, as alleged by Wilson and Plame?

--MediaMatters
0 Replies
 
BumbleBeeBoogie
 
  1  
Reply Sat 16 Sep, 2006 08:56 am
Corn Denies Charge in 'WSJ' That He Outed Plame
Corn Denies Charge in 'WSJ' That He Outed Plame
By E&P Staff
Published: September 15, 2006 10:20 PM ET

David Corn, co-author with Michael Isikoff of the new book "Hubris" that has made so much news lately, today heatedly denied what he called an old and false charge in the Wall Street Journal that he -- not Robert Novak -- outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.

In the Journal on Friday, Victoria Toensing, the attorney, wrote in a column, "The first journalist to reveal Ms. Plame was 'covert' was David Corn, on July 16, 2003, two days after Mr. Novak's column. The latter never wrote, because he did not know and it was not so, that Ms. Plame was covert. However, Mr. Corn claimed Mr. Novak 'outed' her as an 'undercover CIA officer,' querying whether Bush officials blew 'the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in...national security.' Was Mr. Corn subpoenaed? Did Mr. Fitzgerald subpoena Mr. Wilson to attest he had never revealed his wife's employment to anyone? If he had done so, he might have learned Mr. Corn's source."

On his Web site, Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, writes that he has long been friendly with Toensing, and so, "I am disheartened to see her embracing a rather idiotic conservative talking point and ignoring basic facts to tag me as the true culprit in the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson. It is an argument that defies logic and the record. But it is an accusation that pro-Bush spinners have used to defend the true leakers and columnist Bob Novak, the conveyor of the leak.

"This is a canard that has been previously advanced by other conservatives--all to absolve Novak and the actual leakers (mainly Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, not Richard Armitage). And you see the suggestion: that Joe Wilson told me that his wife was an undercover CIA officer and that I then disclosed this information to the public. I've debunked this before. But for Toensing's benefit, I'll go through this again--though I doubt it will do much good."

The full explanation can be found at www.davidcorn.com. In a nutshell, Corn notes that Novak had already described Plame as a "CIA operative," which essentially means she was covert.

"At this point," he adds, "her cover--whatever it might have been--was blown to bits. The fact that Novak did not state she was a 'covert' operative is utterly meaningless. (Does the CIA employ non-secret 'operatives'?)"
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Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Fri 22 Sep, 2006 01:07 pm
A long but good, informative read:

Quote:
The Case of the Missing Crime
The CIA leaker has been found. No law was broken. Why is the prosecutor still going after Scooter Libby?
by Clarice Feldman
09/25/2006, Volume 012, Issue 02


The New York Times and Washington Post are hard at work airbrushing history to obscure their role in promoting Joseph C. Wilson's incredible tale of his Mission to Niger and subsequent fantasy of martyrdom at the hands of Karl Rove. Both add insult to injury. While minimizing their own responsibility for the three-year witchhunt for an imagined White House conspiracy, they still suggest that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby--Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff and the only man indicted in the case--committed a crime for which he must be held accountable.

Really? It would appear that the Fourth Estate has been as inattentive to the criminal case as it was to the facts that led up to it. The case against Libby is as weak as the basis for the investigation was, and the animus that impelled it so distorted the investigative process as to make its continuation a travesty. It's long past time for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to do the right thing and drop the charges.

We now know that the July 2003 leak that launched this case came from the State Department, not the White House. Columnist Robert Novak wondered (as did many in Washington) why such an acid critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy as Joe Wilson--not a spook but a retired foreign service officer and Clinton NSC staffer--had been chosen by the CIA to investigate Saddam Hussein's interest in Niger's uranium. So at the end of an hour-long interview with Colin Powell's top aide at the State Department, Richard Armitage, Novak put the question to him. Armitage replied, in so many words, here's a good nugget for your column: It was Wilson's wife's idea to send him, she works at the CIA. Novak confirmed the gossip and included it as a detail in his next column. It was, in many respects, a routine Washington transaction between a political columnist and a well-placed source. All these details, in their essentials, were known to the Justice Department by October 2003. Why, then, was a special prosecutor unleashed two months after that? Why were reporters subpoenaed, compelled to testify, even jailed? Why is Libby still under indictment and threatened with prison in a trial expected to begin next January? Let's review the origins of this sorry story.

A former envoy to Iraq, Wilson was a frequent TV guest in the weeks and months before the Iraq war, never suggesting that the Bush administration was relying on false intelligence or that he had played any role in gathering intelligence on Iraq. After appearing before a May 2, 2003, hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, he and his wife, Valerie Plame, were interviewed by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who was interested that no WMDs had yet turned up in Iraq. Without naming his sources, Kristof reported that a former ambassador had been sent to Niger by Vice President Cheney, had "debunked" forged evidence of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, that his report had been sent to the White House, and yet the president had repeated the phony uranium story in his State of the Union Address. All of these claims were false, but the White House was unable to mount a vigorous defense.

On July 6, 2003, with press interest piqued by Kristof's report, a similar account from the Washington Post's Walter Pincus and other intimations of a possible Watergate sequel, Wilson went public as the former ambassador in an op-ed for the New York Times, which repeated, in somewhat muted form, the original Kristof account. Taken together, the pieces painted a picture of an administration that had deliberately lied to justify war in Iraq.

Wilson, as would later become clear, had never debunked anything. The forgeries had not shown up until eight months after his February 2002 trip to Niger. Indeed, his interviews with officials there, the Senate Intelligence Committee would later conclude, "lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal." Bush's State of the Union claim--"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"--was sound. But the appearance of Wilson's op-ed set Washington afire that week. The White House, in a poorly considered move, said it had been a mistake to include the claim about African uranium in the State of the Union. CIA director George Tenet publicly accepted blame. And in the midst of this appeared Novak's column, reporting that Wilson's "wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative" and that "two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger."

At this point, the Nation's David Corn, a friend of Wilson's, reframed the tale, giving it a more lurid cast and a plotline that would drive media coverage--and in turn Fitzgerald's investigation--for the next three years. Valerie Plame, he reported, was a "covert agent" who had been deliberately "outed" as "thuggish" payback for her husband's brave whistle blowing. Moreover, this outing probably violated the law, placing her, intelligence agents everywhere, and national security at risk. This blonde Emma Peel-tied-to-the-railroad-tracks-by-lying-warmongers version of the story (assisted by a timely leak from the CIA that Director Tenet had referred the case to the Justice Department) led to press and congressional demands for an investigation by an outside prosecutor. The president ordered anyone in the administration who leaked this information to report it immediately to him. No one came forward. Wilson, already a media darling, looked forward to seeing "Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."

By the end of December 2003, Attorney General Ashcroft had removed himself from the case, placing it in the hands of his newly confirmed deputy James Comey, who in turn assigned the matter to a newly appointed special prosecutor, his friend U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, to whom he granted extraordinary power over the course of the investigation.

Astonishingly, even before Ashcroft recused himself, and even before Comey appointed Fitzgerald, the Justice Department knew that Armitage was the source of the disclosure to Novak. As Corn and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff learned in reporting their new book Hubris, Armitage knew from a description in a follow-up column Novak published on October 1, 2003, that he was Novak's primary source. "Within hours," wrote Isikoff,
    William Howard Taft IV, the State Department's legal adviser, notified a senior Justice official that Armitage had information relevant to the case. The next day, a team of FBI agents and Justice prosecutors investigating the leak questioned the deputy secretary. Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that Wilson's wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA. (The memo made no reference to her undercover status.) . . . Powell, Armitage and Taft, the only three officials at the State Department who knew the story, never breathed a word of it publicly and Armitage's role remained secret.
Subsequently, according to Isikoff's account in Newsweek:
    Taft, the State Department lawyer, also felt obligated to inform White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. But Powell and his aides feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak's source--possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been unenthusiastic about Bush's Iraq policy. So Taft told Gonzales the bare minimum: that the State Department had passed some information about the case to Justice. He didn't mention Armitage. Taft asked if Gonzales wanted to know the details. The president's lawyer, playing the case by the book, said no, and Taft told him nothing more. Armitage's role thus remained that rarest of Washington phenomena: a hot secret that never leaked.
In fact, Armitage had been considered the likely Novak source for months among those of us who had done extensive reporting and research on the case for the online media. For one thing, his was the only name that fit the redacted portions of the prosecution's court filings (redacted, Fitzgerald said, to protect the name and reputation "of an innocent accused"). For another, he had never denied it when asked, and he did seem to many to fit Novak's description of his source from that October 1, 2003, column as someone not in the White House and not a "partisan gunslinger."

Left unanswered in this narrative is why, with the leaker identified, Justice plowed ahead with its investigation. Political cowardice is always a possibility. The frenzied backers of Wilson would undoubtedly have accused Justice of a coverup. Animus between Justice and the White House is also a real possibility. While tensions between the White House (particularly the Office of the Vice President) and the mandarinate in the State Department and CIA over the Iraq war are hardly a secret, infighting between the White House and Justice is less well known, if no less real. There were bitter fights over a number of war-on-terror issues--everything from the definition of "torture," to the treatment of prisoners, to the secret NSA surveillance program--that almost certainly involved contentious relations between Justice lawyers and Cheney counsel David Addington (who would succeed Libby as chief of staff) and possibly Libby himself. Comey himself was in the middle of many of these fights from the time of his appointment as deputy attorney general on October 3, 2003--the day after Isikoff and Corn say Armitage and Taft notified Justice officials that Armitage was Novak's source--until his departure in April 2005.

Just as the fractiousness between the Department of State and CIA on the one hand and the White House and the Pentagon on the other must be considered when we weigh the reasons Tenet pushed for an investigation after the Department of Justice at first refused to proceed--presumably on the sound basis that there was no crime committed--so the tensions and animus against Cheney's office on the part of Justice must not be ignored in considering the path taken by the investigation. In both instances, the aggressive and able work of Scooter Libby on the president's behalf made him a target of those who opposed the White House view that the normal tools of law enforcement were insufficient to protect this country from further terrorist attacks.

While U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton has said he will not allow the Libby trial to become a trial about the war in Iraq, the prosecution most certainly appears to have been deeply influenced by the debate over the decision to go to war. Those who accused the administration of lying and deception were assumed from the outset to be "good leakers" and "whistle-blowers" deserving protection. Those, like Libby, who shared the president's views were targets to be pursued for having attempted to answer the serial lies of a prominent critic. That the original leak came from a repentant Armitage, who apparently testified that he was unaware Plame had ever been under cover, should have been a clue for the prosecution. The theory of the case in which a "thuggish" White House set out to punish Joe Wilson simply wasn't true. Instead, as noted by the astute observer Tom Maguire (who reported on the case in great detail at his website justoneminute.typepad.com), Fitzgerald seemed "to be investigating 'Did the White House conspire to out Ms. Plame?' rather than 'Who outed Ms. Plame?'"

This may explain the odd focus of Fitzgerald's investigation, including his outrageously prejudicial remarks at the October 28, 2005, press conference in which he announced Libby's indictment for perjury, false statements, and obstruction, as well as his decision to proceed with such a thinly justified indictment. Fitzgerald had obviously bought the Corn-generated Emma Peel-on-the-railroad-tracks fable.

"I can say," he announced that day, "that for the people who work at the CIA and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected. And they have to expect that when they do their jobs, that information about whether or not they are affiliated with the CIA will be protected. . . . I will say this. I won't touch the specific damage assessment of what specific damage was caused by her compromise"--none has ever been shown--"I won't touch that with a 10-foot pole. I'll let the CIA speak to that, if they wish or not. I will say this: To the CIA people who are going out at a time that we need more human intelligence, . . . they need to know that we will not cast their anonymity aside lightly."

But why was this sermon being delivered with Libby in the dock, and not Armitage, the confessed source? Since Armitage had testified that he was the source of the leak that served as the basis for the CIA referral letter at the very outset of the investigation, what had the prosecution been up to all that time? 

Barely a month into his investigation, in February 2004, Fitzgerald sought and quickly received from Comey an expansion of his mandate to cover process crimes such as perjury and obstruction. In retrospect, this should have been a tipoff that Fitzgerald was changing focus from the underlying "crime"--which was nonexistent. Judging from the parade of witnesses who would eventually be called before the grand jury, it seems he and his team of investigators were under the impression that before Novak's column ran, a senior administration official had told two White House officials to leak the Plame story to six reporters. This notion might well have been gleaned from a poorly written, later edited, account in the Washington Post. This inaccurate, thinly sourced story--which might well have been told to Fitzgerald's investigators as well as to the Post--somehow seems to have become the template for the investigation, which from then on focused on who those presumptive two White House officials were.

The source of this claim, which so distorted the prosecution's view of the matter, has not been revealed. In discovery, Libby's defense team made clear that they think it was Marc Grossman, Armitage's undersecretary for political affairs, who they contend has been a friend of Wilson's since the two went to college together. That Fitzgerald bought into the left-wing typology of bad leakers (defenders of the Iraq war like Libby) and blameless leakers (Armitage) is evident in his August 27, 2004, affidavit to the court seeking to compel the testimony of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who had discussed the Wilson story with Libby but never published anything about it. At the time he filed the affidavit, he of course knew that Armitage had been Novak's source. Fitzgerald argued:
    One key factor in deciding whether to issue a subpoena has been whether the "source" to be identified appears to have leaked to discredit the earlier source (Wilson) as opposed to a leak who revealed information as a "whistleblower". . . . The First Amendment interests are clearly different when the "source" being sought may have committed a crime in order to attack a person such as Wilson who, correctly or incorrectly, sought to expose what he perceived as misconduct by the White House.
This affidavit was a model of disingenuousness, misleading Judge David Tatel, who revealed his utter lack of political sophistication in the decision compelling the testimony of Miller and other reporters (which paved the way for Miller's 85 days in jail for contempt, when she at first refused to testify):
    While another case might require more specific evidence that a leak harmed national security, this showing suffices here, given the information's extremely slight news value and the lack of any serious dispute regarding Plame's employment.
It was not of "extremely slight news value" that Plame had suggested Wilson for his trip. The story of Joe Wilson's heroic Mission to Niger was explosive because of Wilson's disingenuous original version: Cheney had sent him, had knowledge of his findings that Iraq never sought uranium in Niger, and had ignored those findings. This was the very cornerstone of the "Bush Lied" lie--which has now traveled all the way around the world many times over without the truth ever having caught up. This was a lie that undermined public trust in the president in the middle of a war, and has persisted despite the contrary findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Butler and Robb-Silberman commissions. The presupposition driving Fitzgerald's quest--that White House officials had conspired to "attack" a whistle-blower who sought merely to expose misconduct--was deeply politicized, and so skewed the investigation that the results were preordained: Somehow, someone would be tagged "it."

As late as this year's February 24 discovery hearing, Fitzgerald revealed his utter cluelessness about how and why information spreads in Washington. The prosecutor claimed in court that "Mr. Wilson didn't reveal himself as the unnamed Ambassador [of Kristof's column] until July 6," when Wilson's own New York Times op-ed appeared.

This ignores that Wilson was the star witness at the May 2, 2003, Senate Democratic Policy Committee meeting (minutes of which are inexplicably missing from the committee website and seemingly impossible to obtain), where he and his wife met with Kristof and set the game in play. This ignores that, by Wilson's own admission, before his op-ed he had contacted a number of people in the Senate and State Department to tell them the same story. And this ignores that he was telling lots of reporters the same story he told Kristof. Among the reporters he's known to have talked to were Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, John Judis and Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic, and Andrea Mitchell, who hosted Wilson's appearance on Meet the Press the morning of July 6 and who would, at the very least, have had advance notice that his op-ed would be appearing that day. And for each reporter who knew, we must assume a number of editors, colleagues, and friends were also apprised of the ambassador's identity.

Fitzgerald further ignores that in the post-May 6 per iod, before his own op-ed appeared, Wilson briefed two congressional committees about his trip to Niger. And finally, Fitzgerald ignores that on June 14, 2003, in downtown Washington, at a conference sponsored by an antiwar group called the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, Wilson strongly implied that he was the ambassador sourced anonymously by Kristof. In the program distributed to attendees and posted online until recently, he listed his wife's name, Valerie Plame, in his bio.

Adding to this failure to acknowledge the variety of ways in which knowledge of the Plame/Wilson connection could have spread, Fitzgerald was constrained by Department of Justice guidelines: He could not ask reporters broad questions about their sources, but had to focus on whether they spoke to specified sources. Even then, the reporters refused to respond, absent waivers to testify about those conversations. Many, like Corn and Kristof--for whom Plame and Wilson were the obvious sources--were never questioned at all. Most significantly, Armitage, whose calendar showed a meeting with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, seems never to have been asked if he told other reporters what he told Novak.

Instead the prosecutor fixed his course on determining whether Rove or Libby said anything to any reporter prior to Armitage's conversation with Novak on July 8, 2003. His lodestar was a June 10 memo prepared by Carl Ford Jr., assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, detailing a meeting of INR and CIA officials at which Plame had introduced her husband and explained the mission the agency intended to send him on. To Fitzgerald, the source of any "bad" leak had to be found among the recipients in the White House of this memo.

Marc Grossman plays a role in this as well. The memo was originally written for him. He says that when Vice President Cheney asked who Nick Kristof's unnamed ambassador was, and how and why he had been sent to Niger--remember, Wilson had suggested to reporters that he'd gone at Cheney's "behest," and Cheney most certainly had not "behested" this--Grossman asked Ford to prepare the memo. It was redated July 7, 2003, and while it never was distributed to the White House, it was faxed to Armitage and Powell. Why the original memo was not given a new cover, instead of being redated and readdressed, is still a mystery. The memo never suggests that Plame was covert or even classified, which seems odd, too, given that, were her identity to be kept secret, there'd be no reason to identify her in the memo and even less reason for her to have attended a meeting at which she introduced her husband to State Department officials. As Armitage put it earlier this month, in an interview with CBS News, while the document was classified, "it doesn't mean that every sentence in the document is classified. I had never seen a covered agent's name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government."

Count one of the Libby indictment charges, inter alia: "On or about June 11 or 12, 2003, the Under Secretary of State orally advised Libby in the White House that, in sum and substance, Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and that State Department personnel were saying that Wilson's wife was involved in the planning of his trip." The undersecretary referred to is Grossman, and Libby says he has no recollection of any such conversation. He also denies that Grossman told him of Plame's identity.

In the indictment, the prosecutor puts great weight on Grossman's recollection of this conversation, as he does of every scrap of information suggesting Libby knew of Plame before Armitage's disclosure to Novak. Fitzgerald connects the dots to a baffling June 23, 2003, conversation Libby had with Judith Miller, which then allows him to tag Libby "it"--making him the "first to tell" a reporter of Plame. (The weight he places on this is such that it seems almost as if Fitzgerald is trying to justify to himself his decision to go after Libby, who didn't leak to Novak, while treating Armitage, who did leak, as an "innocent accused.") Fitzgerald's theory that Libby was "first to tell" was always a stretch, given the variety of people who already knew Wilson's story. It collapsed definitively when Woodward--whom Armitage had twice in 2004 refused to grant a waiver of confidentiality, finally getting one after the indictment of Libby--came forward to say that on June 12, 2003--well before the Libby-Miller conversation--Armitage had told him of Plame and her role in Wilson's trip. Further, Woodward has revealed that he bumped into Libby in the hallway that same day, that his notes indicate he might well have told Libby what he'd heard from Armitage, but that those same notes do not show Libby as having responded. He has added that if he'd been asked earlier, when his recollection was fresher, he could perhaps have shed more light on their conversation.

If the prosecutor had asked and Armitage had failed to reveal the conversation with Woodward, and Armitage had then for years refused to allow Woodward to reveal this information to the prosecution, Armitage obstructed the investigation. If, as seems more likely, the prosecutor, with Armitage's notebooks and calendar in hand, never asked him about his conversations with other reporters, Fitzgerald would now seem to be trying to disguise his own mishandling of the investigation as obstruction by others. You cannot wear blinders and suggest someone kept you from seeing the whole picture.

The sum and substance of the charges against Libby are his differing recollections of conversations with three reporters: Matthew Cooper (formerly with Time magazine), Judith Miller, and Tim Russert of NBC. Libby's defense is that he was very busy during this period, that Plame's identity was then a minor point to him, and that he testified to the best of his recollection on these matters--which in any event he would have had no motive to lie about, and which seem not to have been material to any other crime, none having ever been charged.

Here, in summary, is what we know from the Libby indictment and from the May 16, 2006, discovery hearing, at which some evidentiary matters not disclosed previously were revealed:

*Matthew Cooper: Libby recalled and testified that on July 12, 2003, Cooper called him and he (Libby) raised the subject of Wilson's wife. Cooper, on the other hand, says that he recalls it differently, that he raised the matter with Libby. In fact, it appears both may have faulty recollections. As Libby's lawyer argued in May: "Mr. Cooper took notes--He sat there and typed on his computer as he talked to Libby of everything they talked about. We have those. There is no reference to the wife whatsoever. Immediately after the call with Mr. Libby, Mr. Cooper sent to his editor an email describing the important things that Libby said. There is no reference to the wife. None whatsoever.

"There is another email. Again, we have this one. There is an email by Mr. Cooper, again to his editor, on July 16, four days after his conversation with Mr. Libby and five days after his conversations with Mr. Rove, about the article they are planning to write in which they are going to mention the wife. And the email says--talks about him having an administration source for the information about Mrs. Wilson."

Time testified that it had another document, which it had not turned over to Libby, that mentioned Plame. But, "even if other Time, Inc. reporters knew about Ms. Plame," the Time lawyer contended, "that would in no way support Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony." The judge reviewed documents in Time's possession that they had not turned over to Libby, and ruled that no matter how Cooper testified, the documents would make his testimony impeachable. That is, no matter how Cooper testifies, there is evidence in Time's documents that might well discredit his testimony.

It is far from clear why the prosecutor felt testimony in which Libby said he thought he raised the issue to Cooper becomes a charge for false testimony in the indictment, when Cooper said he raised it, and when, moreover, Cooper's contemporaneous notes do not reflect any discussion with Libby about Plame. Nor is it easy to imagine a jury would find this a compelling count either.

*Judith Miller: The charges relating to Miller are hardly stronger, though they, too, give a revealing view of the one-sidedness of Fitzgerald's investigation and prosecution. Having received Miller's notes, Libby's lawyer observed that they revealed she had conversations with other people besides Libby that had never been fully explored:
    You will see that Ms. Miller was investigating and focusing on Mr. Wilson before the very first time that she met with Mr. Libby, that is, before June 23rd of 2003, which is the date she says that she and Mr. Libby first discussed or that Mr. Wilson's wife was first mentioned in a conversation with Mr. Libby. There are numerous entries throughout those notebooks to "V.F." or "Victoria Wilson" or to "Valerie Wilson," all of which indicate that she is talking to somebody else about Mr. Wilson's wife. . . . The second entry that is of importance here is on July 8th of 2003. And your honor again will see in her notes--in the midst of her notes of her meeting with Mr. Libby, there is again a parenthetical--it's sort of odd, but there is a parenthetical that says "wife works in WINPAC," question mark. Now as far as we can tell--and we haven't gotten discovery from the government on this issue as yet, but as far as we can tell, Ms. Plame did not work in WINPAC. As far as we can tell, nobody claims to have said to Mr. Libby that she did work in WINPAC. So where does that come from?
Miller's testimony is baffling and, when read in conjunction with her newspaper accounts of her September 30, 2005, grand jury appearance, is even less comprehensible. In her defense, she was blindsided by the prosecution, which had apparently not known about or asked for her notes on the June 23 meeting before her appearance in court. She simply might have been unprepared to be questioned about them. Moreover, though she conceded the notes reflected conversations with others, by his explicit agreement with her, the prosecutor had promised not to ask her about her other sources.

Miller said at the grand jury appearance, when the prosecutor breached that agreement, that she could not recall who those sources were. (Libby's counsel indicated he'd called six or seven reporters with whom Libby talked at roughly the same time, all of whom would say Libby never mentioned Wilson's wife.) And while Plame's name in some form or another is in Miller's notes, it is unclear who raised it and when. It does appear, however, that Wilson himself might have been one source for Miller, as he had been for so many other reporters.

The New York Times admitted that it had in its possession documents that named Wilson and/or Plame, and resisted turning them over on the ground that, since the reporters and editors were not likely to be government witnesses, the defense was not entitled to them--the documents being producible in a criminal proceeding only for impeachment purposes.

The judge disagreed, holding that, depending on how Miller testified, these documents might impeach her and therefore Libby was entitled to see them, though only after she testifies. Just as Cooper is unlikely to be a star witness, Miller is likely to bomb on the stand.

*Tim Russert: Which leaves the final witness. Libby testified that he believed Russert was the first to tell him of Plame and her connection to Wilson. Russert apparently has no notes of the conversation. He seems to have been the only reporter named in the indictment whom Libby called on July 10, 2003. The call was to complain about MSNBC's coverage of the Bush administration. Libby seemed to think that, in the course of this, Russert told him about Plame and said "everybody knew." Russert has been tight-lipped about the substance of the conversation, but there has been wide speculation that Libby called to heatedly complain of the anti-Semitic tone of Chris Matthews's reporting. Matthews says that if so, Russert never conveyed the complaint to him.

Enter their NBCcolleague Andrea Mitchell. As Libby notes, she is an "access" reporter with contacts in the State Department and CIA. She is Russert's subordinate. On July 6, 2003, the morning of Wilson's inflammatory and false op-ed in the New York Times, Wilson appeared as a guest on Mitchell's show--an appearance that certainly required some foreknowledge of Wilson's identity and background, and of the planned op-ed. Three months later, asked in an October 3, 2003, appearance on CNBC how widely known it had been in Washington before the Novak column that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, Mitchell said, "It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger." (She subsequently, and not credibly, has tried to back off this statement.) Russert is Mitchell's boss, and as inconceivable that Fitzgerald never interrogated her is the claim that she never told him.

In any event, that's the case against Libby. Two reporters whose testimony is not likely to stand up well under cross examination, and one reporter who says that he and the only charged defendant (Libby) never discussed the woman at all.

And as for Armitage, who did tell a reporter, and who told a second reporter, Woodward, whom he kept from coming forward in a timely fashion with the truth--that Armitage had told him long before Libby spoke to any reporter about the matter--well, Fitzgerald calls him an "innocent accused." The prosecutor who directed Armitage not to tell the president or anyone else that he was the source dares to charge another man with obstructing his so-called investigation.

Meanwhile Libby, who fully cooperated with the prosecution, told what he recalled as best he could recall, and promptly gave waivers of confidentiality to all reporters known to have talked to him in this period, is charged with crimes for which the prosecutor is seeking a 25-year prison term.

It's long past time for the president to call in the attorney general, seek an accounting of the case from Fitzgerald, and order him to dismiss the charges or be dismissed himself.

Clarice Feldman, a Washington lawyer who served in the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations in the Reagan administration, has written extensively on the Plame case for The American Thinker (www.americanthinker.com).
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