ALERT! Bush DOJ. Obstructing Justice Again

White House Obstructs Justice on Outing of CIA Operative Plame By Not Allowing Fitzgerald to Provide Evidence to Congress

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 12/03/2007 - 10:51am. Alerts

A BUZZFLASH ALERT

December 3, 2007

White House objections are preventing Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald from providing the Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman with records from interviews of White House officials taken during his investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity, according to information received by BuzzFlash.

As a result, Congressman Waxman has sent a letter to the new Attorney General, Mr. Mukasey. Will he cave into the obstruction of Justice by the White House, or see that justice is served?

What do you think? He's a Giuliani/Bushevik loyalist.

This will be a test of his independence.

The following is the text of the letter, as provided by Congressman Waxman's office.

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

I am writing to seek your assistance in the Oversight Committee’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the leak of the covert identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame As the recent disclosure from former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan underscores, there remain many unanswered questions surrounding this incident and the involvement of the President, the Vice President, and other senior White House officials in the security breach and the White House response. Wilson.

The Special Counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been cooperating with the Committee’s investigation. Over the summer, Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to provide relevant documents to the Committee, including records of interviews with senior White House officials. Unfortunately, the White House has been blocking Mr. Fitzgerald from providing key documents to the Committee.

I hope you will not accede to the White House objections. During the Clinton Administration, your predecessor, Janet Reno, made an independent judgment and provided numerous FBI interview reports to the Committee, including reports of interviews with President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and three White House Chiefs of Staff. I have been informed that Attorney General Reno neither sought nor obtained White House consent before providing these interview records to the Committee. I believe the Justice Department should exercise the same independence in this case.

I have been careful in my dealings with Special Counsel Fitzgerald to narrow the Committee’s request to documents that would not infringe on his prosecutorial independence or intrude upon grand jury secrecy. Before the Committee requested any documents, my staff, Justice Department staff, and Mr. Fitzgerald’s staff discussed the types of documents that could be properly provided to the Committee. Mr. Fitzgerald’s staff agreed that the Committee’s request was appropriate and has already produced a number of the requested documents relating to CIA and State Department officials and other individuals. To date, however, Mr. Fitzgerald has been frustrated in his attempts to transmit documents relating to White House officials to the Committee.

Equal application of the law means that there should not be one standard applied by the Justice Department to congressional investigations of Democratic administrations and another standard applied to congressional investigations of Republican administrations. I ask that you personally look into this matter and authorize the production of the documents to the Committee without any further delay.

Background

On March 16, 2007, the Committee held a hearing to examine the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert identity. Witnesses at the hearing included Ms. Wilson; James Knodell, the Director of the White House Security Office; and William Leonard, the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives. As I announced in my opening statement at the hearing, the purpose of the Committee’s inquiry is to examine three questions:

(1) How did such a serious violation of our national security occur? (2) Did the White House take the appropriate investigative and disciplinary steps after the breach occurred? And (3) what changes in White House procedures are necessary to prevent future violations of our national security from continuing?

Following the hearing, my staff engaged in discussions with Justice Department officials representing Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Fitzgerald’s staff to determine an appropriate way for Mr. Fitzgerald to assist the Committee’s inquiry without jeopardizing Mr. Fitzgerald’s prosecutorial independence or grand jury secrecy. These discussions resulted in a formal document request that I sent to Mr. Fitzgerald on July 16, 2007, a copy of which is enclosed. Both the Justice Department and Mr. Fitzgerald’s staff agreed that the final document request was reasonable and appropriate.

This document request sought seven categories of documents. Some of the requests, such as the request for “[d]ocuments relating to the existence or systems at the White House to ensure that classified information would be protected,” require the Special Counsel to conduct document searches. Other requests asked for enumerated documents. One important request sought:

Transcripts, reports, notes, and other documents relating to any interviews outside the presence of the grand jury of any of the following individuals:

a. President George W. Bush

b. Vice President Dick Cheney

c. Andrew Card

d. Stephen Hadley

e. Karl Rove

f. Dan Bartlett

g. Scott McClellan

Since the Committee’s letter was sent on July 16, Mr. Fitzgerald and his staff have cooperated with the Committee’s investigation and have produced a number of responsive documents to the Committee. Among the documents that Mr. Fitzgerald has produced to the Committee are “FBI 302 reports” of interviews with CIA and State Department officials and other individuals.

Production of Records of White House Interviews

According to a Justice Department official, Mr. Fitzgerald has also designated for production to the Committee reports of interviews of certain White House officials. However, to date, four months after the Committee’s request, he has been unable to produce these documents to the Committee because the White House has not consented to their production. Committee staff has asked Justice Department staff to provide, but has not received, a date by which the White House will determine whether it will allow Mr. Fitzgerald to produce the documents.

There is no legitimate basis for the withholding of these documents. Mr. Fitzgerald has apparently determined that these documents can be produced to the Committee without infringing on his prosecutorial independence or violating the rules of grand jury secrecy. As records of statements made by White House officials to federal investigators, outside the framework of presidential decision-making, the documents could not be subject to a valid claim of executive privilege.

Moreover, there is direct precedent for the production of these records to the Committee. During the Clinton Administration, the Justice Department provided the Committee with dozens of FBI 302 reports of interviews with White House officials. No White House official — including the President and the Vice President — was exempted from the production. Among the White House officials whose FBI 302 reports were provided to the Committee were:

· President Clinton

· Vice President Gore

· Erskine Bowles (Chief of Staff to the President)

· Mack McLarty (Chief of Staff to the President)

· Leon Panetta (Chief of Staff to the President)

· Roy Neel (Chief of Staff to the Vice President)

· Jack Quinn (Counsel to the President)

· Steven Ricchetti (Deputy Chief of Staff to the President)

· Bruce Lindsey (Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President)

· Harold Ickes (Assistant to the President)

· Doug Sosnik (Assistant to the President)

· Cheryl Mills (Deputy Counsel to the President)

In the case of the Clinton Administration interview records, former Attorney General Janet Reno made her own determination that they were relevant to the Committee’s inquiries and produced them to the Committee. I understand that she neither requested nor received White House approval before transmitting the documents.

Request for Assistance

The Committee is conducting a vitally important inquiry into whether the White House followed the required safeguards in protecting Ms. Wilson’s identity and responding to an exceptionally serious breach of national security. As Mr. McClellan, the former White House Press Secretary, now asserts:

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff and the President himself.

Because of the implications of Mr. McClellan’s assertions, I am asking for your personal assistance in obtaining the documents being withheld by the White House. These documents are directly relevant to the Committee’s investigation, and they have been determined by Mr. Fitzgerald to be appropriate for release to the Committee. I believe they should be provided to the Committee without any additional delay and without redactions or other limitations dictated by the White House.

I recognize that President Bush and his counsel may not want this information provided to Congress. But the role of the Attorney General is to administer the laws with impartiality. The Justice Department provided the exact same information to Congress during the Clinton Administration. There is no special standard for President Bush that exempts him and his senior advisors from responsible congressional oversight.

If you have any questions regarding my request, please contact me personally or ask your staff to contact David Rapallo or Theodore Chuang of the Committee staff at (202) 225-5420.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman
Chairman

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Patrick Fitzgerald Has Gone As Far As He Can.

His investigation is over, thanks to Scooter Libby's perjury, making false statements to investigators and obstruction of Justice.

The outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA, counter-proliferation expert will, however, not go away in our minds. The act was nothing short of treason by an administration obsessed with WMD as an excuse to wage an illegal and immoral war in Iraq.

Mr. Fitzgerald, as a U.S. Attorney, is bound by the law, unlike members of the Bush administration, apparently, and must follow the rules of evidence in a court of law.

We, the people, are not so bound and we are not through with Mr. Libby or his boss, Mr Cheney.

The CIA on Valerie Plame, the DOJ on Scooter Libby, the NRO on Patrick Fitzgerald

by margieburns on
Tue 29 May 2007 04:00 PM EDT
Permanent Link

Of course Valerie Plame Wilson was undercover. Of course her status was covert. Working in her division within something called the CIA, those were the odds. But try telling that to the rightwing noise machine.

Still, once more unto the breach, dear friends . . .

As part of the government’s sentencing recommendations in the I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby case, an appendix describes Valerie Plame’s job at CIA and explains Plame’s undercover position:

On January 1, 2002, Valerie Plame Wilson worked for CIA as an operations officer in the Directorate of Operations (DO). “She was assigned to the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) at CIA Headquarters, where she served as the chief of a CPD component with responsibility for weapons proliferation issues related to Iraq.”

In CPD, Valerie Plame Wilson traveled overseas at least 7 times, to more than 10 countries, on official business. “When traveling overseas, Ms. Wilson always traveled under a cover identity – sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias – but always using cover – whether official or non-official cover (NOC) – with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.”

“At the time of the initial unauthorized disclosure in the media of Ms. Wilson’s employment relationship with the CIA on 14 July 2003, Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

NOTE: THE REASON THAT THIS SECRETIVE POSITION AND UNDERCOVER WORK BY MRS. WILSON WERE NOT MADE MORE OF DURING THE LIBBY TRIAL WAS THAT THE DEFENSE HAD THEM EXCLUDED.

This information about Mrs. Wilson’s classified status was deemed, by the Libby defense team, too prejudicial for the jury to hear much about.

Back to Exhibit A, the “Unclassified Summary of Valerie Wilson’s CIA Employment and Cover History”:

“As a result of the leak and subsequent media reporting of Ms. Wilson’s relationship with the CIA, in December 2003 the CIA lifted Ms. Wilson’s cover effective 14 December 2003, and then in February 2004 the CIA rolled back her cover effective 14 July 2003, the date of the leak.”

TRANSLATION, IF ANY WERE NEEDED: If you are undercover classified in the CIA, getting your name and occupation printed in a syndicated column by Bob Novak is probably not a resume-brightener. This even though Novak has tended historically to treat the CIA as authoritative, on the numerous occasions when he has cited it as a source on foreign policy matters. Perhaps that in itself raises or answers the question as to why he brought up Ms. Plame in the first place, since it clearly was not to enhance her with the authoritative halo of the CIA.

Mrs. Wilson then requested and went on unpaid personal leave from September 2004 to August 2005, “when she became the chief of operations of a CPD component with responsibility for proliferation issues.” She then resigned from CIA in December 2005.

Meanwhile, the investigation in the CIA leak went forward, with two grand juries – the second grand jury sworn shortly after the first grand jury expired and the investigation was hit with new information from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

“In October 2005, the CIA determined, in its discretion, that the public interest in allowing the criminal prosecution to proceed outweighed the damage to national security that might reasonably be expected from the official disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s employment and cover status. Accordingly, the CIA lifted and rolled back Ms. Wilson’s cover effective 1 January 2002 and declassified the fact of her CIA employment and cover status from that date forward.”

"This determination means that the CIA declassified and now publicly acknowledges the previously classified fact that Ms. Wilson was a CIA employee from 1 January 2002 forward and the previously classified fact that she was a covert CIA employee during this period.”

It remains to be seen what the National Review, that well-funded ‘noise machine’ cog which seems to be an extension of the Libby defense web site, will make of this. Probably nothing, since it would be difficult to rebut. Or perhaps even now the NRO (Natl Review Online) will continue its charge that Valerie Plame Wilson was never undercover etc.

The NRO has already greeted prosecution sentencing recommendations with typical pseudo rebuttal:

“During the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis Libby, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never charged, and never presented evidence, that Libby illegally disclosed the name of a covert CIA agent. But now, Fitzgerald wants Libby to be sentenced as if he had been guilty of that crime.”

Byron York does not mention here that the Libby defense team wanted information about Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert status excluded from the trial as much as possible, because it would have been prejudicial. York also does not mention that the defense also kept out heavy emphasis on the disclosure of Plame’s covert status as much as possible, because too much of that would also have been prejudicial.

Instead, he basically makes light of the government’s position, as stated in today’s Memorandum of Law supporting the sentencing recommendations: that “the penalty for obstructing an investigation should be proportional to the seriousness of the crime that was the subject of the investigation that the defendant endeavored to obstruct.”

As the Memorandum further states, “the Guidelines gauge the punishment for obstruction according to the harm to the administration of justice intended by the defendant, and prevent a defendant from being rewarded with a lower sentence for successful efforts to obstruct justice.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Libby Trial Heats Up

It is clear to me that the VP and his staff were out to get Wilson. What is not so clear is why there was such and over-the-top reaction to one critic, when there had been quite a few.

The IAEA had already stated publicaly that the Niger documents were crude forgeries. So, everyone knew that the Niger claims were false. What wasn't known, and still isn't known, by most of the public, is who forged the documents and why.

By Carol D. Leonnig and Amy GoldsteinWashington Post Staff WritersThursday, January 25, 2007; A03

A former high-ranking CIA official testified yesterday that, when Vice President Cheney's agitated chief of staff called him out of the blue in June 2003 to ask what he knew about a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, he jumped to get answers.

Summoned out of a meeting with the CIA director to take I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's urgent call later that same afternoon, then-Associate Deputy Director Robert Grenier said he relayed all he had learned about former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man behind news reports of the trip that had Libby so concerned.

Yes, Wilson had gone on a CIA-sponsored mission to check out intelligence that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for nuclear arms and had concluded that the tip was unfounded, Grenier testified he told Libby. And, he told Libby, it appeared that Wilson's wife, a CIA officer, had suggested Wilson for the trip.

The timing of Grenier's response and Libby's anxiety over Wilson are central to the prosecution's allegation that Libby lied to investigators when he said that he believed he first learned CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity from NBC's Tim Russert a month later. Grenier is one of three government officials to testify, so far, that they held conversations with Libby about
Wilson's wife weeks before Libby contends he learned her name.

Libby has pleaded not guilty to five felony counts during the investigation of how Plame's identity was disclosed to the news media. His defense maintains that he got confused about details of conversations with reporters amid the crush of his work on urgent national security issues.

The second day of trial testimony continued to throw back the curtain on a Bush administration beset with rivalries, self-interested alliances and attempts at blame-shifting. Those efforts were particularly intense during the summer of 2003, with U.S. troops in Iraq still unable to find the weapons of mass destruction that President Bush had cited to justify a preemptive war.

Fleshing out the finger-pointing inside the administration is important for both the defense and the prosecution. Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has argued that Plame was the victim of an internal administration scramble as the vice president sought to discredit Wilson. Fitzgerald has alleged that Libby lied to conceal his and Cheney's efforts, as well as Libby's discussions about Plame with reporters.

Grenier said that Libby was fixated on one set of facts that Grenier relayed. He asked, would the CIA release to the news media the information that Wilson's trip was supposed to answer questions raised not just by Cheney's office, but by the State Department and the Defense Department as well?

Yesterday, defense attorneys sought to raise doubts about several of Libby's former administration colleagues, who are now witnesses for the prosecution, by attempting to show that they had flawed memories of events -- and that they had allegiances or other motives that would bias them against Libby. The defense also asserted that, after a criminal investigation into the leak began in the fall of 2003, the White House tried to protect presidential adviser Karl Rove and seemed willing to sacrifice Libby.

Defense attorney Theodore V. Wells Jr. pressed former undersecretary of state Marc Grossman, the prosecution's first witness, to acknowledge his close friendship with his boss at the time, then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, an internal critic of the war and of Libby.

Wells suggested that Grossman had a "fishy" meeting with Armitage just before Grossman was interviewed by the FBI and has given conflicting accounts of events over time.

Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary who is expected to testify for the prosecution, also has a motive to help the prosecution, Wells has said. Fleischer had demanded immunity before he would talk about his conversations with Libby, then had admitted to government prosecutors that he had spoken to several reporters about Wilson's wife in the days before he left his job.

In questioning Grenier, defense attorney William H. Jeffress Jr. emphasized the rift between the CIA and the White House.

Grenier said he remembered reading a report in The Washington Post on June 12, 2003, the day after he tried to answer Libby's questions, that quoted anonymous administration sources as saying that the CIA never told Cheney that his questions were the impetus for Wilson's trip or about Wilson's findings.

"Wasn't this embarrassing to the CIA?" Jeffress asked Grenier. "Didn't you tell the FBI that you thought the White House was trying to shift blame to the CIA?"

Grenier testified that he did surmise that White House officials were pointing a finger at the CIA for not alerting them about Wilson's findings.

"The administration was trying to suggest that had they only known about the eminent Ambassador Wilson's [information] . . . it would have somehow stopped the White House from continuing on its errant path to war," Grenier said. "I think they were trying to avoid blame for not providing [the truth] about whether or not Iraq had attempted to buy uranium."

Weeks later, Grenier said he saw Plame's name revealed in Robert D. Novak's syndicated column and figured that it was the work of the White House. In fact, Armitage and Rove have acknowledged that they were Novak's sources. Jeffress also sought to undermine Grenier's testimony by pointing out that Grenier initially told FBI agents and a grand jury that he did not remember whether he had told Libby that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Only later, Jeffress said, did Grenier notify investigators that he had mentioned that she was an employee. "Do you find your memory gets better the further away from an event you are?" Jeffress asked pointedly.

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

A Closer Look at the CIA Leak Timeline

There have been a number of missteps and false assumptions (or is it complicity?) by the news media and the press, including the NYT and the WaPo, since the Libby indictment. Two of those false assumptions are extremely important ones:

1) That the cover-up in this case was, like others in the past, worse than the crime.

That piece D.C. common wisdom/pundit pap is far from the truth when it comes to the big picture of the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity.

Joe Wilson was far from the only critic of the administration's rush to war and not the only person who openly questioned the evidence the administration was presenting as an excuse for the invasion of Iraq. As is pointed out in this article, the over-the-top, continuing attack on Wilson was, at that time, very different from the Bushites MO up to that point. They had rolled over everyone, brushing critics off like dandruff off their suit coats. So, what did Wilson do, really, to put such a bee in their collective bonnet.

We don't think that it was Wilson's criticism of the use of the 16 words about Yellow-cake, Iraq and Niger in the SOTUS of 2003 that put administration panties in a wad They were afraid he knew even more than he was saying or that, perhaps, Mrs. Wilson did.

By the time Joe Wilson wrote his oped for the NYT, "What I Did Not Find in Africa," the IAEA had long since revealed that the Niger documents, which had given Cheney and others an excuse to ride the CIA for more cooperation in the push for war, were crude forgeries. The question was and still is, who forged those documents and why?.

The administration has been noticeably disinterested in finding out who "hoodwinked" them with forged documents, which they claim they fell for. Could it be that their disinterest comes from the fact that they already knew, that they were not at all taken in by the crude forgeries, but they were afraid that Wilson might have knowledge regarding the forgers and their motives.

2) That Richard Armitage had no ax to grind about the war, is just a silly old gossip who gossiped a bit too much, but had no close connections to anyone inside the White House, with whom he would have been conspiring to discredit Wilson. WRONG!

Seems that some press folks and some pundits owe Joe Wilson and Patrick Fitzgerald an apology, not to mention the American people!

Read On..........

By Robert Parry (A Special Report) January 17, 2007

The trial of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby is being billed by the Big Media as a case study of a favorite Washington cliche – “it’s not the crime but the cover-up” – a smugly delivered line suggesting that Libby committed no real offense beyond trimming a few facts when questioned by overzealous investigators.

But the major U.S. news media is again missing the point. The real significance of the Libby trial is that it could demonstrate how far George W. Bush went in 2003 to shut down legitimate criticism of his Iraq War policies as well as questions about his personal honesty.

In that sense, the trial could be a kind of time machine for transporting America back to that earlier era of not so long ago when Bush and his team felt they controlled reality itself and were justified in tricking the American people into bloody adventures overseas.

It was a time when President Bush swaggered across the political landscape, a modern-day king fawned over by courtiers in the government and the press – and protected by legions of followers who bullied citizens who dared to dissent.

Libby may be going on trial for five felony counts of lying and obstructing justice, but the essence of his criminal behavior was his work as a top enforcer responsible for intimidating Americans who wouldn’t stay in line behind the infallible Bush.

Though many Iraq War skeptics – from the Dixie Chicks to longtime U.S. allies in Europe, such as France – were punished for disagreeing with Bush, Libby’s most notable target was former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Wilson attracted the White House’s wrath in mid-2003 because he was one of the first Washington insiders to question the official consensus about Bush’s wisdom, courage and integrity.

Just months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as Bush basked in stratospheric poll numbers, Wilson went public with first-hand evidence that Bush had “twisted” intelligence to frighten Americans about the prospects of Iraq developing a nuclear bomb.

The former ambassador’s heresy was countered by administration officials who leaked the identity of Wilson’s wife, covert CIA officer Valerie Plame. They also enlisted Bush’s defenders in both the right-wing and mainstream media to wage an unstinting attack on Wilson’s credibility.

That campaign of vilification continues to this day, even though Wilson’s criticism of Bush’s honesty has long since been vindicated. Every time I write about Wilson, I get a flurry of e-mails repeating administration-inspired canards about Wilson “the liar.”

Ugly Tale

This ugly back story of the Libby trial dates to early 2002 when Vice President Dick Cheney expressed interest in dubious reports that Iraq had sought to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger, presumably for a revived nuclear weapons program.

Senior CIA officials asked Plame, who was working on WMD issues, to approach her husband about a fact-finding trip to check out the Niger-yellowcake claims. Wilson, who had served as a U.S. diplomat in both Africa and Iraq, accepted the unpaid assignment, traveled to Niger and reported back that the allegations appeared to be false, a conclusion later confirmed by other U.S. investigations.

But the White House kept looking for ways to slip the alarming suspicions into its public statements, most notably when Bush inserted 16 words about the yellowcake accusation into his State of the Union address in January 2003. Gripped by fear of mushroom clouds, many Americans supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

After toppling Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, however, the U.S. military couldn’t find Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, nor did they find evidence that
Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.

As this reality began to sink in, Wilson told his Niger story anonymously to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who wrote an article about the yellowcake inquiry. Figuring out the identity of Kristof’s source, the White House prepared to retaliate.

In his memoir, The Politics of Truth, Wilson cited sources as saying that a meeting in Cheney’s office led to a decision “to produce a workup” to discredit Wilson.

Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, asked Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, a neoconservative ally in the State Department, to prepare a memo on Wilson. Dated June 10, 2003, the memo referred to “Valerie Plame,” a CIA officer, as Wilson’s wife. [NYT, July 16, 2005]

CIA Director George Tenet also divulged to Cheney that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA and had a hand in arranging Wilson’s trip to Niger – information that Cheney then passed on to Libby in a conversation on June 12, 2003, according to Libby’s notes as described by lawyers in the case. [NYT, Oct. 25, 2005]

The administration shaped those two facts – Plame’s work for the CIA and her minor role in Wilson’s Niger trip – into key attack points against Wilson. On June 23, 2003, Libby briefed New York Times reporter Judith Miller (who was considered close to the administration’s neoconservative wing) about Wilson and may then have passed on the tip that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA.

About the same time as the Libby-Miller meeting, conservative columnist Robert Novak received a surprise call from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s office offering an interview, Novak later recalled.

“During his quarter of a century in Washington, I had had no contact with Armitage before our fateful interview,” Novak wrote in a Sept. 14, 2006, column. “I tried to see him in the first 2 ½ years of the Bush administration, but he rebuffed me – summarily and with disdain, I thought.
“Then, without explanation, in June 2003, Armitage’s office said the deputy secretary would see me.”

Novak dated the call from Armitage’s office at about two weeks before Wilson went public with his Niger story via a New York Times Op-Ed on July 6, 2003, entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” In other words, Armitage's outreach to Novak and Libby's briefing of Miller came at virtually the same time.

Cheney’s Notes

As Cheney read Wilson’s article, a perturbed Vice President scribbled down questions he wanted pursued.

“Have they [CIA officials] done this sort of thing before?” Cheney wrote. “Send an Amb[assador] 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?”

Though Cheney did not write down Plame’s name, his questions indicated that he was aware that she worked for the CIA and was in a position (dealing with WMD issues) to have a hand in her husband’s assignment to check out the Niger reports.

“Those annotations support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op-Ed acutely focused the attention of the Vice President and the defendant – his chief of staff [Libby] – on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to these assertions,” special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald later wrote in a court filing.

That same eventful day – July 6, 2003 – Armitage called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, at home and asked him to send a copy of Grossman’s memo to Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to a former department official interviewed by the New York Times.

Since Powell was preparing to leave with Bush on a state visit to Africa, Ford forwarded Grossman’s memo to the White House for delivery to Powell, the former official told the Times. [NYT, July 16, 2005]

The next day, July 7, 2003, Bush left for Africa with Powell and other senior officials. But administration officials who stayed behind in Washington stepped up their efforts to counteract Wilson's Op-Ed.

On July 8, 2003, Libby gave Judith Miller more details about the Wilsons. Libby said Wilson’s wife worked at a CIA unit responsible for weapons intelligence and non-proliferation. Miller wrote down the words “Valerie Flame,” an apparent misspelling of Mrs. Wilson’s maiden name. [NYT, Oct. 16, 2005]

That same day, Novak had his interview with Armitage. Novak later recalled that Armitage divulged Plame’s identity toward the end of an hour-long interview.

Armitage “told me unequivocally that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIA’s Counter-proliferation Division and that she had suggested her husband’s mission,” Novak wrote, adding that Armitage seemed to want the information published.

Armitage “noted that the story of Mrs. Wilson’s role fit the style of the old Evans-Novak column – implying to me that it [the column] continued reporting Washington inside information,” Novak wrote. [Washington Post, Sept. 14, 2006]

Feeling encouraged by Armitage to disclose the Plame connection to Wilson’s trip, Novak contacted Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove, who confirmed the story as Novak’s second source.

“I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me,” Novak later told Newsday, adding that Bush administration officials “thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.” [Newsday, July 22, 2003]

Out of Africa

Meanwhile, senior officials in Bush’s traveling party to Africa were trying to plant the same anti-Wilson stories.

To the administration’s dismay, the Niger-yellowcake deceit was dogging Bush’s Africa trip. At every stop, questions were asked about how the infamous “16 words” on Niger’s yellowcake ended up in the State of the Union speech.

Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer was finally forced to concede that the yellowcake allegation was “incorrect” and should not have been included in the speech. On July 11, 2003, CIA Director Tenet took the fall for the State of the Union screw-up, apologizing for not better vetting the speech.

“This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches,” Tenet said.

The admission was one of the first times the Bush team had retreated on any national security issue. Administration officials were embarrassed, incensed and determined to punish Wilson.

Time magazine correspondent John Dickerson, who was on the Africa trip, said administration officials urged him to pursue the seemingly insignificant question of who had been involved in arranging Wilson’s trip.

While Bush was meeting with the president of Uganda, one “senior administration official” pulled Dickerson aside and told him that “some low-level person at the CIA was responsible for the mission” and Dickerson “should go ask the CIA who sent Wilson.”

Later, Dickerson discussed Wilson with a second “senior administration official” and got the same advice. “This official also pointed out a few times that Wilson had been sent by a low-level CIA employee and encouraged me to follow that angle,” Dickerson recalled.

“At the end of the two conversations I wrote down in my notebook: ‘look who sent.’ … What struck me was how hard both officials were working to knock down Wilson.

“Discrediting your opposition is a standard tactic in Washington, but the Bush team usually played the game differently. At that stage in the first term, Bush aides usually blew off their critics. Or, they continued to assert their set of facts in the hope of overcoming criticism by force of repetition.” ” [See Dickerson’s article, “Where’s My Subpoena?” for Slate, Feb. 7, 2006]

Back in Washington on July 11, 2003, Dickerson’s Time colleague, Matthew Cooper, was getting a similar earful from Rove, who tried to steer Cooper away from Wilson’s information on the Niger deception and toward the notion that the Niger trip was authorized by “Wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency [CIA] on WMD issues,” according to Cooper’s interview notes. [See Newsweek, July 18, 2005, issue]

Cooper later got the information about Wilson’s wife confirmed by Cheney’s chief of staff Libby, who was peddling the same information to Judith Miller.

On July 12, 2003, in a telephone conversation, Libby and Miller returned to the Wilson topic. Miller’s notes contain a reference to a “Victoria Wilson,” apparently another misspelled reference to Wilson’s wife, Valerie. [NYT, Oct. 16, 2005]

The Novak Column

Two days later, on July 14, 2003, Novak – having gotten confirmation about Plame’s identity from Rove – published a column, citing two administration sources outing Plame as a CIA officer and portraying Wilson’s Niger trip as a case of nepotism.

The disclosure of Plame’s identity effectively meant the end of her CIA career and put the lives of her overseas contacts in jeopardy. But the White House counterattack against Wilson had only just begun.

On July 20, 2003, NBC’s correspondent Andrea Mitchell told Wilson that “senior White House sources” had called her to stress “the real story here is not the 16 words [from Bush’s State of the Union speech] but Wilson and his wife.”

The next day, Wilson said he was told by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that “I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says and I quote, ‘Wilson’s wife is fair game.’”

However, CIA officials, angered by the damage done to Plame’s spy network, lodged a complaint with the Justice Department about whether the leaks amounted to an illegal exposure of a CIA officer.

But the initial investigation was under the direct control of Attorney General John Ashcroft. So, Bush and other White House officials confidently denied any knowledge of the leak.
Bush even vowed to fire anyone who leaked classified material.

“The President has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people in his administration,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said on Sept. 29, 2003. “If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.”
Bush personally announced he wanted to get to the bottom of the matter.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush said on Sept. 30, 2003. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true.”

Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to reporters.

Bush’s legal danger came into clearer focus later with the release of a court document citing testimony from Libby, who claimed that Bush approved the selective release of intelligence in July 2003 to counter growing complaints that Bush had hyped evidence on Iraq’s pursuit of uranium.

Libby testified that he was told by Cheney that Bush had approved a plan in which Libby would tell a specific New York Times reporter about the CIA’s secret analysis, according to a court filing by special prosecutor Fitzgerald.

“Defendant’s [Libby’s] participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller on July 8 [2003] occurred only after the Vice President advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE,” the highly classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the filing said.

In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson scheme got started – since he was involved in starting it – he uttered misleading public statements to conceal the White House role and possibly to signal to others that they should follow suit in denying knowledge.

Retaliation

Privately, some administration officials acknowledged that the Plame disclosure was an act of retaliation against Wilson for being one of the first mainstream public figures to challenge Bush on the WMD intelligence.

In September 2003, a White House official told the Washington Post that at least six reporters had been informed about Plame before Novak’s column. The official said the disclosure was “purely and simply out of revenge.”

Bush’s cover-up might have worked, except in late 2003, Ashcroft recused himself because of a conflict of interest, and Fitzgerald – the U.S. Attorney in Chicago – was named as the special prosecutor. Fitzgerald pursued the investigation far more aggressively, even demanding that journalists testify about the White House leaks.

Yet, from 2003 to 2005, as the Plame case grew into a political embarrassment for Bush, Republican operatives and their right-wing media allies stepped up efforts to transform Wilson – a private citizen – into a national bete noire.

The Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee made misleading and derogatory claims about Wilson’s honesty in a WMD report.

The Republican National Committee posted an article entitled “Joe Wilson’s Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and Misstatements,” which itself used glaring inaccuracies and misstatements to discredit Wilson. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Novak Recycles Gannon on ‘Plame-gate.’”]

Rather than thank Wilson for undertaking a difficult fact-finding trip to Niger for no pay – and for reporting accurately about the dubious Iraq-Niger claims – the Bush administration sought to smear the former ambassador.

But Bush’s strategy did not entirely succeed. In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted Libby on five counts of perjury, lying to investigators and obstruction of justice. Libby resigned from Cheney’s staff.

In a court filing on April 5, 2006, Fitzgerald added that his investigation had uncovered a “concerted” effort by the White House to “discredit, punish or seek revenge against” Wilson because of his criticism of the administration’s handling of the Niger evidence.

Still, the cost to the Wilsons was high. Sidelined by the notoriety from the scandal and faced with the destruction of her spy network, Plame eventually quit the CIA. (It was later revealed that Plame’s operation was focused on obtaining intelligence about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, another flash point that could boil over into a new war.)

Even then, the public punishment of Wilson wasn’t over.

In late summer 2006, authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn promoted an angle in their book, Hubris, that identified the State Department’s Armitage as Novak’s original source on the CIA identity of Valerie Plame.

The Isikoff-Corn disclosure was quickly cited by the mainstream Washington press corps as vindication for the Bush administration and yet another reason to dump on Joe Wilson.
The Armitage Mistake

Since the “conventional wisdom” held that Armitage wasn’t part of the administration’s neocon inner circle and was a skeptic about the Iraq War, the major news media jumped on the story as evidence that there never had been a White House conspiracy to punish Wilson by outing his wife.

“It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House – that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity – is untrue,” a Washington Post editorial declared on Sept. 1, 2006.

While acknowledging that Libby and other White House officials were not “blameless,” since they allegedly released Plame’s identity while “trying to discredit Mr. Wilson,” the Post still reserved its harshest condemnation for Wilson, blaming his criticism of Bush’s false State of the Union claim for Plame’s exposure.

“It now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson,” the Post editorial said. “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.”

The Post’s editorial, however, is at best an argumentative smear and most likely a willful lie.

Along with other government investigators, Wilson did debunk the reports of Iraq acquiring yellowcake in Niger and those findings did circulate to senior levels, explaining why CIA Director Tenet struck the yellowcake claims from other Bush speeches.

(The Post’s accusation about Wilson “falsely” claiming to have debunked the yellowcake reports apparently is based on Wilson’s inclusion in his report of speculation from one Niger official who suspected that Iraq might be interested in buying yellowcake, although the Iraqi officials never mentioned yellowcake and made no effort to buy any. This irrelevant point has been a centerpiece of Republican attacks on Wilson.)

In shifting the blame for exposing Plame’s identity away from the White House and Novak and onto Wilson, Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt also absolved himself since he published Novak’s column revealing Plame’s identity in the first place.

Contrary to the Post’s assertion that Wilson “ought to have expected” that the White House and Novak would zero in on Wilson’s wife, a reasonable expectation in a normal world would have been just the opposite.

Even amid the ugly partisanship of today’s Washington, it was shocking to many longtime observers of government that any administration official or even an experienced journalist would disclose the name of a covert CIA officer for such a flimsy reason as trying to discredit her husband.

And only in this upside-down world would a major newspaper be so irresponsible and so dishonest as to lay off the blame for exposing a CIA officer on her husband because he dared criticize lies told by the President of the United States, deceptions that have led the nation into a military debacle and to the deaths of more than 3,000 American soldiers.

The day after the Post’s editorial, the New York Times took a slightly different tack in defending the White House. The Times article suggested that special prosecutor Fitzgerald was the real villain for having pursued the Plame investigation for more than two years after Armitage had admitted in secret grand jury testimony that he was Novak’s firstl source. [NYT, Sept. 2, 2006]

Armitage-Rove Connection

But these major news outlets had missed another key fact. They assumed that Armitage – as Colin Powell’s well-liked deputy – had no significant connection to the White House political machinations.

That was not the reality, according to a well-placed conservative source who spoke with me. An early supporter of George W. Bush who knew both Armitage and Rove, the source told me that Armitage and Rove were much closer than many Washington insiders knew.

Armitage and Rove developed a friendship and a close working relationship when Bush was lining up Powell to be his Secretary of State, the source said. In those negotiations, Armitage stood in for Powell and Rove represented Bush – and after that, the two men provided a back channel for sensitive information to pass between the White House and the State Department, the source said.

The significance of this detail is that it 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 Novak, who then turned to Rove as a secondary source confirming the information from Armitage.

The revelation from the conservative source as well as Novak’s version of how he got the story – “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me” – suggest that Armitage and Rove were collaborating on the anti-Wilson operation, not simply operating on parallel tracks without knowing what the other was doing.

The mainstream media’s assumption that Armitage “inadvertently” let Plame’s identity slip out almost as gossip also was challenged by my conservative source. When I asked him about that scenario, he laughed and said, “Armitage isn’t a gossip, but he is a leaker. There’s a difference.”
Also forgotten in the mainstream news coverage was the fact that in 1998, Armitage was one of the 18 signatories to a seminal letter from the neoconservative Project for the New American Century urging President Bill Clinton to oust Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary.

Armitage joined a host of neoconservative icons, such as Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Many of the signers, including Donald Rumsfeld, would become architects of Bush’s Iraq War policy five years later.

Nevertheless, the Armitage-as-innocent-gossip version of events was embraced by leading Washington pundits as the final proof that Rove and the White House had gotten a bum rap on the Plame affair.

In a Sept. 7, 2006, article, entitled “One Leak and a Flood of Silliness,” veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote that publications which had made allegations about White House wrongdoing “owe Karl Rove an apology. And all of journalism needs to relearn the lesson: Can the conspiracy theories and stick to the facts.”

But David Broder, Fred Hiatt and the other see-no-evil pundits appear to be the ones ignoring facts in favor of a more pleasant “conventional wisdom” about well-meaning Bush aides who would never think about smearing some Iraq War critic.

As the Libby case finally gets underway, the trial will offer another opportunity for the major news media to climb back into that time machine and travel back to the happier era when everyone who mattered in Washington just knew that George W. Bush was always right and anyone who thought otherwise must be a “conspiracy theorist.”

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

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