Leahy Subpoenas Rove's Plame Emails By Jason Leopold t r u t h o u t Report
Thursday 03 May 2007
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy issued a subpoena on Wednesday to Alberto Gonzales seeking emails that White House Political Adviser Karl Rove turned over to Patrick Fitzgerald related to the special prosecutor's investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and the role the White House political adviser played in her unmasking.
The subpoena comes on the heels of news reports that said the Justice Department's inspector general is investigating a claim that former Gonzales aide Monica Goodling used political affiliation as the basis for screening applicants for assistant US attorney positions. The Justice Department said federal law prohibits such considerations in hiring prosecutors.
"Whether or not the allegation is true is currently the subject" of the investigation by the inspector general and the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said in a statement.
In a letter to Gonzales on Tuesday afternoon, Leahy reminded Gonzales that he had asked the attorney general during a hearing last month, and again in a letter dated April 25, whether the Justice Department was in possession of Rove's emails and if Gonzales would turn them over to the Judiciary Committee voluntarily.
"You responded at the hearing that you did not know, but would check and get back to me," Leahy wrote Gonzales. "I have not heard back from you since."
The lack of a response from Gonzales prompted the Judiciary Committee to issue a subpoena on Tuesday compelling the Justice Department to turn over Rove's emails, many of which were allegedly "lost" and later turned over to Fitzgerald, Leahy said, quoting Rove's attorney Robert Luskin about the whereabouts of the documents. Leahy has set a deadline of May 15 for the emails to be turned over to his committee.
The subpoena covers a wide range of emails Rove sent over the past four years, some of which are also related to investigations underway by Congressional committees about the circumstances behind the firings of eight US attorneys last year. The firings appear to be politically motivated, Leahy said, and were apparently coordinated between the White House and officials in the Justice Department.
"This subpoena includes any such emails that were obtained by Mr. Fitzgerald as part of the Plame investigation," Leahy's letter says. Furthermore, Leahy wants Gonzales to turn over "any and all emails and attachments to emails to, from or copied to Karl Rove related to the committee's investigation into the preservation of prosecutorial independence and the Department of Justice's politicization of the hiring, firing and decision-making of United States attorneys from any (1) White House account, (2) Republican National Committee [RNC] account, or (3) other account in the possession, custody or control of the Department of Justice."
Last month, the RNC disclosed that thousands of emails Rove sent over a four-year period via an email account maintained by the RNC may have been destroyed. The nonprofit government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington revealed in April that its own probe discovered that as many as five million White House emails were missing, in violation of the Presidential Records Act.
In a story first reported by Truthout last year, in a federal court document filed in January 2006 in US District Court in Washington, DC, Fitzgerald revealed that his investigative team "learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." That document was filed during the discovery phase of the perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial against former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Less than two weeks after Fitzgerald revealed that emails from the White House were missing, 250 pages of emails from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's offices were turned over to investigators working for the special prosecutor - more than two years after the investigation began.
The White House offered no official explanation concerning the circumstances regarding the sudden reappearance of the emails it turned over to Fitzgerald on February 6, 2006, or if there was any truth to Fitzgerald's allegations that the emails were not automatically archived. At the time, a White House spokeswoman would only say that staffers "discovered" the batch of documents during a search.
In late January 2004, Fitzgerald sent a letter to then-acting Attorney General James Comey seeking confirmation that he had the authority to investigate and prosecute suspects in the leak case for additional crimes, including evidence destruction.
The leak investigation had primarily been centered on an obscure law that made it a felony for any government official to knowingly disclose the identity of an undercover CIA officer.
Comey, who is scheduled to testify before Congress on Thursday about his knowledge of the events leading up to the firings of the US attorneys last year, responded to Fitzgerald in writing on February 6, 2004, confirming that Fitzgerald did indeed have the authority to prosecute those crimes, including "perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence and intimidation of witnesses."
Fitzgerald wrote Comey in part because he had become suspicious that White House Political Adviser Karl Rove had either hidden or destroyed an important document tying him to the leak and the effort to discredit Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. The document Fitzgerald believed Rove had destroyed or withheld was an email Rove sent to Stephen Hadley, then-deputy national security adviser, in early July 2003. That email proved Rove had a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about issues related to the CIA leak. Rove did not disclose that conversation when he was first interviewed by the FBI three months after he had emailed Hadley.
The same day that Fitzgerald received the written reply from Comey, the White House faced a deadline to turn over administration contacts with 25 journalists to the grand jury investigating the Plame Wilson leak. Cooper was one journalist cited in the subpoena sent to the White House on January 22, 2004. Curiously, the email Rove sent to Hadley did not show up during a search ordered by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in September 2003. Gonzales enjoined all White House staff members to turn over any communication pertaining to Plame Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Iraq war who had accused the Bush administration of twisting pre-war Iraq intelligence.
The directive came 12 hours after senior White House officials had been told of the pending investigation.
A number of theories emerged at the time in an attempt to explain why the emails had not been preserved. Media reports settled on the idea that White House computers simply broke down and failed to archive the emails.
According to a report in Newsweek, FBI investigators did not initially find the email Rove sent to Hadley because "the right search words weren't used" three years ago.
The Washington Post, citing an unnamed source, reported that Rove had sent the email to Hadley from his government account and it was "unclear" why the email did not turn up during a search in 2003.
Whether Fitzgerald knew in late January or early February 2004 about the existence of Rove's email to Hadley is unknown. Neither Fitzgerald nor his spokesman would respond to questions about the leak investigation.
During two of his five appearances before the grand jury investigating the Plame Wilson leak, Rove testified that the first time he discussed Valerie Plame with journalists was after syndicated columnist Robert Novak revealed her identity and CIA status in July 2003. Rove did not disclose that he had actually been a source for Cooper, whose story about Plame's work for the CIA was published less than a week after Novak's column was published.
When Fitzgerald applied pressure to Cooper to testify about the identity of the source who told him that Plame worked for the CIA, Rove's attorney Robert Luskin made a startling discovery: He found the email Rove sent to Hadley.
Luskin told Fitzgerald that he had a conversation with Time magazine reporter Viveca Novak in February 2004 and she inadvertently revealed that Rove had been a source for her colleague Matt Cooper.
Following his meeting with Viveca Novak, Luskin met with Rove and told him that Novak said he was Cooper's source. Luskin and Rove then did an exhaustive search through White House phone logs and emails to find any evidence that Rove spoke with Cooper. That's when the email Rove sent to Hadley was discovered, Luskin said, which he promptly turned over to Fitzgerald and which led Rove to change his testimony.
However, Luskin would not say when he turned it over, or why the email wasn't found when the White House was subpoenaed on January 22, 2004 or when White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered all White House staff in October 2003 to turn over emails and other documentary evidence that showed officials had spoken with journalists.
Luskin testified on December 2, 2005 regarding his meeting with Viveca Novak. He said that he met with her in late January or early February 2004, the very month in which Fitzgerald had sought the authority to prosecute officials if they were found to have hindered his investigation into the leak.
Viveca Novak (who bears no relation to the columnist Robert Novak), however, testified that she met Luskin in either March or May 2004. Still, Rove didn't reveal to the grand jury until October 15, 2004 that he had spoken with Cooper.
Luskin has said that Rove did not intentionally withhold information from Fitzgerald or the grand jury about his conversation with Cooper. Rather, he said, Rove had simply forgotten about it and Luskin's meeting with Novak had jogged his memory.
Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country. (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.
