Posted on 10/24/2005 9:05:41 PM PDT by InvisibleChurch
Monday, Oct. 24, 2005 10:24 p.m. EDT Times: Cheney First Disclosed CIA Official's Name
The New York Times reported late Monday that Vice President Cheney has been directly linked to the so-called "Plamegate" scandal involving the disclosure of the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer.
The paper reported that Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby "first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003."
The paper sourced their story to "lawyers involved in the case."
The Times said that notes taken by Libby differ from his own testimony before the grand jury as to when he first learned of Plame's identity.
"The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program to justify the war."
Cheney apparently discovered details of Plame's CIA work after he questioned then CIA Director George J. Tenet about her husband, Ambassador Wilson.
But even if Libby or Cheney had disclosed Plame's identity as a CIA officer they may not have committed a crime.
"Disclosing a covert agent’s identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent’s undercover status," the Times said.
"Be careful what you wish for" is exactly right. Do these fools think that whoever is indicted in this White House is not going to fight back? They'll depose EVERYBODY; and anybody who lies will be in big trouble. -Howlin
Fascinating ... Cheney agrees to become the fall guy. New VP gets in (Romney, Guiliani, Rice) who becomes the heir apparent to the 2008 POTUS nomination. Sort of like when Senator Lott was thrown overboard just when GOP needed a fresh Majority Leader.
It's Rovian ju jitsu. You think you got us? Bamm! Now we're even stronger!!
(By the way, I don't believe any of this. Just amused.)
This has puzzled me all along; was Wilson suppose to be able to claim/infer that Cheney sent him and not be contradicted because of who his wife was?
In this case I think I'm right.
The investigation was initiated to determine if the law protecting the identity of covert agents was violated. For perjury to occur, a false statement must be material to the investigation of the underlying crime. From the perjury angle, sources are immaterial because there is no proof that anybody actually knew she was a covert agent or reasonably believed that she was at the time of the communications. It's immaterial whether Libby heard about Plame from Cheney or a reporter if Fitzgerald cannot prove that the source passed on information that Plame was a covert agent, as opposed to someone merely working for the CIA.
As far as your analogies are concerned, I find them inapt and untrue.
Jones sued Clinton for sexual harassment. Her case was settled.
Fuhrman was discredited, but never convicted of perjury.
Monday, Oct. 24, 2005 10:24 p.m. EDT Times: Cheney First Disclosed CIA Official's Name
The New York Times reported late Monday that Vice President Cheney has been directly linked to the so-called "Plamegate" scandal involving the disclosure of the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer.
The paper reported that Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby "first learned about the C.I.A.
officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003."
Oh no - the Times is not suggesting anything with this title in this time period. sarcasm off. But you are right - they never suggest he did anything wrong - they just use the power of the pen to link his name to Plamegate and name him as the source of disclosure of her name, directly, forgetting to mention that he can name her to his aide.
You are correct - they did not suggest anything.
Miller testified that Libby told her that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Her notes were questionnable and she did not recall who gave her the name "Flame". She also admitted that she thought some of the info that Libby gave her was classified and she thought she had security clearance (but she didnt).
Actually, Clinton's license to practice law was suspended for five years for lying about having sex with Paula Jones.
A majority of the panelists who met Friday to consider two complaints against the president found that he should be disciplined, the Supreme Court said.
"This action is being taken against (the president) as a result of the formal complaints ... and the findings by a majority of the committee that certain of the attorney's conduct, as demonstrated in the complaint, constituted serious misconduct," the committee said in the document released by the state Supreme Court.
---
Wright cited Clinton for civil contempt last year and fined him $90,000 for giving "intentionally false" testimony.
---
Clinton disbarred from Supreme Court
The Supreme Court said today that a lawyer who was disciplined in his home state of Arkansas cannot practice law before the High Court. The action was totally unremarkable, except that the lawyer in question is former President Bill Clinton.
The justices’ action followed Clinton’s acceptance earlier this year of a five-year suspension of his law license in Arkansas and his payment of a $25,000 fine to the Arkansas Bar Association [stemming from a sexual-harassment suit filed in 1994 by Paula Corbin Jones].
I am right with you, friend. :-)
Is Libby a lawyer? Would his conversations with the VP be confidential?
Oh, no - he knew, too!
CA....
You are quoting Newsmax, not NYT. The article is mostly about Libby's possible legal difficulties.
Right. Either the White House, which certainly has a right to poke holes in Wilson's patently false statements, must tacitly corroborate the falsehood that Cheney sent him, or must "out" Valerie Plame and pay the price. A Hobson's Choice.
It would have been infuriatingly dirty pool for Wilson to purposely set that up. He's certainly capable of it, but I've always thought it wasn't intentional entrapment, but rather that Wilson blundered into the situation, and then the Clinton machine helped them construct that beautiful Catch-22 out of it.
"Have you been living under a rock for the past few weeks? Judith Miller testified to the grand jury that Libby told her about Plame."
You're the one under the rock. From the AP:
In response to questioning by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Miller replied that she "didn’t think" she heard Plame’s name from Cheney’s aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
"I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," Miller wrote, recounting her testimony for an article that the newspaper posted on its Web site Saturday afternoon.
http://tinyurl.com/e4r89
The coverup of what???
CA....
Have you seen the email from J Miller to her public editor at the NYT, Chalame? I just followed a link from Drudge to Editor and Publisher where a copy of the email may be found. In it she says she is proud to have gone to jail to protect the confidential source of Plame--even tho it was a Bush
Whitehouse man. My paraphrase. I am so lost with all of this...just when I think I might have a handle on it something new comes to light and I twist in the wind again.
From a quick Yahoo search: "Mark Fuhrman, a detective who was a witness at the O.J. Simpson trial pled guilty on October 2, 1996, to perjury for denying under oath that he had uttered slurs against blacks. He was placed on three years probation and fined $200 for a single count of felony perjury. "
Perhaps you would like to explain just how the "settlement" of the Paula Jones case resulted in Clinton losing his law license. Clinton was never convicted of perjury, but I think your on the wrong forum if you expect to convince many here that he didn't commit perjury as well as several counts of obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and subornation of perjury.
NEWSWEEK: Vice President Cheney and Close-Knit Group of Advisers Aggressively Advanced Case for Iraq War, Chasing Down Critics and Setting the Stage for the CIA Leak Case
After 9/11, Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby Would 'Pump' Intelligence
Officials for Raw Information on Iraq
Cheney Aide John Hannah, Speculated to Be Key Figure In Leak Investigation, Is
Not a Target, Says Lawyer: Hannah 'Knew Nothing...This Is Craziness'
NEW YORK, Oct. 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Soon after 9/11, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, began routinely calling
intelligence officials, high and low, to pump them for any scraps of
information on Iraq. He would read obscure, unvetted intelligence reports and
grill their authors, but always in a courtly manner, report Newsweek's
National Security Correspondent John Barry and Investigative Correspondents
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball in the October 31 issue (on newsstands
Monday, October 24). The intel officials were often more than a little
surprised. It was extraordinarily unusual for the vice president's office to
step so far outside of channels and make personal appeals to mere analysts.
"He was deep into the raw intel," one government official tells Newsweek.
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20051023/NYSU004 )
Libby was the most relentless digger in Cheney's close-knit group of
advisers, which also included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's under secretary
for policy. Together, the group largely despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-
other analyses handed up by the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, they went
in search of intel that helped advance their case for war, Newsweek reports.
Central to that case was the belief that Saddam was determined to get
nukes -- a claim helped by a report that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium
from Niger, which the White House doggedly pushed.
Ambassador Joseph Wilson
damaged that claim with his landmark New York Times op-ed piece, printed on
July 6, 2003, about his trip to Niger to investigate the story, during which
he concluded it was not credible. Within the White House inner circle,
Wilson's op-ed was seen as an act of aggression against President Bush and
Cheney. Someone, perhaps to punish the loose-lipped diplomat, let it be known
to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie
Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, a revelation that is a possible
violation of laws protecting classified information. This week the
two-year-long investigation of that leak could finally end. It is widely
expected that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed in the
case, may issue indictments for one or more top administration officials,
possibly including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
Some lawyers close to the case are convinced Fitzgerald has a mysterious
"Mr. X" -- a yet unknown principal target or cooperating witness. Some press
reports identified John Hannah, Cheney's deputy national-security adviser, as
a potentially key figure in the investigation. Hannah played a central
policymaking role on Iraq and was known to be particularly close to Ahmad
Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress supplied some of the faulty
intelligence about WMD embraced by the vice president in the run-up to the
invasion. Last week Hannah's lawyer Thomas Green told Newsweek his client
"knew nothing" about the leak and is not a target of Fitzgerald's probe. "This
is craziness," he said.
Whatever news Fitzgerald makes this week, however, the case has shed light
on how Cheney and his clique of advisers cleared the way to war, and how they
obsessed over critics who got in the way. "The notion that they've become a
gang has some merit," says a longtime colleague of Libby's. "A small group who
only talk to each other...You pay a price for that."
(Read article at http://www.Newsweek.com.
Slightly off-topic, but...
Shouldn't Valerie be FIRED for recommending her incompetent husband for the job?
If I recommended my wife conduct a military test based on her extensive knowledge, and it turned out (as it would) that she knows nothing about testing military equipment - I would be fired/looking at jail.
Why not JAIL Valerie for recommending her idiot husband in the first place?
And then FIRE whoever went along with the dumb idea!
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