Our media at work.
Posted on 08/28/2006 2:38:02 PM PDT by .cnI redruM
On October 3, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell talked to reporters after meeting with Laszlo Kovacs, the foreign minister of Hungary. The meeting went well, with nothing controversial to discuss. It went so well, in fact, that a reporter said to Powell, “Mr. Secretary, things are so smooth I thought I’d ask you about something else. The State Department is offering to help in the search for the person who leaked the CIA official’s name. Can you say something about that situation? How might the State Department help?”
“We have been asked by the Justice Department, those who are conducting this investigation, to make ourselves available for any purpose that they have,” Powell answered. Promising to cooperate fully, Powell added, “We are doing our searches in response to the letter we received yesterday, and make ourselves available. I’m not sure what they will be looking for or what they wish to contact us about, but we are anxious to be of all assistance to the inquiry.”
No one in the press corps knew it at the time, but if a newly published account of the CIA-leak case is accurate, Powell knew much, much more than he let on during that session with the press. Two days earlier, according to Hubris, the new book by the Nation’s David Corn and Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, Powell had been told by his top deputy and close friend Richard Armitage that he, Armitage, leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak. Armitage had, in other words, set off the CIA-leak affair.
At the time, top administration officials, including President Bush, were vowing to “get to the bottom” of the matter. But Armitage was already there, and he told Powell, who told top State Department officials, who told the Justice Department. From the first week of October 2003, then, investigators knew who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity — the ostensible purpose of an investigation that still continues, a few months shy of three years after it began.
Justice Department officials also knew who else had spoken to Novak. In that same time period, October 2003, FBI investigators spoke to top White House aide Karl Rove, and Rove told them of a brief conversation with Novak in which Novak brought up learning of Plame’s place of employment and Rove said he had heard about that, too. So by October 2003 — more than two months before the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald — the Justice Department knew who had told Novak about Plame.
ONE FRENZIED WEEK Given the most recent revelation about Armitage — no surprise to anyone watching the case — plus what was previously known about the leak, the question now is, why did the investigation go on? Why was it expanded, and why was Fitzgerald named, and why does it continue today? Some of the answers can be found in the events of a single, frenzied week at the end of September and beginning of October 2003.
Justice Department officials originally did not want to pursue the case. The CIA first contacted the Department about the Wilson leak shortly after Wilson’s identity was revealed in Novak’s column on July 14, 2003. Such referrals are often handled quickly by the Department, but it appears the Plame referral languished there for more than two months. And then, on Saturday and Sunday, September 27-28, all hell broke loose, when news leaked that George Tenet had written a letter to the Justice Department about the matter.
On Monday, September 29, 2003, the Washington Post reported that “The controversy erupted over the weekend, when administration officials reported that Tenet sent the Justice Department a letter raising questions about whether federal law was broken when the operative, Valerie Plame, was exposed. She was named in a column by Robert D. Novak that ran July 14 in The Post and other newspapers. CIA officials approached the Justice Department about a possible investigation within a week of the column’s publication. Tenet’s letter was delivered more recently.”
After the Tenet leak, Democrats in Congress, led by New York Sen. Charles Schumer, demanded an investigation. On September 30, 2003, the Post published a front-page story, “Bush Vows Action if Aides Had Role in Leak,” which reported that, “President Bush’s chief spokesman said yesterday that the allegation that administration officials leaked the name of a CIA operative is “a very serious matter” and vowed that Bush would fire anybody responsible for such actions.”
The furor prompted Novak to write another column on the Plame matter. “During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why [Joseph] Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger,” Novak wrote. “He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA’s counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger.”
According to Hubris, Armitage had gone through the weekend of September 27-28, and then the continued furor on Monday and Tuesday — not to mention the previous three months — without realizing he was Novak’s source. It was only upon reading Novak’s “no partisan gunslinger” column, allegedly, that Armitage knew he was the source and got in touch with Powell.
In any event, the Justice Department moved quickly. In the next two weeks, DOJ investigators interviewed Armitage, Powell, Rove, Lewis Libby, and others. According to Hubris, Armitage told investigators about his talk with Novak, but did not tell them that he had also told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward about Plame. It appears that Armitage did not tell Fitzgerald about his Woodward conversation until November 2005, and then only after Woodward initiated the process.
TRAITORS? NEVER MIND Why did Armitage keep the information from Fitzgerald? In Hubris, Armitage’s allies hint at the same defense that Lewis Libby’s lawyers use to explain why he didn’t tell investigators everything: that Plame was a relatively inconsequential part of a big story and was not, as administration critics say, the focus of a White House conspiracy. “My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat,” State Department intelligence head told Corn and Isikoff, saying that Armitage had simply “f—-ked up.”
Whatever Armitage’s motives, the fact that he was the Novak leaker undermines — destroys, actually — the conspiracy theory of the CIA-leak case. According to Isikoff, in an excerpt of Hubris published in Newsweek: “The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone…”
It’s an extraordinary admission coming from Isikoff’s co-author Corn, one of the leading conspiracy theorists of the CIA-leak case. “The Plame leak in Novak’s column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about the prewar intelligence,” Corn and Isikoff write. “The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework.”
No, it doesn’t. Instead, Corn and Isikoff argue that after Armitage “got the ball rolling,” his actions “abetted” a White House that was already attempting to “undermining” Joseph Wilson. That’s a long way from the cries of “Traitor!” that came from the administration’s critics during the CIA-leak investigation.
WHY LIBBY — AND NOT ARMITAGE? Of course, investigators knew that all along. So why did the investigation continue? And why was Libby ultimately indicted, and not Armitage?
It appears that Libby’s early statements raised investigators’ suspicions. Early on, once the FBI started asking questions, Armitage told investigators he talked to Novak. Rove told investigators he talked to Novak. The CIA’s Bill Harlow told investigators he talked to Novak. Their stories, along with Novak’s description of how he learned about Plame (Novak talked to investigators at the same time, describing the process, but not naming sources), all lined up pretty well.
And then came Libby. During that same October time period, Libby — who was not Novak’s source — told investigators he learned about Plame from Tim Russert. According to the Libby indictment, Libby said that “Russert asked Libby if Libby was aware that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.” Although Libby wasn’t one of Novak’s sources, his story didn’t fit with the others, and that would most likely make investigators suspect that somebody wasn’t telling the truth. In this case, it probably appeared that person was Libby.
Ultimately, Libby was indicted on perjury and obstruction charges. But at the time Fitzgerald indicted Libby, at the end of October 2005, he did not know that Armitage had not told investigators about his, Armitage’s, conversation with Woodward. According to Hubris, Fitzgerald then re-investigated Armitage, finally deciding not to charge him with any crime.
Why? Certainly it appears that no one committed any crimes by revealing Plame’s identity, and one could argue that the Justice Department should not have gone forward with a wide-ranging investigation after it discovered Novak’s sources. But if Fitzgerald was going to indict Libby, then why not Armitage, too?
The answer may lie in the bitter conflict inside the administration over the war in Iraq that is the backdrop to the entire CIA-leak affair. Armitage’s allies have made it clear that they believe Armitage is a “good” leaker while Rove, Libby, and others in the White House are “bad” leakers. We do not know what CIA and State Department officials told Fitzgerald during the investigation, but we do know that fevered imaginings about the terrible acts of the neocon cabal were not the exclusive province of left-wing blogs; they were also present inside the State Department and CIA. Fitzgerald may have chosen the course that he did — appearing to premise his investigation on the conspiracy theorists’ accusations — because he was pointed in that direction by the White House’s enemies inside and outside the administration.
But now, after all the investigating, all the work, and the setting of terrible precedents for forcing reporters to testify in court or go to jail, the CIA-leak case hasn’t moved much beyond where it was in that frenzied week in October 2003. And unlike the old independent counsels, who were required by law to issue a report on their investigation, Fitzgerald has no obligation to explain his actions to anyone. Some questions that are unanswered now might well remain unanswered forever.
So Fitzgerald, the FBI and Powell knew within days that Armitage was the leaker.
That Fitzgerald went forward with the investigation is a disgrace and he should be disbarred.
That Powell didn't defend the President of the United States is so disloyal that I'll never defend him again. Ever.
Since Armitage wasn't charged with leaking Plame's name, we can all be gratified that we were correct and she wasn't a covert agent at the time so there was no crime.
And I see the leftists aren't demanding Armitage's head on a platter. So it's okay to "leak" if the leaker is a critic of the president.
And the Democrats aren't demanding that McCain stop all association with Armitage. When they just thought the leaker was Rove, they were demanding the president fire him. What a bunch of hypocrites.
That would be more than "nonsense" that we would have gone through...ugh.
Although there was a great deal in the media about this supposed scandal, I do not think it was a great topic around the watercooler at the time. In other words, I do not think the average American even cared about this basically media-created scandal in 2004. But yes, that is too horrible to contemplate, but to tell the truth, it WAS contemplated by some, and that is why it happened.
OOPS!!!
Of course, I was in shock because I thought Fitz had indicted Dick Cheney. As it turned out, the bar hag was so drunk she misinterpreted what she saw on the tube by the bar. It was Cheney's AIDE who had been indicted but for awhile there I believed that bar hag. BTW, have you ever noticed that a lot of bars have bar hags as regulars?
No, I think that Wilson's relationship to Plame and his report were the topic of a top secret memo to the State Dept. Anyway, that was the story that Armitage told.
I don't know what Fitzgerald is going to do about the Libby charges. He never had any case to begin with, so my guess is that he will run out the time and try to quietly drop the charges, some time after the November elections.
I wish we had some Republicans with some guts in Congress, who would stand up a make a fuss over this contrived investigation and the damage that it has done to an innocent man, two innocent men, actually, Rove and Libby. Newt would not have stayed silent.
This is very true. :)
Our media at work.
Here's some more on the Wilson/Plame attempted Whitehouse frame, from the NRO. I think that it is pretty much the way that I described it, a trumped up case against Libby to try to tie Cheney and Rove to their invented conspiracy.
The article starts with a response from Corn to yesterday's article on NRO.
Corn: Conspiracy theorist—moi? Where have I proposed a conspiracy theory?
Perhaps a first stop in a tour of Corn's works would be "Rove Scandal: A Conspiracy Charge for the White House?" posted on bushlies.com and davidcorn.com on July 22, 2005. In that article, Corn wrote:
As I write, the news is zapping across the Internet that Bloomberg has reported that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby have given testimony to the Plame/CIA leak grand jury that was contradicted by the accounts of others. Here's the lead:
Two top White House aides have given accounts to the special prosecutor about how reporters told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to persons familiar with the case…
Corn then recounted a conversation he had with a Democratic lawyer friend in Washington. What did the lawyer think was going on in the CIA leak case? Corn asked:
Obviously, he says, it would be easier for [Fitzgerald] to make a "false statements case" than to prosecute a case under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. (Regular readers by now know why.) But, he goes on, there's another way he could tackle this; check out Title 18, Section 371, of the US Code, he advises. It's entitled "Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States"…
Under this law, if there was any conspiring among the leakers—say, one White House aide suggested to another that they use the classified information in hand to disclose Valerie Wilson's connection to the CIA in order to undermine Wilson's account of his trip to Niger—then the acts of each conspirator can essentially be charged to the other(s). If I understand this correctly—did I say I was no lawyer?—that means if one person violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (or lied to Fitzgerald or the grand jury) any one who conspired with them to make the leak happen (or concoct the false account) could be nailed. "From a prosecutor's standpoint," this former prosecutor says, "a conspiracy charge is how you get in each strand—all the strands—of what happened."
Nabbing Karl Rove on a conspiracy? To some that might sound rather appropriate.
Corn will no doubt say that he wasn't actually accusing anybody of conspiracy — after all, he put a question mark after the title, didn't he?
Posted at 10:44 AM
I don't know how I can thank you enough for digging up those links re: Kerry and his e-mail.
I remember being shocked at the time, that he did it...but not as shocked as I was when NO ONE in the media seemed to make it that big of a deal...
We haven't had diplomatic relations with Iran...and that letter, IMHO, STILL damns Kerry and the Democrat Party as one that can be trusted with foreign policy...especially with Ahmanutjob in power.
Thanks again.
How did this investigation help to feed a hungry child?
I see you are as angry as I am about this revelation about the Plame story...
You do realize that Kerry could have ended up as POTUS because of this...and Soros would have accomplished his goal...
Do you believe this was a set up from the get-go...when Joe Wilson was sent to Niger??
You're welcome, Txsleuth! I've been saving stuff like that in (fairly) accessible files for years. We need all the ammunition we can get to expose the dems as untrustworthy with our national security.
From your posts on this thread yesterday, I noticed we share a suspicion of all things Soros. I've got lots of Soros material, so if you need specific info just ping me and I'll see if I have it. I come and go on the forum, but will get back to you.
see #168
He was picked by her for the African mission for private business reasons. Libby is going to the cooler essentially for Joe wilson's African consulting business, which in and of itself, stinks to Clinton-Ron Brown-CBC-Conyers-Heaven.
I have read elsewhere that FITZ told Armitage not to tell anyone.. I wonder why?
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