Plame Leak(s) [by Jason "Merry Fitzmas" Leopold]

Richard Armitage, the former deputy Secretary of State, may be syndicated columnist Robert Novak's primary source who told him on July 8, 2003, that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. But that doesn't change the fact that Karl Rove told former Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper the same thing three days later - and then subsequently failed to tell federal investigators about it for a year.

Cooper summed up Rove's role in the leak succinctly in a first-person account he wrote for Time magazine last year following his grand jury testimony.

"Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes," wrote Cooper, who at the time of the leak was Time magazine's Washington correspondent. "Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'WMD?' Yes,"

Rove also told Novak that Plame worked for the CIA and that she was married to Wilson the same day the columnist spoke to Armitage. And Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in the case on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, first told former New York Times reporter Judith Miller about Plame's CIA status a couple of weeks earlier, and reminded the reporter again that Plame was a CIA officer on July 8, 2003 - the same day Novak spoke to Armitage.

"Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the CIA," a few weeks before Novak's column was published, Miller wrote in a lengthy account of her grand jury testimony.

Keep in mind that Rove and Libby disseminated information about Plame to these reporters a week before Novak published his column identifying her. Since the Armitage reports surfaced last weekend, the media have seemingly ignored these facts and have tried to rewrite history by removing Rove and Libby's culpability in the matter.

The leak, Wilson contends, was a deliberate attempt to silence him because he publicly criticized the administration's claims that Iraq tried to acquire uranium from Niger, which for all intents and purposes forced the White House to issue a mea culpa - a day before White House officials unmasked Plame to journalists - admitting that the infamous "16 words" in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address pertaining to Niger and uranium should not have been in the speech.

Whether Armitage came clean about his role in the leak to the Justice Department in October 2003, a claim Newsweek made last weekend, the fact remains that other senior administration officials were disclosing Plame's covert CIA status to reporters in the same time frame. Since each instance of the leak would have constituted a separate crime, the Justice Department was bound to investigate whether officials knowingly leaked classified information, which under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act would have constituted a felony.

When Rove was first questioned by federal investigators in October 2003, he said he first discovered Plame's identity and CIA employment by reading Novak's column and only after doing so did he share the information with other journalists, according to numerous published reports.

Rove did not disclose that he was a source for Cooper's July 17, 2003, story on Wilson and Plame. It would take more than a year and a few additional appearances before the grand jury before Rove finally revealed that fact.

"It is one thing if Rove happened to hear from a reporter that Plame was a CIA officer, casually confirmed that he had already heard that to another reporter (Novak) and incidentally spread the word to a third (Cooper)," Time magazine wrote in a July 2005 cover story on Rove's role in the leak "It's perhaps something else if Administration officials made an effort to gather information on Wilson, discovered that his wife was a CIA officer and carried out a strategy to discredit Wilson that included outing his wife to a number of reporters. It is still another thing to do the second and pretend, under oath, that you had done the first."

It's true Fitzgerald knew the identity of the leaker early on in the investigation. Truthout reported as much in an April 3 report.

However, Fitzgerald shifted gears a month or so after he was appointed special counsel and began pursuing obstruction of justice and perjury charges due to conflicting testimony he obtained from Rove and Libby.

Libby and Rove said in interviews with FBI investigators and during testimony before the grand jury that they found out about Plame's identity from reporters. Rove testified that he couldn't recall who in the media told him that Plame worked for the CIA and was married to the former ambassador.

In late January 2004, Fitzgerald sent a letter to his boss, then-acting Attorney General James Comey, seeking confirmation that he had the authority to investigate and prosecute individuals for additional crimes that may have been committed during the probe.

Comey responded to Fitzgerald in writing on February 6, 2004, confirming that the special prosecutor had the authority to prosecute "perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses."

The same day Fitzgerald received the response letter from Comey, the White House faced a deadline of turning over to the grand jury investigating the leak emails, calendars, and phone logs related to conversations about Wilson and/or Plame administration officials had with 25 journalists.

Besides Cooper, and Novak, other journalists cited in the January 22, 2004, subpoena include: Knut Royce and Timothy M. Phelps from Newsday; Walter Pincus, Richard Leiby, Mike Allen, Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post; John Dickerson, Massimo Calabresi, Michael Duffy and James Carney from Time magazine; Evan Thomas from Newsweek; Andrea Mitchell from NBC's "Meet the Press;" Chris Matthews from MSNBC's "Hardball;" Tim Russert and Campbell Brown from NBC; Nicholas D. Kristof, David E. Sanger and Judith Miller from the New York Times; Greg Hitt and Paul Gigot from the Wall Street Journal; John Solomon from the Associated Press; and Jeff Gannon from Talon News.

In February 2004, a couple of weeks after Comey sent Fitzgerald a written authorization letter assuring him he could pursue other crimes administration officials may have committed during the course of the probe, Rove was scheduled to testify before the grand jury.

Fitzgerald's suspicions about Rove's story turned out to be prescient. Rove failed to tell the grand jury that he had been a source for Cooper. Instead, Rove said he found out about Plame and then subsequently shared information about her with other journalists - including Chris Matthews, the host of MSNBC's "Hardball" - only after Novak published his column.

Explaining the discrepancy to the Special Prosecutor in October 2005, Luskin, Rove's attorney, told Fitzgerald that Rove had truly forgotten about his conversation with Cooper, but Luskin jogged his memory thanks to a tip he says he received from Cooper's Time colleague, Viveca Novak (no relation to the conservative columnist Robert Novak).

Hours before Libby's indictment in October, Luskin told Fitzgerald that he had gone for drinks with Novak in late January or early February 2004 and she had inadvertently revealed that the buzz inside Time magazine was that Rove had been a source for Matt Cooper's story on Plame Wilson.

Luskin told Fitzgerald that Novak's tip prompted him and Rove to conduct an exhaustive search for documentary evidence to determine if Rove had spoken with Cooper. That's when an email Rove sent to the then-deputy national security adviser immediately following Rove's conversation with Cooper turned up, which Luskin said he promptly turned over to Fitzgerald, and which led Rove to change his testimony and disclose that he did speak with Cooper.

Take a trip down memory land to 2003. See below posted on FR in October 2003.

Who "Blew" Mrs. Wilson's Cover?
Human Events Online ^ | October, 10, 2003 | Herbert Romerstein

The liberal press and the Democrat demagogues on Capitol Hill are having a hissy fit over "who blew the cover of Joe Wilson's wife." The answer is not hard to find. The culprit was Joe Wilson IV—with some help from his wife. When Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in July and revealed that he had gone to Niger on a CIA assignment, he called attention to his wife. CIA people who are really undercover are very careful about not identifying themselves or their families with the agency. They wait until their children are old enough to keep their mouths shut before revealing, even to them, that they are CIA officers. Wilson listed his wife's maiden name in the biography he put on the web site of the Middle East Institute.

When a CIA officer under deep cover is assigned to a hostile country, he knows that the enemy counter-intelligence service will do a background check. Any involvement of a relative with the CIA will endanger the officer's cover. Mrs. Joe Wilson also helped shred her cover when she made a contribution to the Al Gore for President campaign and listed her cover company in the Federal Election Commission filing. If she were ever posted overseas under cover, that would provide the hostiles with a lead to unravel her CIA connection.

The hysterical demagogues are demanding that any administration officials who revealed to columnist Robert Novak that she was a CIA officer be prosecuted under the 1982 Protection of Identities Act. If the names are ever learned, however, it is doubtful that they could be prosecuted. First of all, the liberal Democrats and their ACLU allies made sure in 1982 that only a limited number of CIA officers would be protected by the act. Only those who were "serving outside the United States or (have) within the last five years served outside the United States" are covered. Mrs. Wilson's work appears to be as a CIA analyst at headquarters. There are many such people in CIA, and they are not protected by the law.

Many of the same Democrats who are screaming about this case said nothing when one of their colleagues actually identified a covert CIA agent in a dangerous country. In 1995, then Democratic Congressman, later Senator, Robert Torricelli identified a military officer in Guatemala as a CIA asset. The colonel was helping CIA with information about terrorists and drug dealers that his government had collected. Torricelli alleged that the CIA agent was involved in two murders, one of a U.S. citizen and the other of a Guatemalan, supposedly married to an American. The charges were false. President Clinton ordered the Intelligence Oversight Board to investigate the allegations. The board found that the sources used by Torricelli were "unreliable and...contradicted by other evidence..." The supposed Guatemalan murder victim was Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a leader of a terrorist group called the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity. Bamaca was either killed in combat or died after capture by a military unit. His organization was established in 1980 when the Cuban Intelligence Service, the DGI, ordered three small terrorist groups to unite in order to receive arms and training from the Castro dictatorship. The main activity of the Guatemalan terrorists was murders and kidnappings. In 1968 they murdered John D. Webber, chief of the U.S. military mission, and U.S. Ambassador John Gordon Mein in separate kidnapping attempts. They continued the kidnappings and murders with Cuban help after they were united.

Although Torricelli's charges against the Guatemalan colonel were false, he did tell the truth that the man was helping the CIA. Torricelli succeeded in causing the United States to lose a valuable source in the fight against Communist terrorism. The Janet Reno Justice Department had no interest in prosecuting Torricelli under the "Protection of Identities Act." Instead the case was turned over to the House Ethics Committee where the offending liberal Democrat congressman was slapped on the wrist and told not to do it again.

No one should identify covert CIA officers or their agents. Even though Joe Wilson IV and his wife showed such a cavalier attitude toward her cover, it was wrong to identify her. We have few enough intelligence sources as a result of the Clinton Administration's emasculation of our foreign intelligence services. This was shown when the only way that the CIA could learn if Iraq had attempted to get uranium in Niger was to send Wilson to that country where, as he told The New York Times, "I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people...." By writing his article, Wilson exposed an important CIA weakness: They did not have the sources in Niger that could supply the information. We can blame that on the eight dark years of Bill Clinton.

While Wilson's report is being used by the liberal Democrats to undermine President Bush's charge that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa, Wilson actually confirmed the Iraqi attempt, but his friends merely told him that it didn't succeed. That is what British intelligence reported and President Bush repeated in his State of the Union Address.

The Wilson case does raise another question: What fool at CIA sent a liberal Democrat Bush-basher on such an assignment? Wilson had made his bias against the President known. As a reward for his smearing of the President, Wilson is scheduled to receive the Ron Ridenhour Award on October 15. The award is given by the Nation Institute, which publishes The Nation magazine, one of the few publications of the loony left that continues after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Romerstein served for many years as a congressional investigator and as head of the Office of Counter Soviet Disinformation at the United States Information Agency. He is the author with the late Eric Breindel of The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Regnery)

Whether Armitage came clean about his role in the leak to the Justice Department in October 2003, a claim Newsweek made last weekend, the fact remains that other senior administration officials were disclosing Plame's covert CIA status to reporters in the same time frame. Since each instance of the leak would have constituted a separate crime, the Justice Department was bound to investigate whether officials knowingly leaked classified information, which under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act would have constituted a felony.

Wrong.

Plame's identity was not protected information.

Nobody has been indicted for releasing this information, and the prosecutor has admitted that releasing this information would not have been a crime.

The only person caught up in this is Scooter Libby, who apparently contradicted himself under oath. He was not indicted for leaking Plame's identity, however.

If the Donks want to try to flog this horse hard enough to ride it through the November polls, I say "more power to them". There is nothing here. They are only convincing the people who have hated President Bush since Day 1.

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