Clearing the Air Over ‘Plamegate’ (Also, Novak on C-SPAN, Live at 9 a.m.)

For months Washington’s liberal chattering class filled the airwaves and spilled barrels of ink on the always implausible conspiracy theory holding that Bush White House Pooh-Bahs intentionally leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband’s very public and largely untruthful campaign against the Bush administration’s war policy. But a new book by two decidedly not Bush-friendly reporters — David Corn of the left-wing Nation and Michael Isikoff of the Washington Post — shows the whole controversy to be a sham. No White House people were involved at all. Instead, the leaker was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a known opponent of Bush policies.

All this started when the CIA hired former Clinton-era Ambassador Joseph Wilson to investigate claims that Saddam tried to obtain weapons material in Niger. His report to the CIA, never shared with the White House, lent support to the charge that Saddam was shopping for the ingredients to weapons of mass destruction. Wilson publicly claimed otherwise.

Wilson’s flummery led several journalists, notably columnist Robert Novak and author/reporter Bob Woodward, to start asking questions as to why the CIA would choose a former ambassador of no notable accomplishment to take on such an assignment. Novak’s column, citing an unnamed source (Armitage, as it turns out), led to an investigation of other journalists.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate White House officials in the matter. Fitzgerald found no underlying crime (there was none), but he nevertheless indicted Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, based on Libby’s allegedly conflicting recollections of what he did or did not tell reporters. Now we know, from Corn and Isikoff’s detailed book, “Hubris,” that he mostly didn’t tell anything at all. Armitage, meanwhile, remained silent. He owes the American public and the president, whose policies were put at risk by the controversy, an apology.

This whole sordid episode shows the danger of what can happen when the media pack becomes an ideologically similar pack. The Plame conspiracy never withstood close questioning, let alone any serious law enforcement investigation. Tough questions ought to be asked in the wake of “Hubris” about exactly how and why it became a cause celebre of the anti-war left and the media.

Been doing a lot of research on this. It was Marc Grossman who initiated this whole thing per the article Libby says Powell, Armitage and Grossman were source for Plame Leak - Insight Mag April 3-9, 2006 Issue

Grossman requested that Carl Ford, Jr. draft the memo, which Ford sent to Grossman on June 10, 2003. Grossman wanted the memo as background to use at a White House meeting on criticism of President Bush for using the Niger claim in his State of the Union speech. On July 6, 2003, Armitage asked Ford to send a copy of the memo to Powell on AF-1. And per the above linked article, it was Grossman that told Libby about Plame and he was also the first one to point a finger at Libby when this broke.

We know Armitage had no loyalty to Bush, but it went even further than that…from a story I found last week:

Kerry Exploring Cabinet Options

An excerpt:

A dark-horse candidate for defense, some said, is Richard L. Armitage, Bush's second in command at the State Department.

Remember...many of the players involved worked for the Kerry campaign. Could Armitage have sold his soul for a potential Cabinet position?

Clarice Feldman gives us another interesting tidbit of info about Grossman:

If Fitzgerald has known since January 12, 2004 of the name of the leaker, why is he still protecting him, and why is he treating the leaker’s (that is, Armitage’s) source, who is almost certainly Marc Grossman, former Under Secretary of State for political affairs, the man reportedly the source for the first accusations against Libby and Rove, as an impartial witness to the events? In the discovery process it turned out that Grossman was a longtime friend of Wilson’s, dating to their college days at the University of California—Santa Barbara. Is it likely that the famous prosecutor missed this fact?
Source

More on Grossman at Strata-sphere. Seems he traveled with some cohorts of John Kerry's...Rand Beers in particular. Grossman went to the same college and graduated the same year as {drum roll please} Joe Wilson and also had the same job in a neighboring country. Strato-sphere also has some interesting comments about a Turkey connection. You remember Turkey…the country that balked at allowing our forces passage into northern Iraq?

And another player in this, Carl Ford, Jr. is no "loyal Republican" either...

As is often the case in these partisan bloodlettings, Bolton's attacker is being presented by the media not only as being a devout public servant - with no axe to grind - but a conservative Republican to boot, a claim that seems to fly in the face of his past political contributions as recorded by the FEC.
$500 to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), $1,000 to Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-NY), $1,000 to Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and $500 to Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii).
The Washington Times offered the following: "Gary Jarmin, a Republican consultant and president of Global Dominion Communications, questioned Mr. Ford's claim of loyalty."Bottom line, is that to the best of my recollection, Carl always considered himself a Democrat," said Mr. Jarmin, a longtime Washington lobbyist. "If he is now a self-described 'loyal Republican,' then he must have had a fairly recent conversion." - Washington Times April 20, 2005
Democrat Ford is a longtime DC lobbyist, something absent from most press accounts of his sink-Bolton campaign. Before he went to the State Department he ran his own lobbying operation - Ford Associates. Currently he is employed as the Executive Vice President of Cassidy & Associates, Washington's most powerful - and liberal - public policy consulting group.
Cassidy & Associates was founded by Gerald Cassidy, former counsel to George McGovern's ultra-lefty Committee on Hunger, he is also a former General Counsel to the DNC - 'nuff said.
Pipeline News

Links to sources of that info at the above link.

Then there is the recent article by Novak:

A peculiar convergence had joined Armitage and me on the same historical path. During his quarter of a century in Washington, I had no contact with Armitage before our fateful interview. I tried to see him in the first 2 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. This was two weeks before Joe Wilson surfaced himself as author of a 2002 report for the CIA debunking Iraqi interest in buying uranium in Africa.

Source

This implies that the leak was deliberate. Many here implicate Powell as the instigator, but IMHO, he was only an accessory-after-the-fact by keeping silent. Looks to me like a few people need to be prosecuted for an attempted coup against a sitting President.

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