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:
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 leakers (that is, Armitages) 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 Wilsons, dating to their college days at the University of CaliforniaSanta Barbara. Is it likely that the famous prosecutor missed this fact?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.Links to sources of that info at the above link.$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.
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, Armitages 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.
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.
Thank you for your post. I've got to run for now but I'd like some others to look at it in the meantime.