Posted on 09/28/2003 3:39:47 PM PDT by Brian S
Sun September 28, 2003 02:30 PM ET By Lori Santos
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday she knew "nothing of any" White House effort to leak the identity of an undercover CIA officer in July, a charge now under review at the Justice Department.
On "Fox News Sunday," the top aide to President Bush said, "This has been referred to the Justice Department. I think that is the appropriate place for it."
Rice said the White House would cooperate should the department headed by Attorney General John Ashcroft decide to proceed with a criminal investigation of the matter, which centers on the alleged public disclosure of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Wilson was sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to investigate a report that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger, but returned to say it was highly doubtful.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife -- apparently in retaliation for his conclusion, which undermined the position of the White House.
The Post said CIA Director George Tenet sent a memo to the Justice Department raising questions about the alleged leak, which could mean prison time and a fine.
Rice said, "I know nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this. And it certainly would not be the way the president would expect his White House to operate."
Bush made the Iraq uranium claim in his January State of the Union speech. Critics have said the Iraq-Niger assertion, which later was found to be based partly on forged documents, showed the administration had tried to hype intelligence to make a case for going to war.
URANIUM REPORT
Wilson said in August there had been several attempts to discredit him but mainly through an article by Chicago columnist Robert Novak that said two senior administration officials said Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the uranium report.
Novak's column named Wilson's wife and said she was a CIA operative dealing with weapons of mass destruction.
Asked if the White House was not concerned that top officials might have done such a thing, Rice said she did not recall any discussions of the matter.
"I don't remember any such conversations," Rice said.
"It is well known that the president of the United States does not expect the White House to get involved in such things, anything of this kind," she added.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Bush personally should "investigate what happened ... And people ought to be punished for doing this."
Rice also said top officials "didn't remember" in the case of the president's State of the Union address in January, in which he said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Though the offending phrase had been deleted from an October presidential speech in Cincinnati, Rice said, "Three-plus months later, people didn't remember that George Tenet had asked that it be taken out. ... I didn't remember. (Deputy national security adviser) Stephen Hadley didn't remember."
"We are trying to put now in place methods so you don't have to be dependent on people's memories for something like that," she added.
Washington Post, most detailed story with new allegations
A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. That was shortly after Wilson revealed in July that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account eventually touched off a controversy over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.Associated Press Sun morning"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak. Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers' allegation was that Wilson had benefited from nepotism because the Niger mission had been his wife's idea. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife." The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said he had no indication that Bush knew about the calls. Columnist Robert Novak published the agent's name in a July column about Wilson's mission.
It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility." The Intelligence Protection Act, passed in 1982, imposes maximum penalties of 10 years in prison and $50,000 fines for unauthorized disclosure by government employees with access to classified information.
Members of the administration, especially Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have been harshly critical of unauthorized leakers, and White House spokesmen are often dismissive of questions about news reports based on unnamed sources. The FBI is investigating members of the Senate for possibly leaking intercept information about Osama bin Laden.
No Truce With Kings: All I know is that if some minor players in the Bush administration ratted Plame out to Novak they are walking dead. Bush is gonna get them for leaking to the press, then he is going to turn them over to Justice, and see that they are prosecuted. And I will bet that it don't hurt W politically.That's an interesting theory. The question a lot of us have though is, why didn't Bush do that two months ago when the name was leaked and published? They knew then that it was illegal, regardless of the politics, and Bush and Ashcroft were pushing a law to punish leakers. Why didn't the president find the culprit then, have him or her prosecuted and nip this story in the bud, rather than ignoring it and then have it blow up in their faces like this? Were they protecting someone higher up but below Bush? Is that why the suspicion was focused initially on Karl Rove, the most politically partisan person in the White House?
Who are W's most powerful enemies, and how have they colluded to finally manage to dent the armor?
Answer to part a: the Clintons, the press, liberal spooks. Answer to part b: The Clintons hatched the plan. CIA operatives carried it out. The press filtered the story.
Wilson does his Niger thing, angering Rove, and intentionally leaves his wife Plame's spook status out in the open as bait. The administration enforcers start calling up reporters to retaliate by outing that Wilson probably got the Niger gig through his wife and - see, they are gunning for Bush!
The brand of hardball they are playing is Washington standard issue. Reporters normally will guarantee anonymity to get the juicy story. But the first three reporters they call (playing it according to their true loyalties; i.e. anything to stick it to Bush) stonewall the news, causing the enforcers to overplay their hand. And now the whole administration has egg on their faces for getting caught doing Washington hardball.
The liberal press will never rat out those who set this up. Watch the Washington Times for the next move.
My first thought exactly. This whole thing has the stench of State Department.
Wilson is a side-show to the main question yet unanswered, who was in the chain that forged and forwarded the documents? Why is this still covered up?
I think you have the right flow chart, but the wrong operatives. DIA makes more sense. Bush pretty much owns the CIA, but State, the NSA, and the Pentagon's DIA are chock full of the kind of people McCarthy went after. Clinton's kinda people.
Maybe he read this (Wilson's bio at the Middle East Intitute)
Last paragraph:"He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has two sons and two daughters."
The truth is out there.
I would argue only that Bush doesn't own all of the CIA. There is a sizable contingent there too who have it in for Bush.
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