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.
'Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives'...
emphasis mine
This is a set up. This is a manufactured hoax being perpetrated on the American people by the dims. We should demand an investigation of those involved hurling these fraudulent accusations and prosecute them under the RICO statutes. We should investigate Mr. Wilson and prosecute him for violating the confidentiality agreements he signed by disclosing classified information in the New York Times articles that he wrote. We should prosecute him for conspiring to feed inaccurate information to our intelligence community by falsifying his so called investigation. We should prosecute Mrs. Wilson (not the name she goes by) for violating ethics laws and steering a government to her husband. If that's not a conflict of interest I don't know what is.
The Clinton administration spent 8 years placing their people into every niche they could in government. Those people are loyal to Billary, not the US. The CIA is one of the worst institutions in this regard, along with much of the Clinton Pentagon. They cut the guts out of the CIAs DO and handcuffed them, then placed folks in positions of power in the DI, including this witch, who would give the Clinton spin to everything. Bush has been hamstrung by a partisan minority in the Senate and kept from replacing the worst offenders.
This man and his wife should be very careful for the next couple of weeks. If this story starts to lag or lose steam they may just be required to "commit Arkencide" to provide "legs" to the attacks.
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