Posted on 10/01/2003 12:51:07 AM PDT by Timesink
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ASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — The memorandum from the White House counsel on Tuesday morning was terse, and unusual for the Bush administration: The Justice Department had opened a preliminary criminal investigation into the possible leak of an undercover C.I.A. officer's name, and every member of the White House staff was being ordered to "preserve all materials that might be relevant."
Over eight years of the Clinton administration, such legal warnings became all but business as usual for White House employees. But Tuesday's directive was an unsettling novelty for the staff of a president who won office vowing to restore "honor and integrity" to the Oval Office, who railed against leaks that threatened lives and who has so far largely weathered controversies without a hint of criminal inquiry.
No one can yet say where the F.B.I.'s investigation will lead (most leak investigations lead nowhere), or whether it will produce any evidence of wrongdoing. But in this case, the accusation itself does political damage, at a minimum giving new life to last summer's investigation into whether the White House cherry-picked evidence about Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons and buried dissenting views.
It could hardly come at a worse time. Just when President Bush's job approval ratings are slipping, when his would-be Democratic rivals are stepping up their criticism of his rationale for war in Iraq and his handling of the aftermath, and when Mr. Bush would prefer to focus on winning support for rebuilding Iraq — and a second term in office.
Already, the matter has prompted rare intramural sniping from anonymous administration officials and at least tentative expressions of concern from Republicans on Capitol Hill. "It reopens all the old tensions, between the White House and the C.I.A., between the foreign policy types and the political types, between the different parts of the Administration that saw the Iraqi threat differently," one senior administration official said. "That's why it poses the threat of making a real mess."
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, summed up what appeared to be the prevailing view in his party: "It all may be perfectly innocent, but I think it calls for an investigation."
Representative Peter T. King of Long Island said the controversy "shouldn't have legs" but expressed concern that political damage had already been done. "Over all, politically, I think the White House has to go on the offense," Mr. King said. "For the entire campaign and the first two years and six months of this administration, they were an incredibly lean and mean fighting machine. For the last 10, 11 weeks or so, they've just been floundering."
He added: "Something is missing. Maybe they miss Karen Hughes there, or they just weren't ready for something that started off below their radar screens and grew."
President Bush was told of the formal F.B.I. inquiry by 7 Tuesday morning, about the time he usually settles into the Oval Office. By 7:30 the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, walked into the senior staff meeting and read aloud the memorandum that he was about to e-mail to the staff.
"Most people in the room didn't seem to have a reaction to it," said one senior official who was there.
There have been three previous occasions in this presidency when employees have been ordered to preserve documents and records: in response to inquiries after the Sept. 11 attacks, in the case of a leak of information about a forthcoming raid in Chicago against a suspected terrorist-related group and in relation to its dealings with Enron.
But this inquiry, into the disclosure of the name of the C.I.A. official, Valerie Plame, an agency operative on unconventional weapons, puts a particularly human dimension and a potentially clear political motive on a controversy that has so far revolved mostly around inside disputes and debates over the reliability — and the use or misuse — of pre-war intelligence estimates of Iraq's weapons capacity. It is a direct outgrowth of the criticism that dogged Mr. Bush for much of the summer about his assertion in his State of the Union address last winter that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from the nation of Niger.
Mr. Bush included that contention despite past warnings from the C.I.A. to the White House that it could not be sustained by the evidence and despite an earlier C.I.A. fact-finding mission conducted by Ms. Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a veteran diplomat, who concluded that the claim was "highly doubtful" and said so in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on July 6.
The revelation of Ms. Plame's role at the C.I.A. was published eight days later, in a column by the syndicated writer Robert Novak. Mr. Wilson has since accused the Bush administration of disclosing his wife's identity to intimidate other critics of its Iraq policy and accused the president's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, of at least condoning the leak. That is a serious, if utterly unproven, charge, and one that distracts Mr. Rove as the political season heats up.
Responding to assertions by some Republicans that he had been driven by partisan politics to make an issue out of the disclosure of his wife's name, Mr. Wilson told CNBC on Tuesday night that he had given $2,000 to Senator John Kerry's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and that he had met several times with advisers to Mr. Kerry. He said he and his wife had given $2,000 to Mr. Bush's campaign four years ago. Records show that Mr. Wilson also gave $1,000 to Al Gore in 1999.
"The leaking of this information is an extremely serious matter — revealing the identity of C.I.A. agents could endanger their lives — and if someone is prosecuted for this crime, he or she could face 10 years in prison," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who called for naming a special counsel.
But the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, said: "You have special counsels if you think the administration is trying to cover up or obstruct justice or is not interested in this issue. It is quite obvious to me that the White House and the administration are very upset about this issue."
During the day, several White House officials debated whether this was an inquiry that would gain speed or be quickly set aside. "I could argue that either way," an adviser to Mr. Bush said.
Mr. Bush's aides have not been beyond talking about classified information to make a point. In July, they declassified a lengthy executive summary National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq, a highly classified document, to underscore their contention that Mr. Bush's statements about Saddam Hussein were based on information that the C.I.A. and other agencies had agreed upon.
Exactly, what was Novak's agenda to name her?
A great question and the reason I do not trust Ashcroft to pursue any government corruption. That would require, as you suggest, "integrity".
Bush kept Clinton holdovers ... I would not be surprised at a dem inside job inside this divided government to set up the Prez...
Right out of the playbook
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