NEW YORK Adding to the growing intrigue in the Plame case, the grand jury investigating the leak of the covert CIA operative's name subpoenaed has a wide range of White House documents, including records of telephone calls from Air Force One and information relating to an internal working group dealing with Iraq, government sources confirmed to CNN on Friday.
"We are complying fully with the request from the Department of Justice," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Friday.
Government sources told CNN the federal grand jury was seeking any information about contacts between White House officials and more than two dozen reporters. The grand jury also asked for a transcript of a briefing by former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
The subpoenaed information regarding telephone calls to and from Air Force One, sources said, covered July 7-12, while the president was on a trip to Africa. The requested transcript was from a briefing during that trip as well.
Newsday reported that two of the subpoenas dealt mostly with requests for information before and after the publication of Robert Novak's fateful July 14 column, which outed Plame.
Many of the documents subpoenaed Friday relate to the White House Iraq Group, a little-known task force. Newsweek reported that the group was created in August 2002.
The Newsweek report cites an earlier Washington Post article that lists senior political adviser Karl Rove, Bush advisers Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney among the group's members.
The grand jury, which met again Friday, has heard from at least four current or former White House officials. Much of its work recently has also reportedly been to pore over many documents relating to the case.
Re your post #141 - Thanks for posting that new E&P article, but it just all goes back to my initial and on-going confusion. This investigation sounds like it's really looking for something, in earnest, but I don't know what, and I don't know why. Everyime I think I understand it, all the facts seem to change in some new important way. So, I'm just going to wait and see.
telephone records/calls....geeeeez!....what's up with that?
See post #126 for the Huffington blog post mentioned above.
Those documents were turned over long ago.
Air Force One Phone Records Subpoenaed
March 5, 2004
The article is from March of last year, but it notes the Subpoenas were issued and complied with in January of that year. So, as I pointed out right at the beginning, this Rove and now Air Force One business is merely stirring up old angles of the story that were long ago investigated and settled.