Free Republic

A federal judge in Washington yesterday lifted a contempt order and the threat of jail against a Time magazine reporter after he submitted to questioning by a special prosecutor who is investigating the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. officer's identity to the columnist Robert Novak and other journalists. The reporter, Matthew Cooper, was questioned in a two-hour deposition about his contacts with I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, but only after Mr. Libby's lawyer assured Mr. Cooper's lawyer that Mr. Libby had waived a confidentiality agreement with the reporter. The deposition was given on Monday...

Here’s an unsolicited tip for Rep. Trey Gowdy: A smoking gun explanation for the Obama Administration’s use of false talking points has already been found. And the culprit is not a White House adviser or State Department bureaucrat. It’s the intelligence community’s reliance on the media. It’s tucked inside the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Benghazi, which reveals a key source of the bad intelligence that made it into Ambassador Susan Rice’s famous talking points: the media incorrectly reported that before the attack on Sept. 11, 2012 there were protests outside the U.S. facilities in Benghazi when there...

Hours before they were to leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. For over a month Cheney had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity by senior White House officials. The Libby pardon, aides reported, had become something of a crusade for Cheney, who seemed prepared to push his nine-year-old relationship...

THE STATE DEPARTMENT PLOT THICKENS [John Podhoretz] Time Magazine has a new story about the revelation of Valerie Plame's name -- a story that, despite Time's own bizarre spin, reinforces the claim that Karl Rove and others learned that Joseph Wilson was married to a CIA operative from the media. "As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration," writes Massimo Calabresi. Later, he...