Free Republic

Plamegate: Mystery SolvedBy Kenneth R. TimmermanFrontPageMagazine.com | July 13, 2006 Finally some straight talk on the Valerie Plame case, thanks to Robert Novak, the conservative columnist who first revealed the identity of the not-so-covert CIA officer three years ago. Novak’s July 14, 2003, column on the much-disputed trip to Niger by Plame’s husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, triggered an FBI investigation, a federal grand jury, and eventually the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who indicted top White House aid Scooter Libby for perjury along the way. At issue was whether Saddam Hussein ever sent a buying team to Niger...

Dems' Falsely Attack The President For "Leaking" Information That Was Declassified Legally And Appropriately (3 years ago). FACT: The President And The Vice President Have The Authority To Declassify Information: Vice President Cheney: "There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and it, obviously, focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President." (Fox News' "Special Report," 2/15/06) "Cheney Was Referring To Executive Order 13292, Issued By President Bush On March 25, 2003, Which Dealt With The Handling Of Classified Material. That Order Was Not An Entirely New Document But Was, Instead, An...

FROM: JULY 18, 2005 Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken. Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss’s long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte. Judging by Director Goss’s remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA “experts” in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame’s outfit –...

WASHINGTON Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's first charges in the White House leak case don't get to the heart of his two-year probe: the leak. The indictment of vice presidential adviser I. Lewis "Scooter' Libby Jr. is built on charges of obstruction of justice, making false statements and perjury _ and it will rest primarily on testimony from a handful of Washington reporters. "In some ways it seems less satisfying," said Michael Cahill, a Brooklyn Law School professor, adding that false statements might have impeded the probe into whether top Bush administration officials knowingly revealed the identity of CIA agent Valerie...

Special Report: Judith Miller Exonerates Bush Officials The true facts in the CIA-leak case are now becoming astonishingly clear. New York Times reporter Judith Miller's testimony, as she describes it in the Sunday edition of her paper, proves that the wrong people are under investigation. It's not really a story about Bush officials Lewis Libby and Karl Rove and their conversations with the press. Rather, it's a story about a CIA bureaucracy working to undermine the Bush administration through the media and cover up for its own mistakes. It's now obvious that Bush officials are spending time before a grand...

There is no bigger deal in Washington, DC this week than the Karl Rove business. To catch up, I recommend most strongly that you review previous Mullings: "The Sweet Mint Teapot Dome Scandal" "Joe Wilson Can't Find the Truth, Either" What we know is this: Rove, according to an internal e-mail leaked to Newsweek's Michael Isakoff, was warning Time Magazine's Matt Cooper off the Joe Wilson story. At the time the story was swirling around that the office of Vice President Cheney had authorized the trip and then buried Wilson's report. SIDEBAR If you don't think the popular press is...