| Sunday, July 10, 2005 |
| Scootie-pie |
Jeralyn Merritt (TalkLeft) makes a careful, painstaking but compelling case for Lewis "Scooter" Libby being the second source (with Colonel Karl Rove) in the Valerie Plame leak investigation. From Merritt's post:
On to Matt Cooper. It's important to remember that he was subpoenaed initially specifically about Lewis Libby, held in contempt, and then, because he got a personal waiver from Libby, agreed to be deposed by Fitzgerald. It was after that deposition that he got the second subpoena, asking about communications with other sources. The prosecution seems to be zeroing in on whoever its target(s) are, with Cooper set to talk to the grand jury (and "J. Diddy" Miller in jail). Of course, there's still no evidence that either man is the target of the investigation and not simply witnesses. Still, the circumstantial case for Libby being at least one of the two leakers looks pretty good, and its clear that the vice president's office, where Libby is Cheney's number two guy, was in a unique position to benefit from the outing of Plame (or more accurately, the discrediting of former ambassador Joseph Wilson):
- It was the vice president's office (Libby is Cheney's chief of staff) that was pressuring the CIA to corroborate the Saddam-nuclear hypothesis, and it was their intensive questioning -- and insistence that evidence of Saddam's nuclear intentions be found -- that prompted the CIA to send former ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger.
- When Wilson later discredited the president's "yellowcake" statement, he was specifically refuting statements by Cheney, including public statements (i.e., on "Meet the Press.").
From From a WaPo article dated August 10, 2003: To gird a nation for the extraordinary step of preemptive war -- and to obtain the minimum necessary support from allies, Congress and the U.N. Security Council -- the administration described a growing, even imminent, nuclear threat from Iraq. The unveiling of that message began a year ago this week.
Cheney raised the alarm about Iraq's nuclear menace three times in August. He was far ahead of the president's public line. Only Bush and Cheney know, one senior policy official said, "whether Cheney was trying to push the president or they had decided to play good cop, bad cop."
On Aug. 7, Cheney volunteered in a question-and-answer session at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, speaking of Hussein, that "left to his own devices, it's the judgment of many of us that in the not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear weapons." On Aug. 26, he described Hussein as a "sworn enemy of our country" who constituted a "mortal threat" to the United States. He foresaw a
time in which Hussein could "subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he said. "Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law."
Of course, Cheney wasn't the only one pushing that line (think Condoleezza Rice...) However it has already been said publicly, by Novak, that the leak came from the White House, not the Pentagon or the CIA itself, so that rules out some of the other Iraq book-cookers like Feith, Cambone and Tenet. The Mr. Moustache Theory is tempting, but there's no evidence the leak came from the State Department (although the White House source certainly could have originally gotten the information from there, since we now know that John Bolton was in the habit of snooping on unnamed government officials....). In fact, it might be time to focus suspicion on the members of WHIG -- the White House Iraq Group, which was formed (coordinated by WH chief of staff Andrew Card) before the invasion to "market" the Saddam "threat" in the U.S. ... More vintage WaPo:
The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it. Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in unauthorized interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's near-term nuclear potential.
According to the WashPost, the members of the group, which meet weekly in the WH Situation Room, were Libby, Rove, Card, Condi Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, communications strategiests Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James Wilkinson, and "legislative liaison" Nicholas Calio.
Merritt also adds this interesting clip from an April 3, 2004 story in the International Herald Tribune:
...At the same time, Fitzgerald is said to be investigating whether the disclosure of Plame's identity came after someone discovered her name among classified documents circulating at the upper echelons of the White House.
Of that group, who would have been most likely to have access to classified documents circulating "at the upper echolons of the White House?" Since it's possible but highly doubtful that a princpal, meaning Cheney himself or Rice, would have made the call to Novak, a deputy seems the most likely, since the leak was essentially a communications strategy (to discredit Wilson in the press). It's hard to believe that any of the communications staffers or the "legislative liaison" would have access to the classified file (Hughes at that point wasn't even a staffer, she was an unofficial advisor), Matalin somehow seems unlikely to have had the info, although she was Cheney's communications advisor -- she has already testified before the grand jury BTW -- so we're back to Rove, Libby, Hadley, and maybe Andrew Card ... although there is this:
Wilkinson, at the time White House deputy director of communications for planning, gathered a yard-high stack of intelligence reports and press clippings. Wilkinson said he conferred with experts from the National Security Council and Cheney's office. As to where the information about Ms. Plame came from, the WaPo article starts out with something pretty intriguing:
His name was Joe, from the U.S. government. He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush administration. An engineer-turned-CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S. government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic mission downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River, he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a serious mistake.
... The Vienna briefing was one among many private and public forums in
which the Bush administration portrayed a menacing Iraqi nuclear threat, even as
important features of its evidence were being undermined. ...
Back to Colonel Karl, this flashback from the American Prospect (c.a. March 8, 2004) is interesting, in part because it suggests that if Rove said the same thing to the grand jury, and he turns out to be the leaker, he's in a serious perjury nightmare:
President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.
But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.
A June, 2004 story in CapitolHillBlue (which also notes Bush's decision to retain a private attorney in the Plame matter), contends that sources say Rove approved of the name drop, meaning he might not have been the "high level White House official," (but still might have lied to the GJ). The article also reminds that Wilson named another suspect: NSC official Elliott Abrams (formly of Iran-Contra fame), which could drag Mr. Hadley back into center field.
It just gets curiouser...
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posted by JReid @ 12:08 AM   |
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