| Wednesday, October 26, 2005 |
| Five for fighting |
The Washington Note predicts one to five sealed indictments in the Plame affair, delivered tomorrow but not announced until Thursday (or Friday if you believe Jim Vandehei's predictions on MSNBC). This sure makes David Corn look smart, prescient and well sourced, doesn't it? Says the Note's John Clemens: insider sources say the targets already know who they are. If it is five, and I had to guess, my picks would be Rove, Libby (obviously), sitting NSA advisor Stephen Hadley (an historic indictment), onetime Cheney Mideast advisor David Wurmser and the Powerball: Cheney as an unindicted co-conspirator. The charges: perjery, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy (to lie to Congress about the Niger uranium debacle).
Capitol Hill Blue says Andy Card is helping prepare the White House for the worst, including laying out the most plausible scenario for how and why this all went down.
On the Chris Matthews watch: the Hardballer tonight asked the strategic question of why Scooter Libby would make, let alone keep, notes of a conversation with his boss, Dick Cheney, in which he essentially outs Cheney as his source of information on Valerie Plame? And then, given his history of loyalty to Cheney, why would he provide those notes to the prosecutor, and then lie about where he got Plame's name? Stupidity? Not likely. Carelessness? I'd think not. Poor memory? Don't count on it. My guess is that at the time Cheney shared the information about Plame with him, Libby understood -- or was made to understand -- that it was classified; not for sharing -- but that he was to find a way to get it out. He followed orders, but not without protecting himself by taking notes. That notation insures that Libby won't be the last man in line if a prosecutor should come calling -- and that Cheney goes down with him -- mutual exposure, mutual loyalty. Maybe once he was nailed to the wall by Fitzgerald, Libby decided to cash in his insurance policy. Or maybe, just maybe, he wasn't the one who provided the note to the prosecutor...
It's clear that Libby is terribly exposed here. Stories are flying that Libby ordered Wurmser to leak the salient facts to the press, and obviously Scooter and Rove made direct contact with reporters, too. Libby has nothing to lose and everything to gain by casting himself as following -- rather than giving -- orders in the Wilson-Plame debacle.
And then there's Stephen Hadley. If the Italian press reports are correct, his motive in the Plame outing would be to divert attention from the fact that it was he who brought those forged Niger documents into the White House -- documents that became a key source of the nuclear claim (the only other source being the discredited "aluminum tubes.") Chasing reporters away from Wilson would have been important to the office of the National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, because Wilson's nasty habit of talking to reporters was pushing the media toward, rather than away, from the cracks in the nuclear story, and the NSA's role in the blunders/lies.
So both Hadley and Libby had motive. Wurmser had opportunity. Rove was the man who knew how to get it done, hopefully protecting the president in the process.
The only question left is, who else could be on the line? Scott McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer? Rice herself (remember, she was the other main salesperson for the Iraq nuclear "mushroom cloud," along with Cheney, and she had exposure on the forged documents, too). What about John Bolton, Wurmser's then boss? Or perhaps the government's pet reporter herself, Judy Miller...
This story just couldn't be more fascinating. And remember our old friend Bob Novak -- a cooperating witness for the prosecution from the beginning? He has said his original source (before Rove confirmed the info on Plame) was no partisan flamethrower, and so was more likely an insider bureaucrat, a la Wurmser... Of course, the Prince of Darkness could have also gotten the information he needed from Collin Powell, who was in posession of a certain memorandum marked "SNF" for "secret - no foreign..."
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Tags; CIA leak, Plame, Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson , Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, White House, PlameGate, Iraq, Middle East, War, Terrorism, Foreign Policy |
posted by JReid @ 12:59 AM   |
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