SubscribeFrom today's briefingSo, as you can see, it's stonewalling on questions that they don't want to answer while they spew their venomous lies to friendly reporters. While the investigation is ongoing.
MORAN: … Fox News and other surrogates are essentially saying that the conversation lasted for two minutes and that the subject was ostensibly welfare reform. They’re getting that information from here, from Karl Rove.
MCCLELLAN: And, again, you’re asking questions that are related to news reports about an ongoing, continuing investigation. And you’ve had my response on that…
Presidential spokesman Ronald Ziegler, in his daily briefing, refused all questions on Watergate and related subjects, replying repeatedly to reports, "I have to ask for the next question."...Ziegler declined to place a timeline on his no comment orders, indicating that no more will be said here about Watergate until the current grand jury investigation is completed, indictments are handed down, and the court litigation is over. That could be many months.Mark A.R. Kleiman points out that, while it may be unlikely for Rove to be prosecuted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Rove could be vulnerable to proesecution under the "far less demanding elements" Espionage Act:
1) possession of (2) information (3) relating to the national defense (4) which the person possessing it has reason to know could be used to damage the United States or aid a foreign nation and (5) wilful communication of that information to (6) a person not entitled to receive it.I believe that the special prosecutor had to prove that a crime had been committed before the judge would send Judith Miller to jail, and the judge seems to agree: "It's a case in which the information she was given and her potential use of it was a crime."
Jim Lindgren
I see that Joseph Wilson is going to be interviewed on NBC’s TODAY show on Thursday morning. Given our adversarial press, this should be a wonderful opportunity for NBC reporters to get to the bottom of things. I would hope that they would ask Wilson questions about his complicity in his wife’s outing. If Wilson hadn’t lied to the press or the public about what he found in Niger, about how he was hired to go to Niger, and about the Italian forged document, then there would have been no reason for people to try to correct the misimpressions he created and the lies he told.
As the Washington Post reported[Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said.So[, although both Wilson and the CIA doubted it at the time,] Wilson had found [some] evidence that tended to confirm the substance of the sentence in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq — which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq.]
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee 2004 report exposed Wilson’s lies on what he found and told the CIA, as well as the one about how Wilson was hired.
Wilson said that his wife Valerie Plame had nothing to do with his being hired: “Valerie had nothing to do with the matter." "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." But the 2004 Senate Intelligence report said that she first suggested him for the trip and then followed up with a memo touting his suitability for the mission.
It would be great if NBC TODAY would probe Wilson on these matters. The Wall Street Journal says that Wilson had started lying to the press and public about how he was hired before his wife was outed, in part by Rove. Correcting this lie (were Plame not a covert agent) not only would be a smart partisan thing to do, but it would be the right thing to do. Wilson was publicly lying about what he found in Niger, publicly lying about what he reported to the CIA, and (according to the WSJ) publicly lying about how he was hired. Except for the “covert agent” issue, it would be right to correct all these lies. Indeed, reporter Cooper’s email reveals that Rove was offering a “big warning” “not to get too far out on Wilson,” a warning that the press should have heeded but didn’t. They believed Wilson, only to find out that his account was untrue.
But it appears probable, though not certain, that Plame was a covert agent (the statutory definition turns on whether she was on undercover missions outside the US in the 5 years before the disclosure of her identity, a factual issue that for some reason few outside of Powerline have focused on). The other reason that Plame may not have been a covert agent is that, according to bloggers quoting Andrea Mitchell, who was involved in NBC’s early stories on Wilson, it was widely known that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. Yet if Plame was a “covert agent,” it would not be right or justified for Rove to expose Plame’s identity.
Here it would be good to ask Wilson whether he thought that by lying about what he found in Niger and what he told the CIA and how he was selected, he was gambling with his wife’s safety. How could he be sure that people would know that Plame was a covert agent, or that there was a law against revealing her identity? Perhaps someone might have reasonably believed that they were correcting misimpressions that Wilson himself had created. Did Wilson realize that he had put the Administration in something analogous to a Catch-22?: Wilson can lie about how he was hired but the Administration can’t correct his lie without outing his wife. Did Wilson consciously decide to gamble with his wife’s safety by lying in a way that would be hard for the Administration to correct? This is the line of questioning that I would most like NBC TODAY to explore (in a more respectful tone, of course).
One of the revelations of the Time Magazine Cooper email is that it gives the context of Rove’s disclosure that Wilson was suggested by his wife. The context strongly suggests that it wasn’t retaliation, but rather it was part of a discussion trying to correct any misimpressions of how Wilson was hired to do the mission. According to the Cooper email, Rove discussed whether the Director of the CIA or Vice President Cheney had authorized the trip.
So on the legal charge of intentional disclosure of Plame’s undercover identity, there is nothing in the Cooper email to suggest the sort of knowledge by Rove necessary to convict under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (50 U.S.C. 421 et seq.). It punishes one who “intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States . . .” It's not even clear (beyond a reasonable doubt, no less) that Rove knew Plame's name, knew that the information that he disclosed identified her, or knew that the US was taking affirmative steps to conceal her relationship to the intelligence community (if it was indeed doing so).
Of course, other evidence might be offered to show that Rove knew that he was contributing to the outing of an undercover CIA agent, rather than just explaining the context of the hiring of Wilson; but the Cooper email certainly doesn’t help the prosecutors in proving intent. The intent standard on this charge is particularly high, and will be hard for prosecutors to meet. For this reason, the country’s three leading newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times, and the Washington Post—have concluded that, by leaking, no crime was committed or they seriously doubt that any crime was committed.
But that doesn’t let either Rove or Bush off the hook entirely. I won’t go into the other evidence in part because I don’t know much about it, but the question whether Rove lied to Bush or the White House press office is still an open question (Rove was quoted as having said that he wasn’t involved, which if he really said this, appears to be a lie). If Rove lied to investigators, then he might be prosecuted for obstruction of justice or related claims.
And President Bush promised to fire the leaker. Although Bush could argue that, at the time he promised this, he assumed that the leaker had committed a crime by leaking (and now it appears that the leaker did not), this is a very hard case to make to the public and the press. It would seem that Bush must either fire Rove or break his promise (even though Bush may have a plausible argument that his promise was based on a false premise—that the leaker committed a crime by leaking).
Powerline has been particularly good on the Wilson-Plame story and the press’s failure to deal with the fact that Wilson’s account of his Niger investigation was false. The WSJ has a strong editorial as well. Yet we must not lose sight that there may be other lies that Rove told about non-involvement in outing Plame, and that Bush must deal with his promise to fire the leaker.
When the Italian report on Niger uranium surfaced, Vice President Cheney's office contacted the CIA's counter-proliferation office to look into it. Such a request is called a "tasker." It was hardly the first query the task force had received from the White House, and such requests were not made through the CIA director's office, but directly. Plame's colleagues asked her if she would invite her husband out to CIA headquarters at Langley, Va., for a meeting with them, to assess the question.And, btw, I love the attacking the victims strategy.
It was unsurprising that the CIA would seek out Wilson. He had already performed one secret mission to Niger for the agency, in 1999, and was trusted. Wilson had also had a distinguished and storied career as a Foreign Service officer. He served as acting ambassador in Iraq during the Gulf War and was hailed by the first President Bush as a "hero." Wilson was an important part of the team and highly regarded by Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Wilson was also an Africa specialist. He had been a diplomat in Niger, ambassador to Gabon and senior director for Africa on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. (I first encountered Wilson then, and we have since become friends.) No other professional had such an ideal background for this CIA mission.
Plame's superiors asked her to cable the field in Africa for routine approval of an investigation of the Niger claim. At Langley, Wilson met with about a dozen officers to discuss the situation. Plame was not at the meeting. Afterward, Wilson informed his wife that he would be traveling to Niger for about 10 days. She was not particularly enthusiastic, having recently given birth to twins, but she understood the importance of the mission. She had no authority to commission him. She was simply not the responsible senior officer. Nor, if she had been, could she have done so unilaterally. There was nothing of value to be gained personally from the mission by either Joe or Valerie Wilson. He undertook the trip out of a long-ingrained sense of government service.
CIA officers debriefed Wilson the night of his return at his home. His wife greeted the other operatives, but excused herself. She later read a copy of his debriefing report, but she made no changes in it. The next they spoke of Niger uranium was when they heard President Bush's mention of it in his 2003 State of the Union address.
Attributing Wilson's trip to his wife's supposed authority became the predicate for a smear campaign against his credibility. Seven months after the appointment of the special counsel, in July 2004, the Republican-dominated Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its report on flawed intelligence leading to the Iraq war. The blame for failure was squarely put on the CIA for "groupthink." (The Republicans quashed a promised second report on political pressure on the intelligence process.) The three-page addendum by the ranking Republicans followed the now well-worn attack lines: "The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee."
The CIA subsequently issued a statement, as reported by New York Newsday and CNN, that the Republican senators' conclusion about Plame's role was wholly inaccurate. But the Washington Post's Susan Schmidt reported only the Republican senators' version, writing that Wilson was "specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly," in a memo she wrote. Schmidt quoted a CIA official in the senators' account saying that Plame had "offered up" Wilson's name. Plame's memo, in fact, was written at the express directive of her superiors two days before Wilson was to come to Langley for his meeting to describe his qualifications in a standard protocol to receive "country clearance." Unfortunately, Schmidt's article did not reflect this understanding of routine CIA procedure. The CIA officer who wrote the memo that originally recommended Wilson for the mission -- who was cited anonymously by the senators as the only source who said that Plame was responsible -- was deeply upset at the twisting of his testimony, which was not public, and told Plame he had said no such thing. CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told Wilson that the Republican Senate staff never contacted him for the agency's information on the matter.
Curiously, the only document cited as the basis for Plame's role was a State Department memo that was later debunked by the CIA. The Washington Post, on Dec. 26, 2003, reported: "CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the ... document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended the meeting. 'It has been circulated around,' one official said." Even more curious, one of the outlets where the document was circulated was Talon News Service and its star correspondent, Jeff Gannon (aka Guckert). (Talon was revealed to be a partisan front for a Texas-based operation called GOPUSA and Gannon was exposed as a male prostitute, without previous journalistic credentials yet with easy and unexplained access to the White House.) According to the Post, "the CIA believes that people in the administration continue to release classified information to damage the figures at the center of the controversy."
Senate Democrats tried to add to Republican discomfort over the presidential adviser Karl Rove today as they called for legislation to deny security clearances to officials who unmask undercover agents.
The Democrats hoped to attach the measure to a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security. Should the maneuver succeed, and Republicans then resist the overall bill, Democrats could portray them as trying to block legislation vital to national security.
"Several years ago when (Rove) started getting accolades from political writers as the mastermind behind Bush, the president is known to have bristled.BTW - as Floydd points out (and others mention) there continues to be an ongoing, lively discussion of the Rove Affair at the "ribbit" thread - mentioned in the MetaFilter sidebar.
He once told a journalist that he did not like his aides getting 'star treatment. So he started calling Rove 'Turd Blossom,' which refers to the so-called cowpie splat made by bovine waste when it hits the ground." [Helen Thomas]
"The sight of David Gregory, Terry Moran, John Roberts and other White House correspondents badgering Scott McClellan over Karl Rove has triggered some pretty strong reactions.From NBC Chief White House Correspondent, David Gregory:
Many on the left are saying it's about time that journalists found some backbone and got tough on the Bush team.
Others are saying that the White House gang are showing their true anti-Bush colors and are hopping mad because their colleagues are involved..."
"If you have been watching, you know it's been a rough few days in the White House briefing room. Depending on your political views, you either think it's an unfair feeding frenzy or about time we pressed these guys on this story.
Let me just say this is what happens when government officials mislead the press. They have to be accountable for what they say. If you think we have a political agenda, I'd refer you to briefings during the Clinton days when Monica Lewinsky was the topic. Those were pretty rough, too. I think we, as a group, are so energized because the White House has been forced to change its story. They ought to be held accountable for that. Particularly since Scott McClellan absolved Karl Rove of any crime two years ago — also in the midst of the investigation.
You may have noticed on Nightly News, we have taken great pains to point out that what we know thus far does not indicate Rove committed any crime. This is a legal story, but it has also become a political debate about Rove's actions.
What's also interesting is that no White House official I've spoken to thinks the blistering McClellan's receive has been unfair. They knew it was coming. They also admit they made a mistake telling him to go out there earlier this week and abruptly say the White House wouldn't comment any longer.
It's tough for any White House to balance a legal strategy with a political one. For the record, it's not personal. A few of us have kidded McClellan after hours in the press room that it must be fun to be the president's spokesman."
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posted by furiousxgeorge at 12:43 AM on July 14, 2005