Either laws were broken or they weren't.
Reading those opinions makes it evident that the reporters who are so eagerly lapping up the "no crime" theory haven't read them. All three judges agree that, if a common-law "reporter's privilege" exists, Mr. Fitzgerald has submitted enough evidence about the commission of a serious crime or crimes to warrant overcoming that privilege.posted by kirkaracha at 1:35 PM on July 17, 2005
LAWRENCE O'DONNELL:audio available on crooks and liars
Here’s what I think is definitive on this question. Patrick Fitzgerald has represented to the courts that he is pursuing a serious, national security, criminal violation. It seems to me in this grand jury, witness number one -- and Tony you’ve been a prosecutor, you know how they assemble cases -- witness number one would have been a CIA administrator who comes in and testifies about how Valerie Plame does indeed fit the law’s requirements. Because if witness number one doesn’t do that successfully for the prosecutor, there is absolutely no reason to call witness number two, because there is no crime to investigate.
Tony?
TONY BLANKLEY:
Yeah--well--I mean--that’s one way to approach it.
The CIA declined to discuss Plame's intelligence work, but an agency official disputed suggestions that she was a mere analyst whose public exposure would have little consequence.A leak about the significance of the leak. Nice.
"If she was not undercover, we would have no reason to file a criminal referral," the CIA official said, insisting on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation."
"White House political aide Karl Rove was the first person to tell a Time magazine reporter that the wife of a prominent critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy was a CIA officer, the reporter said in an article Sunday.posted by ericb at 5:04 PM on July 17, 2005
Time correspondent Matthew Cooper said he told a grand jury last week that Rove told him the woman worked at the ‘agency,’ or CIA, on weapons of mass destruction issues, and ended the call by saying ‘I've already said too much.’
....Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'WMD'? Yes,’ Cooper wrote in Time's current edition.
....Until last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that vice presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby and Rove were not involved in the leaks.
Cooper said on NBC's ‘Meet the Press‘ that he spoke to Libby after first learning about Wilson's wife from Rove." [MSNBC | July 17, 2005]
"One former Republican official who retains close ties to the White House said there could be a political cost for keeping Mr. Rove on board even if he is found to have done nothing illegal. ‘If Karl survives, he does so at the president's political expense,’ said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be seen as disloyal to Mr. Rove.posted by ericb at 5:26 PM on July 17, 2005
‘George W. Bush came into office promising two tenets that are in competition now: straight talk, non-parsing - and loyalty,’ the former official said. ‘He's either got to choose loyalty or straight talk. He can't do both.’....
‘The Bush operating style is, you be loyal to me, I'll be loyal back to you - and I'm not going to let my critics think they can prompt a lot of resignations just by pointing out that we said we'd fire them,’ said Professor Stephen Walt, academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
But, Mr. Walt said: ‘With Bush now being a lame duck, you start to wonder whether or not he'll have the same clout. At what point does the R.N.C. start weighing in and saying, 'Gee, we know he can't run again. But do we want to be saddled with a scandal that will make it harder for us to win in 2008?'"
“… we shouldn't get hung up on [Rove] - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.Also see: In Plame Leaks, Long Shadows [Washington Post | July 17, 2005]
To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots…. Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush's fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself… [The recent attacks]…are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson…. This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
…. Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's Box it can't slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.” [New York Times | July 17, 2005]
“…You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them…[Karl Rove] never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political--and everyone is fair game. Which now includes Rove. In a familiar Washington twist of fate, Rove's theory of politics is being turned against him—and he is being forced to deploy the Republican machine, which he built on Bush's behalf, for a more personal task: his own defense….posted by ericb at 11:32 PM on July 17, 2005
It's unlikely that any White House officials considered that they were doing anything illegal in going after Joe Wilson. Indeed, the line between national security and politics had long since been all but erased by the Bush administration.”
“The misinformation being spread in the media about the Plame affair is alarming and damaging to the long-term security interests of the United States. Republicans' talking points are trying to savage Joe Wilson and, by implication, his wife, Valerie Plame, as liars. That is the truly big lie….posted by ericb at 11:33 PM on July 17, 2005
Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover -- in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. government agencies….
Yet, until Novak betrayed her, she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed her he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her….
The Republicans insist on the lie that Plame got her husband the job. She did not. She was not a division director; instead she was the equivalent of an Army major. Yes, she recommended her husband to do the job that needed to be done, but the decision to send Wilson on this mission was made by her bosses.
At the end of the day, Wilson was right. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was the Bush administration that pushed that lie, and because of that lie Americans are dying. Shame on those who continue to slander Joe Wilson while giving Bush and his pack of liars a pass. That's the true outrage."
"..In sum, based on an exhaustive investigation, the specialThanks madamjujujive, particularly for the truthout (NYT) link & I also get a tremble when you say 'sex'.. It seems pretty clear that noone in her personal life, excepting her husband, were aware, but I can also see where an ambiguous reading about the level of secrecy attaching to Plame's alterior life may have been construed in other publications..
counsel has established the need for Miller’s and Cooper’s
testimony. Thus, considering the gravity of the suspected crime
and the low value of the leaked information, no privilege bars
the subpoenas."
"..other former C.I.A. officers say that by 2003 Ms. Wilson's cover was already thin. Any serious inquiry would have revealed that Brewster Jennings [bogus CIA Boston petroleum company] was little more than a mailbox. Though she traveled regularly, Ms. Wilson, who speaks French, German and Greek, had been working for some time at agency headquarters in Langley, Va. And her marriage to a senior American diplomat, Mr. Wilson, ended any pretense of having no government ties. At that point, she looks, walks and quacks like an overt agency employee," said Fred Rustmann, a C.I.A. officer from 1966 to 1990, who supervised Ms. Wilson early in her career.."Tizz a complexity of artifice and smoke indeed.
Instead of appointing a special prosecutor, what if the president had just called in his top people in the beginning of all this and said, "Folks, we have a problem here. I need to know who's been talking to Bob Novak, and I need to know today by the end of business"? That's what presidents used to do, and they're usually pretty good at finding out when they really want to know. Not many people had the nerve to lie to Lyndon Johnson when he looked them in the eye, and Richard Nixon figured out early on who Deep Throat was, and now we know from Woodward and Bernstein that on that one Nixon was right.posted by kirkaracha at 6:21 AM on July 18, 2005
Instead, this White House did what it usually does when challenged: It went into attack mode, called charges that the White House had leaked the name ridiculous, and allowed the controversy to boil until a special prosecutor had to be appointed. Now two years and millions of tax dollars later, the president's trusted friend and strategist Karl Rove has emerged as the top suspect, and we're left to wonder: Can anything said from the White House podium be taken at face value, or does the White House just deny automatically anything that reflects badly on it?
This could and should have been dealt with inside the White House long before it reached the special prosecutor level. Instead, the president's people followed the modern public relations rule, "Never admit a mistake, just do what is necessary to kill the story before it kills you," which often works. What they are learning, though, is that when that involves tearing down the character of your critics, it can also be very dangerous business.
"Top aides to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were intensely focused on discrediting former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV in the days after he wrote an op-ed article for the New York Times suggesting the administration manipulated intelligence to justify going to war in Iraq, federal investigators have been told....Karl Rove, and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson's credibility, according to people familiar with the inquiry.posted by ericb at 7:38 AM on July 18, 2005
Although lower-level White House staffers typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.
A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove's interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove reportedly responded: 'He's a Democrat.' Rove then cited Wilson's campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said." [L.A. Times | July 18, 2005]
President Bush said Monday that if anyone in his administration committed a crime in connection with the public leak of the identity of a CIA operative, that person will "no longer work in my administration."posted by kirkaracha at 9:49 AM on July 18, 2005
...
Bush said in June 2004 that he would fire anyone in his administration shown to have leaked information that exposed the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. On Monday, however, he added the qualifier that it would have be shown that a crime was committed.
"We must remember the high standards that come with high office," Bush said, with his wife Laura, Cheney, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card seated behind him. "This begins with careful adherence to the rules. I expect every member of this administration to stay well within the boundaries that define legal and ethical conduct."-- George W. Bush, January 22, 2001
"Just a quarter of Americans think the White House is fully cooperating in the federal investigation of the leak of a CIA operative's identity, a number that's declined sharply since the investigation began. And three-quarters say that if presidential adviser Karl Rove was responsible for leaking classified information, it should cost him his job.posted by ericb at 1:42 PM on July 18, 2005
Skepticism about the administration's cooperation has jumped. As the initial investigation began in September 2003, nearly half the public, 47 percent, believed the White House was fully cooperating. That fell to 39 percent a few weeks later, and it's lower still, 25 percent, in this new ABC News poll.
....75 percent say Rove should lose his job if the investigation finds he leaked classified information. That includes sizable majorities of Republicans, independents and Democrats alike — 71, 74 and 83 percent, respectively."
(PDF version of ABC Poll with full questionnaire and results.)
"Monday's briefing exhibited perhaps the most vitriol from the press yet over the White House's refusal to answer questions -- at one point one reporter seething with irritation, saying, 'What the hell is going on?'posted by ericb at 1:50 PM on July 18, 2005QUESTION: What is his problem? Two years, and he [President Bush] can't call Rove in and find out what the hell is going on? I mean, why is it so difficult to find out the facts? It costs thousands, millions of dollars, two years, it tied up how many lawyers? All he's got to do is call him in.
MR. McCLELLAN: You just heard from the President. He said he doesn't know all the facts. I don't know all the facts.
QUESTION: Why?
MR. McCLELLAN: We want to know what the facts are. Because --"
Blah, blah, blah!
"A few important, unanswered questions: Has former Rove deputy Ken Mehlman discussed the Plame matter with any White House officials, specifically Karl Rove, in the past three weeks? What was the specific nature of those conversations — who was involved, how long did they last, what was discussed?posted by ericb at 2:00 PM on July 18, 2005
The answers to these questions are important." - more ...
"You know it's bad when the press laughs openly at your spin. He is still the president and stuff, you know. From today's presser:Next week they'll bring spitballs."QUESTION: Mr. President, you said you don't want to talk about an ongoing investigation, so I'd like to ask you, regardless of whether a crime was committed, do you still intend to fire anyone found to be involved in the CIA leak case? And are you displeased that Karl Rove told a reporter that Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife worked for the Agency on WMD issues?
PRESIDENT BUSH: We have a serious ongoing investigation here. (Laughter)
"Reporters are obligated to the truth, and allowing themselves to be pimped by those who would use them as tools against the truth is a crime against the profession and the society it serves. Protecting that which you are bound to expose is malpractice."posted by ericb at 8:45 PM on July 18, 2005
"Sources said the timing of an announcement had been moved up in part to deflect attention away from a CIA leak controversy that has engulfed Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove.posted by ericb at 8:47 AM on July 19, 2005
A Republican strategist with close [ties] to the White House described Clement as the leading candidate. 'She's pretty untouchable," he said. "Plus, it helps take Rove off the front pages for a week.'"
"A classified State Department memo that may be pivotal to the CIA leak case made clear that information identifying an agent and her role in her husband's intelligence-gathering mission was sensitive and shouldn't be shared, according to a person familiar with the document....News that the memo was marked for its sensitivity emerged as President Bush yesterday appeared to backtrack from his 2004 pledge to fire any member of his staff involved in the leaking of the CIA agent's name....The memo's details are significant because they will make it harder for officials who saw the document to claim that they didn't realize the identity of the CIA officer was a sensitive matter. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, may also be looking at whether other crimes -- such as perjury, obstruction of justice or leaking classified information -- were committed....The paragraph in the memo discussing Ms. Wilson's involvement in her husband's trip is marked at the beginning with a letter designation in brackets to indicate the information shouldn't be shared, according to the person familiar with the memo. Such a designation would indicate to a reader that the information was sensitive."posted by ericb at 9:28 AM on July 19, 2005
"The news that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was the second possible source in the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent to Time magazine elevates the scandal to a whole new level. It is bad enough for Karl Rove to be accused of being a leaker, since he is President Bush’s chief political strategist. But if Time’s story holds, I. Lewis Libby’s involvement represents an even more insidious abuse of power.[Boston Globe | July 19, 2005]
....Libby was in the thick of whipping up fear over the thinnest of evidence. The level to which Libby and Cheney stooped to get their war was highlighted by the momentous presentation of Saddam’s ‘threat’ before the United Nations Security Council by then Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell gave a presentation six weeks before the war where he said, ‘every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions.’ Those assertions resulted in grudging acceptance of the war from many Democrats.
....Virtually all of Powell’s solid sources fell apart when the United States turned Iraq upside down, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians in the process.
....It was Cheney’s staff who wrote the first draft of Powell’s UN speech. It was Libby who suggested, in strategy meetings at the White House, playing up every possible, conceivable threat of Saddam — with the emphasis on the word ‘conceive.’
A US News and World Report story in the summer of 2003 quoted a senior administration official as saying Libby’s presentation ‘was over the top and ran the gamut from Al Qaeda to human rights to weapons of mass destruction. They were unsubstantiated assertions, in my view.’
Powell, according to both US News and Vanity Fair, was so irritated by Libby’s hodgepodge of unsubstantiated facts that he threw documents into the air and said, ‘I’m not reading this. This is bull ...’
....According to Vanity Fair, Cheney himself urged Powell to go ahead and stake his national popularity on the nonexistent evidence by saying to Powell, ‘Your poll numbers are in the 70s. You can afford to lose a few points.’
America and Iraq would go on to lose more than a few points. Libby may end up as a symbol of a government so driven to ignore the truth it was willing to resort to dirty tricks to stop anyone from telling it."
There's a lot we don't know about this case. But these things are clear:posted by muckster at 11:16 AM on July 19, 2005
• Journalists should not tailor their principles to the politics of the moment.
• Coerced waivers of confidentiality are meaningless.
• Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
"Half of those in [a] poll taken by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent, said they believe the president is trustworthy, while almost as many, 46 percent said he is not. Bush was at 62 percent on this measure in a September 2003 Pew poll and at 56 percent in a Gallup poll in April. One of Bush’s strong suits throughout his presidency has been the perception by a majority of people that he is honest.posted by ericb at 3:32 PM on July 19, 2005
The slide in trust in Bush comes at a time the White House is answering questions about top aide Karl Rove’s involvement in the public leak of the identity of a CIA operative....Bush’s job approval in the Pew poll was 44 percent, with 48 percent disapproving."
"White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.posted by ericb at 9:25 PM on July 19, 2005
The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said." [more ...]
"...the astonishing news remains: Rove, a.k.a. Bush's Brain, a.k.a. the Architect, a.k.a. the most powerful and brilliant and deeply unlikable political thug most people have barely heard of because he's just that kind of secretive nefarious genius the likes of which makes women recoil and flowers wilt and moderate politicians break out in hives, well, Rove might have stepped over the line just far enough to end his current reign as Dark Lord of Shrubtown[San Francisco Chronicle | July 20, 2005]
….Rove, with his meager education and porcine sheen and this-one's-for-all- the-girls-who-shunned-me-in-high-school revenge demeanor, essentially reinvented American politics, created a new language of hate and fear, rewrote the GOP rule book to include the notion that actual facts don't matter and a politician can get away with absolutely anything if the denials are orchestrated just right and if the accusers are immediately counterattacked and mistakes are admitted absolutely never.
….Here's the bottom line: Scandal notwithstanding, Rove's nastiest and most valuable work for this lame-duck president is now complete. And Bush is flopping all over the place: Social Security reform is a disaster, and Iraq is an appalling catastrophe, and the economy is running on fumes, and this nation is an international punch line, and Bush's poll ratings are sinking faster than Jenna Bush can slam down a Bud Light. All things over which even Rove himself has little control.
All that's left at the moment is to force into power a nasty right-wing Supreme Court justice with a mean glare and a misogynistic streak to help thwart America's prospects for hope and progress for the next 30 years, and Dubya can probably do that without Rove's help. Bush has already fed the Christian right's insatiable hunger for sexual dread and homophobia by packing the nation's lower courts with dozens of extremist conservative judges. The momentum is there. Pray Sandra Day O'Connor is the only one to go before 2008.
Besides, you just know that if Rove is forced out (or if he and Bush agree that he should step down, as a matter of clever strategy), he'll merely go underground, move his big pink nail-encrusted throne to a different bunker where he will continue interviewing GOP presidential hopefuls for 2008 in an attempt to gauge whose body he can most easily invade, who has the least amount of humanity and the greatest malleability and the maximum capacity for having their soul sucked through the eye of a needle. Meetings ongoing. BYO sacrificial blood."
"A president's ability to govern effectively depends on a measure of accountability -- the public's confidence that the leader will hold subordinates accountable for lapses in performance, ethics and judgment. That is precisely the quality that is beginning to slip away from the Bush administration, just six months into its second term.[Washington Post | July 20, 2005]
The Bush White House's stonewalling and temporizing in the leak investigation of Karl Rove is the most dramatic sign of this problem, but it isn't the only one. This is an administration that rarely holds anyone accountable for anything, other than political disloyalty. That has been the problem on Iraq and Abu Ghraib. People who make mistakes, or worse, have had too many medals pinned on them.
….Presidential second terms are slippery slopes. People get arrogant; they start to think that because they won reelection, the political rules of gravity no longer apply. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were brought crashing back to earth by bad mistakes in their second terms. This summer we are watching another reminder that reelection doesn't suspend the laws of accountability.”
“Disinformation, distraction--that's the plan, as trouble-causing details emerge from the investigation that threaten Karl Rove and other senior Bush aides. For GOP operatives, it's all-hands-to-the-deck time. And the strategy is to fire whatever ammunition the have, whether it is real or a dud. They want to turn this into a partisan mud-wrestle, realizing that much of the public turns off to such cat-and-dogs nastiness. They try to make the victims the culprits, calling Joe Wilson the biggest liar of all time and making claims about Valerie Wilson that are unsupported by the known facts (e.g., she was no more than a desk jockey). Change the focus to anything but what Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and other White House aides did and whether the White House and the president has covered up for them.posted by ericb at 8:17 AM on July 20, 2005
One could spend all day responding to the disinformation and misinformation--and that's their goal.”
"We have all taken an oath, and from this moment on it is our jobs to honor it…..posted by ericb at 8:19 AM on July 20, 2005
"[W]e must remember the high standards that come with high office. This begins with careful adherence to the rules. I expect every member of this administration to stay well within the boundaries that define legal and ethical conduct. This means avoiding even the appearance of problems. This means checking and, if need be, doublechecking that the rules have been obeyed. This means never compromising those rules."
"House and Senate Democrats, frustrated that the Republican majority has held no inquiries into how a covert CIA agent's name was leaked, plan their own forum Friday....posted by ericb at 3:22 PM on July 20, 2005
The U.S. Senate Democratic Policy Committee (DPC) and the U.S. House Government Reform Committee Minority will conduct a joint hearing at 10:00 AM, Friday, July 22, in Room 138 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, to examine the national security implications of disclosing the identity of a covert intelligence officer. The hearing will be co-chaired by Senate DPC Chairman Byron Dorgan (D-ND), and U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), the Ranking Member of the House Government Reform Committee.
The panel of witnesses will include former intelligence officers and analysts who will discuss the impact of such disclosures, based on decades of experience and service to our country on intelligence and national security matters."
"A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked '(S)' for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.[Washington Post | July 21, 2005]
Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.
The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the 'secret' level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as 'secret' the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials."
"President Bush likes to talk about high standards, accountability and personal responsibility. While Bush expects students, school systems and future retirees to toe the line, his friends get an easier deal."[Seattle Post-Intelligencer | July 21, 2005]
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posted by Heywood Mogroot at 2:05 AM on July 17, 2005