Reporter: Top Cheney Aide Among Sources

[IJ Reilly]

Game, set and match?

The vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was a source along with the president's chief political adviser for a Time story that identified a CIA officer, the magazine reporter said Sunday, further countering White House claims that neither aide was involved in the leak.

In an effort to quell a chorus of calls to fire deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove, Republicans said that Rove originally learned about Valerie Plame's identity from the news media. That exonerates Rove, the Republican Party chairman said, and Democrats should apologize.

But it is not clear that it was a journalist who first revealed the information to Rove.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony said Sunday that Rove learned about the CIA officer either from the media or from someone in government who said the information came from a journalist. The lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because the federal investigation is continuing.

In a first-person account in the latest issue of Time magazine, reporter Matt Cooper wrote that during his grand jury appearance last Wednesday, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "asked me several different ways if Rove had indicated how he had heard that Plame worked at the CIA." Cooper said Rove did not indicate how he had heard.

The White House's assurance in 2003 that Rove was not involved in the leak of the CIA officer's identity "was a lie," said John Podesta, White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration. He said Rove's credibility "is in shreds."

Until last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that Libby and Rove had no connection to the leak. Plame's husband is Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq at the start of the Persian Gulf War.

...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050717/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cia_leak_investigation

[zimv20]

pretty shoddy reporting/editing that they refer to the GOP party chairman w/o naming him. speaking of ken mehlman, he was on Meet the Press today...

movie link (http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Meet_the_Press_Mehlman_Rove_Leak_071305.mov)

story snippet link (http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/07/17.html#a3990)

let us note his double standard when trusting or not trusting patrick fitzgerald. even while those who are calling for rove's resignation are labeled as "not trusting fitzgerald," mehlman cannot commit to trusting fitzgerald's decision until after it's rendered, despite mehlman's "tremendous confidence" in him. ugh.

[IJ Reilly]

You're just seeing the entire GOP storyline collapse under the weight of its own implausibility and the rot of ethical corruption.

Edit: I think we now know the name of Miller's source.

[IJ Reilly]

The Republicans are now fully ensnared in a web of their own construction. For the sake of party unity, they have to argue that the White House was never so intent on destroying Joe Wilson that they'd go after his wife, but yet, there was Ken Mehlman on Meet the Press just yesterday, "answering" questions about Rove and Libby by attacking Joe Wilson. So they are still doing what they've never done. Who, except for the most dedicated true believer, is going to accept this reasoning in the end?

Top Aides Reportedly Set Sights on Wilson

Rove and Cheney chief of staff were intent on discrediting CIA agent's husband, prosecutors have been told.

WASHINGTON — 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.

Prosecutors investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush's top political strategist, 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.

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.

...

News of the high-level interest in discrediting Wilson comes as White House defenders, most notably officials at the Republican National Committee, argue that Rove has been vindicated of suspicion that he was a primary source of the leak. Knowingly revealing the identity of a covert operative is a federal crime.

Regardless of Rove's legal liability, the description of his role runs contrary to earlier White House statements that Rove and Libby were not involved in the unmasking of Wilson's wife, and it suggests they were part of a campaign to discredit Wilson.

...

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Rove and the White House deserved credit for cooperating with Fitzgerald. "Cooperate, cooperate, cooperate" was the policy, said Mehlman, who once was Rove's deputy at the White House.

Cooper, who testified last week before Fitzgerald's grand jury concerning his conversations with White House officials about Wilson, confirmed Sunday that prosecutors showed intense interest in the roles played by Rove and Libby in discussing Wilson's wife.

...

Wilson said in an interview Saturday he had known that Novak was interested in him a week or so before the column appeared. He said a friend who saw Novak on the street reported that Novak told him, "Wilson is an asshole and his wife works for the CIA."

...

There have been other indications of a concerted White House action against Wilson. Two days before Novak's column, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus was told by an "administration official" that the White House was not putting much stock in the Wilson trip to Africa because it was "set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction," according to an account of the conversation Pincus wrote for this summer's Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Pincus discussed the substance of the conversation with prosecutor Fitzgerald last fall under an arrangement where Pincus did not have to tell Fitzgerald who the administration source was.

And Fleischer also seemed attuned to a strategy of discrediting Wilson. Two days before Novak revealed Plame's identity, Fleischer questioned the former envoy's findings in remarks to reporters during a trip with Bush in Africa.

The transcript of that press gaggle (the term for an informal question-and-answer between reporters and the White House spokesman), which took place in the National Hospital in Abuja, Nigeria, has been requested by the prosecutors.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-leak18jul18,0,4779848.story

[skunk]

Wow. They should have stopped digging long ago. Hubris with a capital H.

[katchow]

quote from Cooper:

"It was my first interview with the President, and I expected a simple "Hello" when I walked into the Oval Office last December. Instead, George W. Bush joked, "Cooper! I thought you'd be in jail by now.""

wouldn't you just love to have responded to that? I mean, talk about a lobbed softball :)

[IJ Reilly]

The "mystery memo" surfaces...

Plame's Identity Marked As Secret

Memo Central to Probe Of Leak Was Written By State Dept. Analyst

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.

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.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.

Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained access to information about her from the memo, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

The memo may be important to answering three central questions in the Plame case: Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame's CIA role? Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity? And, who leaked it to the media?

...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/20/AR2005072002517_pf.html

[mactastic]

The wiggle room:
Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said.

"But it didn't explicitly SAY that Plame's name needed to be kept secret. It was just in a section of the memo that was labeled secret. I don't think that meant EVERYTHING in that paragraph was secret."

This makes parsing the definition of 'is' seem quaint by comparison.

[IJ Reilly]

It also cited her by her married name, Valerie Wilson. Could have been an entirely different person. Who could know?

[mactastic]

Didn't seem to matter a whit what the nuances were when it was Sandy Berger in the crosshairs...