Plame Developments

Air Force One phone records subpoenaed
Grand jury to review call logs from Bush’s jet in probe of how a CIA agent’s cover was blown

BY TOM BRUNE
STAFF WRITER, Newsday

March 5, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The federal grand jury probing the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity has subpoenaed records of Air Force One telephone calls in the week before the officer's name was published in a column in July, according to documents obtained by Newsday.

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

And the subpoenas asked for a transcript of a White House spokesman's press briefing in Nigeria, a list of those attending a birthday reception for a former president, and, casting a much wider net than previously reported, records of White House contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets.

The three subpoenas were issued to the White House on Jan. 22, three weeks after Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed special counsel in the probe and during the first wave of appearances by White House staffers before the grand jury.

The investigation seeks to determine if anyone violated federal law that prohibits officials with security clearances from intentionally or knowingly disclosing the identity of an undercover agent.

White House implicated

The subpoenas underscore indications that the initial stages of the investigation have focused largely on the White House staff members most involved in shaping the administration's message on Iraq, and appear to be based in part on specific information already gathered by investigators, attorneys said Thursday.

Fitzgerald's spokesman declined to comment.

The investigation arose in part out of concerns that Bush administration officials had called reporters to circulate the name of the CIA officer, Valerie Plame, in an attempt to discredit the criticism of the administration's Iraq policy by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

In 2002, Wilson went to Niger at the behest of the CIA to check out reports that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium "yellow cake" to develop nuclear weapons. He reported that Iraq sought commercial ties but that businessmen said the Iraqis didn't try to buy uranium.

All three subpoenas were sent to employees of the Executive Office of the President under a Jan. 26 memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez saying production of the documents, which include phone messages, e-mails and handwritten notes, was "mandatory" and setting a Jan. 29 deadline.

"The president has always said we would fully comply with the investigation, and the White House counsel's office has directed the staff to fully comply," White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said Thursday.

The Novak column

Two of the subpoenas focus mainly on White House records, events and contacts in July, both before and after the July 14 column by Robert Novak that said "two senior administration officials" told him Plame was a CIA officer.

The third subpoena repeats an informal Justice Department document request to the White House last fall seeking records about staff contacts with Novak and two Newsday reporters, Knut Royce and Timothy Phelps, who reported on July 22 that Plame was a covert agent and Novak had blown her cover.

The subpoena added journalists such as Mike Allen and Dana Priest of the Washington Post, Michael Duffy of Time magazine, Andrea Mitchell of NBC's "Meet the Press," Chris Matthews of MSNBC's "Hardball," and reporters from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. There have been no reports of journalists being subpoeaned.

The subpoenas required the White House to produce the documents in three stages -- the first on Jan. 30, a second on Feb. 4 and the third on Feb. 6 -- even as White House aides began appearing before the grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C.

The subpoena with the first production deadline sought three sets of documents.

It requested records of telephone calls to and from Air Force One from July 7 to 12, while Bush was visting several nations in Africa. The White House declined Thursday to release a list of those on the trip.

That subpoena also sought a complete transcript of a July 12 press "gaggle," or informal briefing, by then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer while at the National Hospital in Abuja, Nigeria.

That transcript is missing from the White House Web site containing transcripts of other press briefings. In a transcript the White House released at the time to Federal News Service, Fleischer discusses Wilson and his CIA report.

Finally, the subpoena requested a list of those in attendance at the White House reception on July 16 for former President Gerald Ford's 90th birthday.

The White House at the time announced the reception would honor Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, but said the event was closed to the press.

The White House Thursday declined to release the list and the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, which paid for the event, did not return phone calls.

The subpoena with the second production deadline sought all documents from July 6 to July 30 of the White House Iraq Group. In August, the Washington Post published the only account of the group's existence.

It met weekly in the Situation Room, the Post said, and its regular participants included senior political adviser Karl Rove; communication strategists Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; policy advisers led by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen J. Hadley; and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Wilson alleged in September that Rove was involved in the leak but a day later pulled back from that, asserting that Rove had "condoned" it.

Hughes left the White House in the summer of 2002. Matalin, who left at the end of 2002, did not return a call for comment. Matalin appeared before the grand jury Jan. 23, the day after the subpoenas were issued.

The subpoena with the last production date repeated the Justice Department's informal request to the White House last fall for documents from Feb. 1, 2002, through 2003 related to Wilson's February 2002 trip to Niger, to Plame and to contacts with journalists.

Current White House press secretary Scott McClellan, press aide Claire Buchan and former press aide Adam Levine have told reporters they appeared before the grand jury Feb. 6. At least five others have reportedly been questioned.

 

The transcript mentioned in the above article appears on the State Dept. page. No way of knowing if it is complete...
_________________
Transcript: White House Press Briefing in Nigeria, July 12

Liberia, CIA Director Tenet, Iraq nuclear program



White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer briefed reporters July 12 in Abuja, Nigeria, the last stop in President Bush's five-nation Africa trip. Following is the White House transcript:

(begin transcript)

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Abuja, Nigeria)

July 12, 2003

PRESS GAGGLE WITH ARI FLEISCHER

The National Hospital
Abuja, Nigeria

MR. FLEISCHER: The President this morning is receiving a briefing at the National Hospital. There is a representative of the press in there, we arranged for a print pooler to be in there. And then there will be a demonstration of the laboratory equipment that the President will see, focused on important health care issues here in Nigeria. Then the President will have his meeting with the President of Nigeria to talk about U.S.-Nigerian bilateral relations. I anticipate regional issues involving regional conflicts will arise, as well.

We will try to have a background briefer give you a readout after the meeting. I'm not sure of the logistics on that one yet, but we'll do our best to get that done. It may involve logistics -- dropping tape -- but we're going to move quickly and try to get that done.

Q: You brief the pool, then, you're thinking?

MR. FLEISCHER: I think that's the only way to do it, because there won't be an opportunity to get the backgrounder to the filing center.

Then the President will make remarks in a speech at the Leon Sullivan Summit, and then return to the White House.

Q: Does the President anticipate asking Nigeria to take even more of a role in solving the Liberian crisis, or does he anticipate making any sort of announcement about what the U.S. role in that might be?

MR. FLEISCHER: Nobody should be on the lookout for an announcement today. It will be a topic that is discussed. The United States has worked closely with Nigeria to resolve regional conflicts throughout Africa. Nigeria has received considerable training in its peacekeeping efforts, and its military has received considerable training from the United States. They have abilities, and we have worked with Nigeria to help them to put those abilities to good use.

Q: Ari, what's the President's reaction to Mr. Tenet's statement -- a rather long one -- what was his reaction?

MR. FLEISCHER: The President is pleased that the Director of Central Intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged, which was the circumstances surrounding the State of the Union speech. The President said that line because it was based on information from the intelligence community and the speech was vetted.

Q: Does the President still have confidence in Director Tenet?

MR. FLEISCHER: Yes. President Bush has confidence in Director Tenet and President Bush has confidence in the CIA.

Q: Ari, the President often speaks of accountability. Does he feel accountability is achieved in this circumstance? Or how do you address that issue?

MR. FLEISCHER: Let me explain to you the President's thinking on this. A greater, more important truth is being lost in the flap over whether or not Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. The greater truth is that nobody, but nobody, denies that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. He was pursuing numerous ways to obtain nuclear weapons. The United States never said that he had nuclear weapons. We have said that he was pursuing them. It should surprise nobody that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire the means to produce from a variety of sources and a variety of ways.

He had previously obtained yellow cake from Africa. In fact, in one of the least known parts of this story, which is now, for the first time, public -- and you find this in Director Tenet's statement last night -- the official that -- lower-level official sent from the CIA to Niger to look into whether or not Saddam Hussein had sought yellow cake from Niger, Wilson, he -- and Director Tenet's statement last night states the same former official, Wilson, also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official, Wilson, meet an Iraqi delegation to discuss expanding commercial relations between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.

This is in Wilson's report back to the CIA. Wilson's own report, the very man who was on television saying Niger denies it, who never said anything about forged documents, reports himself that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger about sales.

What did the President say in the State of the Union? He said: according to British reports, Iraq is seeking uranium from Africa. And the intelligence cited two other countries, in addition to Niger.

So, again, the larger truth, was Saddam Hussein a threat, in part because he was seeking nuclear weapons, in addition to what we know and have said about chemical and biological.

Now, if you ask, how is the President approaching this, what's the President's approach, the President sees this as much ado, that it's beside the point of the central threat that Saddam Hussein presented.

Q: But doesn't that make it all the more important that some accountability be achieved that this flap over one fact can obscure his larger message?

MR. FLEISCHER: The President's larger message has not been obscured. The American people continue to agree that Saddam Hussein was a threat and --

Q: You just said it was being obscured. You said there's a larger truth here that's being missed.

MR. FLEISCHER: Yes, but the larger truth -- the larger truth being missed this week, but it's not been missed by the country on a longer-term basis.

Q: So this is just another press problem? The President has often thought we go overboard. Is that the case here? Is the larger truth being obscured just by the media?

MR. FLEISCHER: No, I'm not saying that, because there was a vetting issue on the speech, and that's a governmental issue. But I'm saying that this governmental issue needs to be put into a larger perspective, now that everybody has had one week's worth of chance to analyze this.

So, no, I can't say this is about the press. But I can say there is an important bigger picture here. And that bigger picture remains just as valid for the American people today as it was the day the President gave the State of the Union address.

Q: On February 5th, Colin Powell did not have enough confidence in that statement to include it in his presentation to the U.N. There was some vetting that was done between the President's speech and Mr. Powell's presentation to the U.N. Why then, if that -- if at that point we knew, you knew, or the administration knew that the information was not good, why then was that very scary accusation allowed to stand through the through the war? I mean, we didn't get this corrected until after the war.

MR. FLEISCHER: It was corrected in March, when the part about yellow cake from Niger was looked into by the IAEA and that's when they reported it was based on forged documents.

But we still do not know whether or not Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. According to the intelligence, there were two other nations that were cited for where Iraq may have been seeking or was seeking uranium.

So what we have said is it should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech. People cannot conclude that the information was necessarily false. After all, why would it surprise anybody that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium. The more uranium you have, the fewer centrifuges you need to produce a nuclear weapon. So that, in and of itself, should not surprise anybody.

What is the issue here, in the President's judgment, is whether that information should have risen to his level and his giving the speech. And the administration, I think, to be fair to the administration, we did acknowledge that. We were the ones who were forthright and direct about it.

Q: Well, after the IAEA brought up the forged documents. But on February -- if it wasn't substantiable enough to be presented in Mr. Powell's presentation, surely by then the White House realized that it wasn't substantiable enough to be put in the State of the Union. Why no public comment after February 5th? Why wait a month until the IAEA challenged the forged documents?

MR. FLEISCHER: Because this is the nature of intelligence information. This intelligence information was included in the NIE; it was part of the information that was being discussed widely in intelligence circles. There was a consensus agreement that supported the NIE with the footnoted objection from the State Department.

Q: Does the President consider the matter closed now? With the President -- with Director Tenet's letter, does the President consider the matter closed?

MR. FLEISCHER: Yes, the President has moved on. And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on, as well.

Q: This is the last day of the President's historic trip to Africa. Has this overshadowed what he has hoped to accomplish?

MR. FLEISCHER: No, I think you have to ask the American people that. I think that if you look at America's newspapers and America's TV shows, there has been ample reporting on both. I am not in a position to gauge which report the American people pay the most attention to. I think people probably pay attention to both. But again, I think when people hear about the trip to Africa and the focus on AIDS, the impression people have is we are, indeed, a compassionate nation, our tax dollars are going to a good purpose.

When people hear about the flap over whether or not Iraq did, indeed, seek uranium from Africa, the American people say, we didn't go to war because Iraq may or may not have been seeking uranium from Africa; we went to war because Saddam Hussein was a threat because of chemical and biological weapons and also because he was pursuing nuclear weapons, whether he did or did not seek uranium from Africa. So I think the American people have it in pretty good perspective.

Q: Ari, did Dr. Rice ask Director Tenet to put out the statement, or did anybody else from the White House ask him to put out the statement?

MR. FLEISCHER: Discussions with Director Tenet about the statement have been going on for days, have been worked out previously. It's appropriate for the CIA to speak out.

Q: Did he bring up the notion of addressing a statement, or did the White House ask him to?

MR. FLEISCHER: It was mutual. The discussion was, the CIA needs to explain what its role was in this. And the best way for any entity in the government to explain its role is to issue a statement.

Q: Why, if he was going to if it has been talked about for several days, did Dr. Rice come out and brief yesterday? Why not just wait for Tenet to put out his announcement? I mean, was there any reluctance on the CIA to put out a statement?

MR. FLEISCHER: Dr. Rice was always scheduled to brief yesterday, just as Secretary Powell was scheduled to brief at the filing center the night before. So we actually, literally the day before the trip or the week before the trip -- sit down. She was scheduled to brief on the flight to Nigeria. It was moved up to the morning flight. It was easier to do it that way, frankly, and to disseminate whatever she said.

Q: Any postmortem briefing to expect on the plane back?

MR. FLEISCHER: No, there will be no briefings on the plane back.

(end transcript)

 

Excerpt from Josh Marshall's column in The Hill...
_______________

...

The Senate investigation is focusing on what happened to those documents after that they got into U.S. government hands. But there’s also an ongoing FBI investigation into just who forged them and how this fraudulent evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program was peddled into American hands.

The results of that investigation could be bad news for the White House, too.

Consider one piece of evidence that has more than one reporter’s attention.

We normally think of the uranium claims with reference to the 2003 State of the Union speech. But the real controversy came months earlier.

In September 2002, the White House was beginning a major press offensive designed to prove that Iraq had a robust nuclear weapons program. That campaign was meant to culminate in the president’s Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati.

But behind the scenes, a battle royal was shaping up between the White House and the CIA. On Oct. 1, U.S. intelligence agencies released to the White House and Congress a top-secret national intelligence estimate (NIE) that mentioned the Niger reports as well as claims about attempts to purchase uranium in Somalia and Congo.

Despite the NIE, however, the CIA clearly had grave concerns about the accuracy of the Niger story. And there was a wrestling match between the White House and the CIA over whether the president should publicly refer to it in his speech.

The struggle culminated in the two days (Oct. 5 and 6, 2002) before the president traveled to Ohio, when the CIA sent two separate top-secret memos to the president’s staff insisting that the references be removed from the speech. Fearing that even that hadn’t done the trick, CIA Director George Tenet personally telephoned Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley insisting that the references to uranium sales be removed from the speech, as they were.

Though none of this was publicly known at the time, it was clearly in that first week of October 2002 that the White House was most in need of some new evidence on the Niger uranium front. And on Oct. 7, within 48 hours of those memos flying back and forth between the National Security Council (NSC) and the CIA, an Italian businessman was offering those forged documents to a reporter in a bar in Rome.

To call that timing convenient is rather an understatement.

Was the source of those documents (or someone associated with him) privy to a high-level, secret dialogue between the NSC and the CIA? And if so, how and why?

...

 

Maybe the reason this thing is moving so slow is because the whole damn DC press establishment is complicit. Also, note the convenient oversight on the web site posting and the desire to cooperate fully, but still allowing aides the 5th. Moral certainty.
__________________________

Leak Investigators to Get Phone Log


By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 6, 2004; Page A02


CRAWFORD, Tex., March 5 -- Aides to President Bush agreed to turn over a log of a week's worth of telephone calls from Air Force One and other records to satisfy subpoenas from a federal grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity, White House officials said Friday.

The grand jurors also asked the White House to surrender two years of records of any conversations about the case with reporters, including approximately 25 who were specified by name.

The grand jury, which has been taking testimony from current and former White House officials, issued three subpoenas Jan. 22, three weeks after Attorney General John D. Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation.

White House officials said they have turned over much of the material, but not all of it, and intend to eventually provide all the subpoenaed documents.

"It's just a matter of getting it all together," said White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

The document requests are the clearest sign yet that the new prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald of Chicago, is taking an aggressive approach to determining how columnist Robert D. Novak learned the name of the undercover operative, Valerie Plame.

Plame's husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, was a vocal critic of the administration's case for war against Iraq. Administration officials have said that some of their colleagues, apparently seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility, told reporters he was chosen for a sensitive CIA mission to Africa only because his wife helped get him the assignment.

The grand jury subpoenas, first reported by Newsday, also ask for the text of a White House briefing that referred to the controversy but was missing from the White House Web site. Officials posted it Friday and said it had been omitted inadvertently.

The subpoenas also seek documents from July 6 to July 30 relating to the White House Iraq Group, a group of communications, political, national security and legislative aides who met weekly in the Situation Room.

One subpoena demanded a list of attendees at a July 16 White House reception for the 90th birthday of former president Gerald R. Ford. The reception apparently came up in interviews conducted by FBI agents or in grand jury testimony, but Bush's aides said they did not know why.

That was two days after Novak published the column naming Plame. He attributed the information to "two senior administration officials," who could have committed a crime by disclosing the information if they did so intentionally and knew of Plame's undercover status.

Bush was in Africa the week before the column appeared, and the investigators are trying to determine whether anyone in his traveling party had called back to talk to Novak or other reporters about Plame. The subpoena asks for Air Force One's July 7-12 phone records.

Bush's staff was informed of the requests in a Jan. 23 e-mail from White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales that directed staff members to preserve relevant records. He followed that up with a Jan. 26 e-mail asking them to turn over such records to his office. Gonzales wrote that the requests were "pursuant to grand jury subpoenas."

The staff was told to turn over records of any "contacts, attempted contacts, or discussion of contacts, with any members of the media concerning Wilson, his trip, or his wife, including but not limited to the following media and media personnel."

The memo then names about 25 journalists, including Novak and five Washington Post reporters. The subpoena asks for any contacts from Feb. 1, 2002, to the present.

McClellan said at a briefing near Bush's ranch that Gonzales's memo urged "everybody to comply fully with the request from the investigators, and that's exactly what we are doing."

"At this point, we're still in the process of complying fully with those requests," McClellan said. "We have provided the Department of Justice investigators with much of the information and we're continuing to provide them with additional information and comply fully with the request for information."

White House officials said that neither Bush nor Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had issued a policy about whether aides called by the grand jury could invoke the Fifth Amendment, which protects citizens from having to testify against themselves. .

At the briefing, McClellan said Bush "has made it very clear he wants everybody inside government and outside government to provide those who are leading the investigation with information that might help them get to the bottom of this."

"Our policy, at the direction of the president, is that everybody should cooperate fully with those who are leading the investigation," he said. "That's our policy. I'm not going to speculate about grand jury proceedings. I have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination. I checked with White House counsel's office, and they have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination."

 

Here's the raw data...
_____________________
QUESTION: Scott, does either the President or Secretary Card have a policy on whether it's acceptable for White House aides to take the Amendment when they're asked questions in this case?

McClellan: Well, keep in mind that by law, grand jury investigations are closed, and prosecutors and grand jurors cannot reveal anything about the proceedings. The President has made it very clear he wants everybody inside government and outside government to provide those who are leading the investigation with information that might help them get to the bottom of this. He's been very clear about this, but let me make clear that -- well, go ahead, Mike.

QUESTION: Go ahead.

McClellan: No, no. You were going to ask a question; go ahead.

QUESTION: Are you willing to say that White House aides who ask questions in this investigation should not take the 5th Amendment?

McClellan: Our policy, at the direction of the President, is that everybody should cooperate fully with those who are leading the investigation. That's our policy. I'm not going to speculate about grand jury proceedings. I have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination. I checked with White House Counsel's Office, and they have no knowledge of anyone invoking their legal right against self-incrimination.

Jeff, go ahead.

QUESTION: Scott, it was a little difficult to hear the exchange that was going on, I want to make sure I understand what you've acknowledged responding to, subpoena-wise. You have responded to the subpoena for telephone records from Air Force One?

McClellan: Yes, we are complying fully with the request from the Department of Justice. I think you can ask them about the specific questions and issues -- the investigators, that is -- and, like I said, we prefer that you direct those questions to them, in our belief that that is helping them move the investigation forward.

 

Missed this one over the weekend...
________________
Envoy had been a target
Before his CIA wife’s cover was blown, White House directed efforts to discredit Joseph C. Wilson IV

BY TOM BRUNE
WASHINGTON BUREAU, Newsday

March 6, 2004

WASHINGTON - A transcript subpoenaed in the CIA leak probe reveals the White House press operation began efforts to personally discredit former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV days before a columnist blew the cover of his CIA-officer wife.

As Newsday reported Friday, a federal grand jury served three subpoenas on the White House in January for Air Force One telephone records and a transcript of a press briefing during the presidential trip to Africa the week before Robert Novak's July 14 column identifying CIA officer Valerie Plame.

The grand jury also subpoenaed White House records of staff contacts with an expanded list of more than two dozen reporters who wrote or broadcast about administration concerns over Plame, Wilson and his CIA report that rejected rumors Iraq tried to buy uranium in Niger.

The White House Friday confirmed it had received subpoenas. "We're still in the process of complying fully," said spokesman Scott McClellan.

The efforts to discredit Wilson came after he went public July 6 with criticism of President George W. Bush for mentioning the uranium rumor in January 2003 in his State of the Union address which helped make a case for the Iraq war.

In the subpoenaed July 12 transcript of a briefing in Nigeria, then-press secretary Ari Fleischer called Wilson a "lower-level official" and said Wilson had made flawed and incomplete statements. Fleischer did not return calls Friday.

Meanwhile, many of the journalists on the subpoena's list have reported various attempts by the Bush administration last year to discredit Wilson by suggesting his wife arranged for the CIA to send him to Niger.

For example, Time Magazine reported three days after Novak's column that unnamed administration officials had described Plame's relationship to Wilson and suggested she had gotten him the mission.

One journalist, NBC reporter and "Meet the Press" host Andrea Mitchell, appears to have several connections of interest.

On July 6, she interviewed Wilson about his trip to Niger, and two days later she reported officials tried to cast Wilson as a Democratic "partisan."

And on July 16, her husband, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, was honored at a White House reception held to celebrate former President Gerald Ford's 90th birthday. The grand jury subpoenaed the guest list, which has not been released.

"I shouldn't talk about it," Mitchell said Friday, declining to say if she attended the reception. Asked why the grand jury might be interested in it, she said, "I can't even imagine."

Probe's scope includes media figures

Subpoena list

A federal grand jury has subpoenaed White House records on administration contacts with more than two dozen journalists and news media outlets in a special investigation into the improper leak of a covert CIA official's identity to columnist Robert Novak last July. They include:



Robert Novak, "Crossfire," "Capital Gang" and the Chicago Sun-Times

Knut Royce and Timothy M. Phelps, Newsday

Walter Pincus, Richard Leiby, Mike Allen, Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post

Matthew Cooper, John Dickerson, Massimo Calabresi, Michael Duffy and James Carney, Time magazine

Evan Thomas, Newsweek

Andrea Mitchell, "Meet the Press," NBC

Chris Matthews, "Hardball," MSNBC

Tim Russert, Campbell Brown, NBC

Nicholas D. Kristof, David E. Sanger and Judith Miller, The New York Times

Greg Hitt and Paul Gigot, The Wall Street Journal

John Solomon, The Associated Press

Jeff Gannon, Talon News

 

From The American Prospect today...
________________
Plugging Leaks
More details emerge on the Plame investigation, as Karl Rove's testimony is revealed for the first time.
Murray S. Waas


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.

Rove, through an aide, declined to comment for this story. The White House also declined comment, referring any further inquiries to the Department of Justice because of the ongoing criminal investigation.

These revelations come on the heels of a Newsday report that Justice Department officials had subpoenaed the phone records of Air Force One for several days in July before the Novak column ran. In addition, according to Newsday, officials subpoenaed records from the same time period of the White House Iraq Group, an internal task force created to strengthen the case for war made to Congress and the American public. In addition to Rove, prominent members of the task force included National Security Council deputy Stephen J. Hadley; I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney; and former Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs Nicholas E. Calio.

The leak of Plame's name to Novak last July came at a time when Plame's husband was criticizing the Bush administration for using faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Wilson had led an eight-day, CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium to build an atomic weapon. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were contrived and that documents purportedly revealing the scheme were crude forgeries.

Still, President Bush, in making the case to go to war with Iraq, cited the allegations in his 2003 State of the Union address. Bush has since admitted that using the Niger information was a mistake, and he has appointed a presidential commission to investigate that and other instances of faulty intelligence considered by Congress before it authorized war.

It was last July, when Wilson first made public his criticisms, that Novak wrote his now-infamous newspaper column alleging that Wilson had received his assignment because his wife had recommended him for the position. The claim has since turned out to be untrue. Novak revealed that Plame was a covert CIA operative in the context of incorrectly asserting that she was responsible for her husband's appointment.

According to sources, Rove, in his interview with the FBI, said that he and others on the White House's political staff wanted to contain the political fallout from Wilson's allegations, and that they thought the charge of favoritism was a legitimate issue. Rove added that when he steered others in the direction of the now-disproved charges, he believed them to be true, in part because he regarded Novak as a credible news source.

When the Justice Department investigation began last September, the White House press corps repeatedly questioned White House press secretary Scott McClellan as to whether Rove was the person who leaked Plame's name to Novak. Initially, McClellan said that Rove had denied that he was the leaker.

Then, on September 28, The Washington Post reported:

"Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. `Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,' the senior official said of the alleged leak. A source said reporters quoted a leaker as describing Wilson's wife as `fair game.'"

A subsequent Newsweek story suggested that the Post had been incorrect in some details. According to the magazine's account, the calls to "at least six Washington journalists" took place after Novak's column appeared, rather than before. Furthermore, Newsweek made an assertion (confirmed by Wilson) that MSNBC talk-show host Chris Matthews called Wilson in July, a full week after Novak's column appeared, telling the former ambassador that "Karl Rove … said your wife was fair game."

When grilled on this variation of Rove's involvement, McClellan became evasive. McClellan insisted that the criminal investigation only centered on "whether someone leaked classified information;" questions regarding the "fair game" report were "down the road of rumor and innuendo and unsubstantiated accusations."

McClellan then warned reporters "not to read anything into what I said," refusing to answer questions about whether it was, in one reporter's words, "ethical for a senior administration official to advance a story about an illegal disclosure of a CIA operative, basically giving that story legs."

McClellan then repeatedly refused to exonerate Rove, according to a transcript of his remarks, instead insisting that any White House comments were merely a matter of "setting the record straight" rather than "spreading information to punish someone for speaking out," something the White House "would not condone."

As a result of the Post report, federal investigators are now hunting for not only the identity of the administration official who leaked Plame's name to Novak but also the administration official who told the paper about the telephone calls to the six other reporters. The investigators believe it likely, according to an attorney familiar with some aspects of the criminal investigation, that the source of the Post story may very well know the identity of the person who leaked Plame's name to Novak.

In interviews with potential witnesses, investigators have taken to referring to the story and its mysterious source as "one by two by six," meaning that one official may know the identity of two other administration officials who spoke to the six reporters.

"If they find 'one by two by six,' then just maybe… they have also found their guy," said one attorney familiar with the criminal investigation.

Still, little else is known regarding special counsel Peter Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame leak. A federal grand jury only recently began hearing evidence in the matter. FBI agents working on the probe have signed unprecedented secrecy agreements as a condition for working for the special counsel, and Fitzgerald has asked government officials and their attorneys appearing before his grand jury to agree not to disclose anything to the press or the public.

Media attention has so far focused largely on four current and former White House aides who have testified: McClellan; Claire Buchan, a deputy press secretary; Adam Levine, a former White House communications aide, and Mary Matalin, a former adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

But several sources have said that some news reports were reading too much into the recent grand-jury appearances. One government official familiar with the inquiry suggested that the grand jury was focusing on the "periphery of the action" and working toward "ruling certain people out and certain theories wrong." Reporters, meanwhile, were "maligning people simply because they did not know anything and had nothing to write." Questioning of more than one witness who has appeared before the grand jury, said an attorney familiar with the inquiry, was "truncated ... and over fairly quickly," adding that "they gave every impression they were closing some doors."