More "straight" talk from the C-i-C ... Bush: Any Criminals in Leak to Be Fired Jul 18, 12:42 PM (ET) By PETE YOST WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said Monday that if anyone in his administration committed a crime in connection with the public leak of the identity of an undercover CIA operative, that person will "no longer work in my administration." At the same time, Bush again sidestepped a question on the role of his top political adviser, Karl Rove, in the matter. "We have a serious ongoing investigation here and it's being played out in the press," Bush said at an East Room news conference. Bush, appearing with visiting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, spoke a day after Time magazine's Matthew Cooper said that a 2003 phone call with Rove was the first he heard about the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson apparently working for the CIA. 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. Asked at a June 10, 2004, news conference if he stood by his pledge to fire anyone found to have leaked Plame's name, Bush answered, "Yes. And that's up to the U.S. attorney to find the facts." ...
GWB on 7/18/05: "if someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration." Didn't George himself commit the crime of DUI, and get convicted? Looks like he better fire himself under his new, sweeping policy. I...can't...help....myself....
Bush moved the goal posts just like he did with Iraq. First Iraq was about WMD, then terrorism, then democracy in the middle east. First anybody involved with leaking would be out of the administration, now it has been changed to anybody convicted of committing a crime. I'm glad that unlike Clinton, Bush just says what he means and doesn't play word games.
it's unfortunate that none of you even attempt to get your facts straight. http://www.threebadfingers.com/?p=359 -- consider this question and answer session with the President on September 30, 2003 regarding the Valerie Plame leak (emphasis mine): QUESTION: Do you think that the Justice Department can conduct an impartial investigation, considering the political ramifications of the CIA leak, and why wouldn’t a special counsel be better? THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of. And so I welcome the investigation. I — I’m absolutely confident that the Justice Department will do a very good job. There’s a special division of career Justice Department officials who are tasked with doing this kind of work; they have done this kind of work before in Washington this year. I have told our administration, people in my administration to be fully cooperative. I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business. Predicated upon these earlier comments, President Bush was asked further questions on June 10, 2004 (emphasis mine): QUESTION: Given — given recent developments in the CIA leak case, particularly Vice President Cheney’s discussions with the investigators, do you still stand by what you said several months ago, a suggestion that it might be difficult to identify anybody who leaked the agent’s name? THE PRESIDENT: That’s up to — QUESTION: And, and, do you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found to have done so? THE PRESIDENT: Yes. And that’s up to the U.S. Attorney to find the facts.
It will be much easier to be President of the United States if you just bow to the will of your opponents-- within and without!
What is unfortunate is that you choose to ignore inconvenient facts and twist others. Either you or the site that comes from has once again engaged in creative editing. You can only choose to quote the part that helps your side or you can look at the whole issue. Because Bush also said some other things. We still have a record of that statement. The goal posts have been moved.
Seriously, that dog died in the late 70s with Carter. Do you realize the MSM has no bias towards Democrats? Their bias are news stories. Of course, they do not call things with a Republican bias, either. All/Most indicatioins point at Rove in this leak. You know Rove's history just as well as I do. Do not be ignorant about this, it is not a partisan issue. It should not be one, as well. I fully support punishment of those involved; not because they may be Senior White House officials, but because there was someone who used information to try to discredit a report that turned out true. basso, this is not a game of hardball, but actual crime. You would agree that no one is above the law, but why is Bush stonewalling? Below is a poll by ABC News. Should Karl Rove Be Fired If He Leaked Classified Information? Code: Yes No All 75% 15% Republicans 71 17 Independents 74 17 Democrats 83 12
The main stream media is anything but liberal. As a liberal I can promise you they don't write their columns and articles from my point of view. You can whine about the coverage all day long, but the fact is that a quote was made. The word came from this administration and all it said was being 'involved'. They may have also said anyone who committed a crime, but that doesn't change that it was this administration and not me or the MSM that set the standard of a person simply being involved. You still haven't answered how you are ok with CIA operatives involved with WMD being outted and weakening our abilities to combat terrorism whether a law was broken or not, is something that isn't worth our attention.
Why do the facts have an agenda against the administration? [edit] Better get the SC nominee out there to change the subject.
Memo Underscored Issue of Shielding Plame's Identity By ANNE MARIE SQUEO and JOHN D. MCKINNON Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL July 19, 2005; Page A3 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. A special prosecutor is investigating whether Bush administration officials broke the law by intentionally outing a covert intelligence operative. Investigators are trying to determine if the memo, dated June 10, 2003, was how White House officials learned that Valerie Wilson was an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. 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. In a news conference yesterday that followed disclosures that his top strategist, Karl Rove, had discussed Ms. Wilson's CIA employment with two reporters, Mr. Bush adopted a different formulation, specifying criminality as the standard for firing. "If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration," Mr. Bush said. White House spokesman Scott McClellan later disputed the suggestion that the president had shifted his position. 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. http://online.wsj.com/public/articl...4bAJGgqjdsNHxrYSNE_20050818,00.html?mod=blogs
An Unlikely Story Karl Rove's alibi would be easier to believe if he hadn't hidden it from FBI investigators in 2003. By Murray Waas Web Exclusive: 07.19.05 Print Friendly | Email Article 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. 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. Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove's accounts was the claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has said that Rove never knew that Plame was a covert officer when he discussed her CIA employment with reporters, and that he only first learned of her clandestine status when he read about it in the newspaper. Luskin did not return a telephone call today seeking comment for this story. If recently disclosed press accounts of conversations that Rove had with reporters are correct, Novak and Rove first spoke about Plame on July 8, 2003. It was three days later, on July 11, that Rove also spoke about Plame to Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper. Three days after that, on July 14, Novak's column appeared in which he identified Plame as an "agency operative." According to Novak's account, it was he, not Rove, who first broached the issue of Plame's employment with the CIA, and that Rove at most simply said that he, too, had heard much the same information. Novak's column came during a period of time when senior White House officials were attempting to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was then asserting that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq. Wilson had only recently led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was covertly attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back that the claims were most likely the result of a hoax. But President Bush had still cited them during a State of the Union address as evidence that Hussein had an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass destruction. In the column, Novak called Plame an "agency operative," thus identifying her as a covert CIA agent. But Novak has since claimed that his use of the phrase "agency operative" was a formulation of his own, and that he did not know, or mean to tell his readers, that she had a covert status with the agency. Rove, too, has told federal investigators he did not know that Plame had a covert status with the CIA when he spoke with Novak, and Cooper, about Plame. The distinction as to whether Rove specifically knew Plame’s status has been central to the investigation of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; under the law, a government official can only be prosecuted if he or she knew of a person's covert status and "that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent." But investigators were also skeptical of Novak's claim that his use of the term "operative" was a journalistic miscue because it appeared to provide legal protection for whoever his source or sources were. And although Novak's and Rove's accounts of their conversations regarding Plame were largely consistent, they appeared to be self-serving. It has been, in large part, for all of these reasons that Fitzgerald so zealously sought the testimony of reporters Cooper and Judith Miller of The New York Times, according to sources sympathetic to Fitzgerald. Cooper testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury last week, after earlier having been found in civil contempt for refusing to do so. In contrast, Miller has refused to testify, and is currently serving a sentence in an Alexandria, Virginia, jail. Finally, also driving Fitzgerald's investigation has been Rove's assertions that he only found out about Plame's status with the CIA from a journalist -- and one whose name he does not recall. But as The New York Times first disclosed on July 16, senior Bush administration officials first learned that Plame worked for the CIA from a classified briefing paper on July 7, 2003, exactly a week before Novak's column naming Plame appeared and at the time that senior Bush administration officials were devising a strategy to discredit Wilson. The classified memorandum, dated June 10, 2003, was written by Marc Grossman, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs, and reportedly made claims similar to those made by Wilson: that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Hussein to make the case to go to war with Iraq. The report was circulated to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and a slew of other senior administration officials who were then traveling with President Bush to Africa. Fitzgerald has focused on whether Rove might have learned of Plame's identity from one of the many senior White House officials who read the memo, according to the Times account and attorneys whose clients have testified before the federal grand jury. http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10016
"...senior Bush administration officials first learned that Plame worked for the CIA from a classified briefing paper on July 7, 2003, exactly a week before Novak's column naming Plame appeared and at the time that senior Bush administration officials were devising a strategy to discredit Wilson." __________ What an amazing coincidence...
Do you really think that Plame being outed weakened our "ability to combat terrorism" more than Durbin's idiotic remarks.. and the scores of like-minded asswipes who bay at the moon?
