Jason Leopold: Still Confident About Rove Indictment Article Beleaguered investigative reporter Jason Leopold was on the Ed Schultz radio show yesterday, defending his Truthout article that Karl Rove has been indicted. He sounds very confident. You can listen here. Jason told Schultz that on Saturday he got a phone call from his sources telling him that the action Friday was not at the courthouse, but at Patton Boggs. They provided an extraordinary level of detail about what took place at the law firm. Jason is continuing to receive new details. He said that yesterday, he was told that the entire 4th floor of Patton Boggs was locked down for the marathon meeting. He reiterated his prior information, that Rove was there with his secret service detail, that plea negotiations were going on which ultimately were rejected outright, after which he was given an envelope containing the Indictment and told he had 24 hours to get his affairs in order. Jason said he believed by Saturday night, his article would break in the Washington Post, New York Times and other papers. He noted that yesterday, at Rove's NEI speech, only one reporter asked him about CIA leak case. No one had bothered to follow up on the story. No one asked him if he had been indicted. Jason says he confirmed the story with more than 2 sources. He says Knights- Ridder, MSNBC and ABC News now have one source for the story. He said that these same sources are repsonsible for his being able to break the story about the 250 pages of e-mail documents turned over to Fitzgerald in February. Schultz asked him if he thought he was being attacked by blogs because of jealousy. He responded that it's not jealousy, it's hatred. Jason said he does not believe he was set up. He still believes in his article, and reminds Ed that it said the indictment would be announced sometime this week. Jason also is checking on Fitzgerald's whereabouts Friday, and said he is going to check every vet within 20 miles of Luskin's house to see if he really was there with his cat. Jason said he is upset that some have accused him of lying. He would have no motive to lie. His goal was to get the story, not to bs anyone. So, two questions that should be easy to answer that could shed light on whether Jason's sources are accurate: 1. Does Patton Boggs in D.C. have a 4th floor? Or does it occupy four floors or more of an office tower? 2. Does Karl Rove have a secret service detail? According to the Secret Service website, Today, the Secret Service is authorized by law to protect: * the President, the Vice President, (or other individuals next in order of succession to the Office of the President), the President-elect and Vice President-elect; * the immediate families of the above individuals; * former Presidents, their spouses for their lifetimes, except when the spouse re-marries. In 1997, Congressional legislation became effective limiting Secret Service protection to former Presidents for a period of not more than 10 years from the date the former President leaves office. * children of former presidents until age 16; * visiting heads of foreign states or governments and their spouses traveling with them, other distinguished foreign visitors to the United States, and official representatives of the United States performing special missions abroad; * major Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates, and their spouses within 120 days of a general Presidential election. Then there's the question of why would Fitzgerald be conducting plea negotiations if the indictment had already been handed down? On that one, overlooking the issue of whether Fitzgerald would disclose a sealed indictment to Luskin and Rove before it was unsealed by the Court unless he also had obtained the Court's permission to do so, I can see one possible scenario. Perhaps Rove had been indicted on perjury and false statement charges, and Fitz was offering to let him plead to those counts, with a sentence concession for his cooperation, and letting him know that if he didn't accept the deal, he'd be going back to the grand jury and asking them to indict on obstruction of justice as well. Perhaps the 24 hours to get his affairs in order had to do with 24 hours to accept or reject the plea offer. (After all, it's not like Rove would be going to jail on Monday even if there was an Indictment. Like Libby, he'd get a personal recognizance bond. ) Even if Rove decided to reject the offer on Friday, at the end of the marathon session and didn't need until Monday, the earliest Fitz could go back to the grand jury for the indictment on the additional count would be today. The grand jury that is hearing the CIA leaks case meets Wednesdays and Fridays. Jason says his sources are clear the indictment tendered to Rove was already voted on by the grand jury. Is it possible that Fitzgerald didn't file it with the clerk of the court, but provided a copy to the Judge with a motion to seal it and a motion to allow him to share it with Rove and Luskin? Will we ever know? See, Libby's Indictment (copy of filed indictment here.) The first page contains the date it was filed with the Court and the date in 2003 the grand jury was sworn in. The last page contains signatures for the grand jury foreperson and Fitzgerald, but not the dates the signatures were placed there. Both Mark Corallo and Robert Luskin were very specific, emphatic and believable in their denials to me. But I also believe Jason that his sources have provided him this information. Which leads me back to wondering whether his sources were being truthful and accurate. [Added: The biggest problem for me is the sources' insistence that the Indictment was already voted on. See Ex-Fed's comment below.] I'm also wondering why Fitzgerald spokesperson Randall Samborn won't disclose whether Fitz was in Chicago or Washington on Friday. Why is that a secret?
I don't know what to think anymore -- Update on the Rove Indictment Story By Marc Ash, Wed May 17th, 2006 For the past few days, we have endured non-stop attacks on our credibility, and we have fought hard to defend our reputation. In addition, we have worked around the clock to provide additional information to our readership. People want to know more about this, and our job is to keep them informed. We take that responsibility seriously. Here's what we now know: I spoke personally yesterday with both Rove's spokesman Mark Corallo and Rove's attorney Robert Luskin. Both men categorically denied all key points of our recent reporting on this issue. Both said, "Rove is not a target," "Rove did not inform the White House late last week that he would be indicted," and "Rove has not been indicted." Further, both Corallo and Luskin denied Leopold's account of events at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm that represents Karl Rove. They specifically stated again that no such meeting ever occurred, that Fitzgerald was not there, that Rove was not there, and that a major meeting did not take place. Both men were unequivocal on that point. We can now report, however, that we have additional, independent sources that refute those denials by Corallo and Luskin. While we had only our own sources to work with in the beginning, additional sources have now come forward and offered corroboration to us. We have been contacted by at least three reporters from mainstream media - network level organizations - who shared with us off-the-record confirmation and moral support. When we asked why they were not going public with this information, in each case they expressed frustration with superiors who would not allow it. We also learned the following: The events at the office building that houses the law firm of Patton Boggs were not in fact a very well-guarded secret. Despite denials by Corallo and Luskin, there was intense activity at the office building. In fact, the building was staked out by at least two major network news crews. Further, although Corallo and Luskin are not prepared to talk about what happened in the offices of Patton Boggs, others emerging from the building were, both on background and off-the-record. There were a lot of talkers, and they confirmed our accounts. We do have more information, but want additional confirmation before going public with it. THE 24 HOUR THING We reported that Patrick Fitzgerald had, "instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order...." That does not mean that at the end of that 24-hour period, Fitzgerald is obliged to hold a press conference and make an announcement. It just means that he has given Rove a 24-hour formal notification. Fitzgerald is not obliged to make an announcement at any point; he does so at his own discretion, and not if it compromises his case. So we're all stuck waiting here. Grab some coffee. http://forum.truthout.org/blog/story/2006/5/17/125248/099
are 24 "business hours" up? perhaps JL's sources meant after 24 is up, meaning, after the 2 hour season finale of 24 next monday? WWJBD???
and FWIW, i checked google earth, and although it's by no means definitive, i will state that patton boggs does appear to have at least four floors...bearing in mind however, the 12 floor limit on downtown DC buildings.
Apparently on a radio program today Leopold said that the "24 business hour" quip was the work of an editor. Who knows anymore? Leopold could be trying to save his ass or Rove and his lawyers are playing games. Either way, we'll all know soon enough when Fitz finally says something.
Well we do know that indictments are usually dated. So I'm sure all will out. btw, are you saying that it could be true?
I believe Fitz wants desparately to indict Rove for something, and as we all know, you can indict a .
More internet fodder ... http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/ May 17, 2006 -- LATE EDITION -- WMR can report tonight on more details concerning the confusing reports regarding Karl Rove and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald from last Friday. WMR can confirm that the appearance of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Grand Jury at the US Federal Courthouse in Washington was a formality in which the jury informed the Attorney General of their decision to indict Karl Rove. That proceeding lasted for less than 30 minutes and took place shortly after noon. Gonzales's personal security detachment was present in the courthouse during the Grand Jury briefing. From the courthouse, Gonzales's motorcade proceeded directly down Constitution Avenue to the Department of Justice. According to sources within the Patton and Boggs law firm, Karl Rove was present at the law firm's building on M Street. WMR was told by a credible source that a Patton and Boggs attorney confirmed that Fitzgerald paid a visit to the law firm to inform Rove attorney Robert Luskin and Rove that an indictment would be returned by the Grand Jury against Rove. Contrary to other reports, some of which may have emanated from the Rove camp in order to create diversions and smokescreens, the meetings at Patton and Boggs did not last 15 hours nor was a 24-hour notice of intent to indict delivered to Rove. In the Scooter Libby case last October, after the Grand Jury decided to indict Libby on Friday, October 21 and the Attorney General personally heard the decision the same day at a meeting with the jury, the actual indictment was issued the following Friday, October 28. Several sources have told WMR that an announcement concerning the indictment of Rove will be made on Friday, May 19 generally following the same scenario from October 28, 2005 -- the posting of the indictment on the Special Prosecutor's web site followed by a press conference at Main Justice. WMR was also told by a credible source that part of the reason for Fitzgerald's visit to Patton and Boggs was to inform Rove attorney Luskin that he has moved into the category of a "subject" of the special prosecutor's investigation as a result of a conversation with Time reporter Viveca Novak, in which Novak told Luskin that Rove was a source for Time's Matt Cooper. The special prosecutor, who has prosecuted one defense attorney in the Hollinger case, is reportedly investigating whether Luskin, as an officer of the court, may have violated laws on obstruction of justice. WMR has also discovered that last year Rove, realizing he remained a lightning rod in the CIA Leakgate scandal, made preliminary plans to move into the private sector from the White House to take political heat off the Bush administration. However, as it became clear that he was in over his head legally and his legal bills piled up, Rove decided to remain at the White House.
Gonzales, like his predecessor John Ashcroft, has recused himself from the CIA leak investigation. Gonzales, as White House counsel, had taken part in the White House's response to the Justice Department in the early days of the probe. When he became attorney general, there was no doubt that he would have to recuse himself from the matter. He was asked about it during a press conference in October 2005, when there was great anticipation that indictments were coming in the CIA leak affair, and this is what he had to say: http://corner.nationalreview.com/
basso, I wouldn't trust Gonzales to hand me a tissue. Things are in a state of flux, for sure. Either someone is eventually going to own up to the egg on their face (Leopold), or Rove is going to get indicted in the next few days. Time will answer all. At least, we all hope so. Keep D&D Civil.
some background on Leopold and VIPS http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2006/05/get_cheney.html -- May 19, 2006 Get Cheney There has been one group of Cheney critics that has stood out among the rest, launching an all out offensive against the VP during the summer of 2003: the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). The ringleader, Ray McGovern, has been the most outspoken of the VIPS against Cheney, writing plenty of op-eds in various publications deriding the vice president. When did McGovern and VIPS start targeting Cheney? Coincidentally, McGovern and VIPS went after Cheney after McGovern’s first meeting with Joe Wilson. Additionally, the infamous Jason Leopold started writing articles that closely resemble the message that VIPS was forming about Cheney’s involvement in the Plame investigation starting October 2005. This was when VIPS suddenly went silent about Cheney. Ray McGovern was a keynote speaker at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) on June 14, 2003. Another keynote speaker at the event was none other than Joe Wilson. This was when Wilson stated carefully that the ambassador that had been talked about in news reports (himself) about Niger had been sent on behalf “not of the CIA, but of the government”. McGovern has detailed his first meeting with Wilson in several articles he has written. The one thing he seems to have left out of them was that it was after meeting Wilson that he suddenly had an urge to have Cheney kicked out of the White House. As with Wilson’s long-forgotten comment about not being sent by the CIA, McGovern adopted many of Wilson’s talking points in the following months. It began on 27 June 2003 with an article in CounterPunch called “Cheney, Forgery, and the CIA”. This would be a preview of Joe Wilson’s New York Times op-ed, where McGovern cites what must be Joe Wilson when he writes: In recent weeks, administration officials have begun spreading the word that Cheney was never told the Iraq-Niger story was based on a forgery. I asked a senior official who recently served at the National Security Council if he thought that was possible. He pointed out that rigorous NSC procedures call for a very specific response to all vice presidential questions and added that "the fact that Cheney's office had originally asked that the Iraq-Niger report be checked out makes it inconceivable that his office would not have been informed of the results." By this point, Joe Wilson had already gotten the ball rolling in the New York Times and the Washington Post that he, the ambassador, had debunked the Niger forgeries as part of his mission, and that this was reported back to Cheney and the State Department. Another bit of misinformation was whether or not it was Cheney who had sent Wilson, or that Cheney knew of the mission at all. The anonymously sourced articles couldn’t get the message straight on this, and Wilson repeated at the EPIC conference that he wasn’t sent on behalf of the CIA, but of the government. All of these claims were false and were part of a mounting attempt to take down Cheney. After being sourced in McGovern’s article about Cheney, Joe Wilson came out in his 6 July 2003 op-ed and repeated in substance his earlier quote: The documents should include… a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure. The case presented against Cheney was clear in that he supposedly knew about Wilson’s trip, knew that Wilson had debunked the forgeries, and that he ignored it to twist the intelligence on Iraq. What was left muddled was whether or not Cheney had ordered the mission, with the earlier media reports presenting an incoherent message, and Wilson stating in a more private setting that he wasn’t sent on the behalf of the CIA – which was undeniably false. This set the stage for VIPS to try and cut off the head of the beast, by demanding the resignation of Cheney. Ironically, VIPS published this message on 14 July 2003, the same day Novak published his column that revealed Plame as a CIA analyst. Here they repeated the claim that Wilson was sent by Cheney, in a letter to Bush: There is just too much evidence that Ambassador Wilson was sent to Niger at the behest of Vice President Cheney's office, and that Wilson's findings were duly reported not only to that office but to others as well… That this campaign was based largely on information known to be forged… Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who visited Niger at Cheney's request… it is equally clear that your vice president led this campaign of deceit… We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney's immediate resignation. In no uncertain terms, VIPS repeated the lies that Cheney requested Wilson to go on the mission, that his campaign was based on information known to be forged, and that Wilson’s report was given to Cheney. This was the result of a two months long campaign by Wilson to indict Cheney of wrongdoing by inventing a story that would eventually fall under its own weight, while he was an advisor to John Kerry’s presidential campaign no less. VIPS and Wilson would later claim that they had never alleged that Cheney had sent Wilson while alleging that the story about debunking forgeries was the result of Wilson having “misspoken”. In fact, two members of VIPS resigned from the group citing exactly such disingenuous behavior as their reason: We fear that, in its very laudable effort to expose the administration, this memorandum runs the risk of showing up VIPS itself as a group that plays fast and loose with the truth. VIPS play fast and loose with the facts to take down Cheney? Never in a million years! That two members of VIPS resigned because McGovern and Johnson aligned themselves with the agenda of Wilson and the Kerry campaign to take out Cheney can’t be seen as anything other than momentous. It seems Bill and Kathleen Christison saw where this was going, and they didn’t like it one bit. One can only imagine they are satisfied with their decision today, since this would be only the beginning. VIPS were not alone in calling for the removal of Cheney. On June 6-8 2003 presidential hopeful Lyndon LaRouche put out a memo “charging that the growing mountain of evidence showing that Cheney had repeatedly used a forged document to corral Congressional and public support for the Iraq War, constituted grounds for the impeachment of the Vice President.” Coincidentally, Ray McGovern has been a regular contributor to the LaRouche publication EIR which fantasized further on removing Cheney: Since LaRouche issued his demand that Cheney, and not President Bush, must be the target, the attention to Cheney's role in the intelligence fiasco leading into the war has heightened, so that as of this writing, the momentum is building to the point at which heads are likely to roll in the coming days and weeks. On the same day the Christisons resigned from VIPS, McGovern was at a congressional briefing held by another presidential hopeful, Representative Dennis Kucinich. Trying to solidify the story he and Wilson had propagated, McGovern responded to questions by Kucinich: Is it possible that Vice President Cheney was never told about the Wilson mission to Niger? "That's an easy one," McGovern answered. "It is not possible." It seems McGovern did not take the advice of the Christison’s, who warned that they could not be so sure what had happened within the administration, something which it later turned out that they would get burned on. McGovern continued to stick to the script Wilson had seemingly written in stone: Kucinich also asked McGovern, if it were possible that someone like former Ambassador Wilson could be sent to Niger at the initiative of the Vice President, and then the Vice President would not have been told the result? McGovern said that this would go through National Security Council (NSC) channels, adding: "When a Vice President has a question, as certain as night follows day, he gets an answer." We fast-forward to 20 July 2005 when things started to heat up in the Plame investigation. After the narrative about Cheney receiving Wilson’s report, Wilson debunking the forgeries, and Cheney sending Wilson had been laid to rest by the SSCI report, it was time to implicate Cheney in something else. At first Wilson wanted Rove to be the one frog-marched out of the White House for supposedly outing his wife’s classified occupation. Yet since Cheney was never forced to resign and the Bush administration had been re-elected, it was back to trying to get Cheney. Now Cheney was the one who directed the nefarious plot to out Plame. “The Hand of Cheney” is McGovern’s next article where he fingers Cheney in outing Plame while asking, “Did Dick Finger Plame?” He first tries to pretend that he himself never alleged that Cheney had sent Wilson or that Wilson had said something similar: …atop the Republican National Committee's current list of "Joe Wilson's Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and Misstatements" sits this priority item: "Wilson insisted that the Vice President's office sent him to Niger." This is a deliberate distortion of what Wilson has said, but if we were to address all such distortions we would be here all day. These were not distortions but were based on what Wilson and people like McGovern had written and said publicly. Then McGovern wrote what must be one of the most projectionist things he has written stating, “What strikes me more and more is the rather transparent two-year-old campaign to dissociate Cheney from L'Affaire Iraq-Niger.” That opposed to the transparent two-year-old campaign to associate Cheney with L’Affaire Iraq-Niger? As for addressing distortions all day, that’s exactly what one could say about McGovern’s article; for another rainy day, perhaps. He goes on to allege that Michael Ledeen was behind the forgeries, according to fellow VIPS member Vincent Cannistraro, one of many McGovern conspiracy theories. A brand new angle popped up in 2005, when they needed to fry Cheney in a different pan. Now a story about Wilson knowing that the White House was doing a “work-up” on him was peddled. McGovern, still in his 20 July 2005 article: It was the first time I met Wilson. He told me then that he was about to publish. I remember him adding, with considerable emphasis, "They are going to come after me big-time. I don't know exactly how, but they are going to do it." Well, now we know how; and why. A few months later, when it became apparent that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was going to hand down indictments, Cheney was still the target. After Larry Johnson confirmed a rumor that 22 indictments were pending, he and McGovern emphasized that Cheney was one of the people going down, in addition to Stephen Hadley and a list of others. On 20 October 2005, McGovern wrote an article titled “Chickens Come Home to Roost on Cheney”, stating: The coming months are likely to see senior Bush administration officials frog marched out of the White House to be booked, unless the president moves swiftly to fire Fitzgerald-a distinct possibility. McGovern’s love of conspiracy theories shines through again, here speculating that Bush might fire Fitzgerald to save all of his men that were supposedly going to be indicted. If you thought the debunked lies about Wilson’s mission had cleared their way out of McGovern’s system, you’d be wrong: According to Kristof, that mission was undertaken at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney's office to investigate a report that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Very cleverly he attributes this to Kristof, leaving out the fact that Wilson is the one who told Kristof. No wait, Kristof misquoted him. Uh huh. McGovern dove back in to fish up Wilson’s warning of impending doom: Wilson then turned dead serious and, with considerable emphasis, told me the White House had already launched a full-court press in an effort to dredge up dirt on him. He added, "When I do speak out, they are going to go after me big time. I don't know the precise nature the retaliation will take, but I can tell you now it will be swift and vindictive. They cannot afford to have people thinking they can escape unscathed if they spill the beans on the dishonesty undergirding this war." (Sad to say, the White House approach has worked. There are perhaps a hundred of my former C.I.A. colleagues who know about the lies; none-not one-has been able to summon the courage to go public.) How did Wilson know this? Did he talk to his friend Marc Grossman at the State Department perhaps? No, of course not, they aren’t friends, wink, wink. McGovern isn’t a particularly good liar, as he here claims that none of his former CIA colleagues that knew about lies had the courage to go public. Apparently Tyler Drumheller, Paul Pillar, Larry Johnson, himself, among others, disappeared from the Earth the moment McGovern decided to write this column. He finishes off with the speculation he started with: But now the president may have to let Cheney go after all. Why? Because special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is taking his job seriously… If the case Fitzgerald has built, however, is not strong enough to implicate Bush personally, it seems likely that the president will acquiesce in wholesale frog marching of others from the White House… Yeah, whatever happened to that? Enter Jason Leopold. Faced with having been completely wrong about indictments and Cheney going down, it seems that VIPS got themselves a mouthpiece they could use, one who didn’t mind getting his story completely wrong. Although Raw Story has tried to remove traces of it, Leopold wrote a story on 26 October 2005 that claimed Libby and Rove would be indicted, in addition to Libby being indicted for outing Plame. When that didn’t happen, Leopold switched right over to Cheney. As if echoing McGovern, Leopold wrote on 28 October 2005: But Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak has led to many discoveries by the prosecutor, one of which is that Cheney played a key role in the leak and the reason was to closely guard the fact that the White House knowingly used false intelligence, specifically the Niger documents, to build a case for war against Iraq. In a November 7th article in Truthout, Leopold claims that, “Fitzgerald has eyed Cheney in seeking to ascertain who ordered the leak, as previously reported. While the Vice President stands accused of no wrongdoing, his role may come into greater focus during a trial.” Leopold then went after Cheney about the NSA program, claiming in a January 20 article: It was then that the NSA started receiving numerous requests from Cheney and other officials in the state and defense departments to reveal the identities of the Americans blacked out or deleted from intelligence reports… But the sources said that on dozens of occasions Cheney would, upon learning the identity of the individual, instruct the NSA to continue monitoring specific Americans caught in the wiretaps if he thought more information would be revealed, which crossed the line into illegal territory. Was he done? No, he quotes a “former counterterrorism official” as saying: "What's really disturbing is that some of those people the vice president was curious about were people who worked at the White House or the State Department," one former counterterrorism official said. "There was a real feeling of paranoia that permeated from the vice president's office and I don't think it had anything to do with the threat of terrorism. I can't say what was contained in those taps that piqued his interest. I just don't know." Larry Johnson is a former counterterrorism official, if that means anything. Back to the Plame investigation, and picking on Cheney; Leopold writes February 9th for Truthout: Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials. The officials work or had worked in the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council in a senior capacity and had direct knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to discredit Wilson. This mimics McGovern’s earlier claims that came from Wilson, that they were doing a “work-up” on Wilson; now they allege this started in March 2003 after Wilson made a TV appearance on CNN talking about the forgeries. Notice how the sources could all easily fit within the VIPS group, plus Wilson, Rand Beers, and not to mention Marc Grossman. One can virtually feel Leopold getting strung along by his sources: "The way I remember it," the CIA official said about that first meeting he attended in Cheney's office, "is that the vice president was obsessed with Wilson. He called him an '*******,' a son-of-a-b****. He took his comments very personally. He wanted us to do everything in our power to destroy his reputation and he wanted to be kept up to date about the progress." Ironically enough, it was Wilson who called the Bush administration assholes in his keynote speech at the EPIC conference in June 2003. It gets juicier: The CIA, State Department and National Security Council officials said that early on they had passed on information about Wilson to Cheney and Libby that purportedly showed Wilson as being a "womanizer" and that he had dabbled in drugs during his youth, allegations that are apparently false, they said. OK, so Leopold has all these wonderful sources in all kinds of places, giving him completely new, unreported and juicy details from everything that was supposedly going on. The only problem was that it just sounded like a whole lot of loose allegations. Leopold needed to give the story more credibility, and tried doing so on February 25th. In this article, titled “Cheney Exposed?” he alleges that the White House turned over 250 pages of emails from Cheney’s office to Fitzgerald, which Fitzgerald supposedly revealed to the grand jury: The emails are said to be explosive, and may prove that Cheney played an active role in the effort to discredit Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, sources close to the investigation said. Perfect! On cue, after Leopold writes an article about Cheney being “exposed”, Ray McGovern chimes in on April 10 with an article named “Blowing Cheney’s Cover”, although this article was not about the Plame investigation. On the same day, Leopold publishes another article about Cheney and Plame – a topic on which McGovern had suddenly been silent on since Libby’s indictment. Here Leopold not only implicates Cheney again but brings Bush into the ring: In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media. As typical for a Leopold article, absolutely no one who would deny anything he said could be reached for comment. His sources for the article are attorneys and US officials “close to the case”, whatever that is supposed to mean, which appear to be the same sources Leopold has used throughout. Another Leopold feature, “I report therefore it is” journalism: Now that President Bush's knowledge of the Plame Wilson affair has been exposed, there are thorny questions about whether the president has broken the law - specifically, whether he obstructed justice when he was interviewed about his knowledge of the Plame Wilson leak and the campaign to discredit her husband. If you thought he was getting ridiculous yet, perhaps the most laughable is this: According to four attorneys who last week read a transcript of President Bush's interview with investigators, Bush did not disclose to the special counsel that he was aware of any campaign to discredit Wilson. Bush also said he did not know who, if anyone, in the White House had retaliated against the former ambassador by leaking his wife's undercover identity to reporters. Attorneys close to the case said that Fitzgerald does not appear to be overly concerned or interested in any alleged discrepancy in Bush's statements about the leak case to investigators. Now that’s believable! Bush lied, but Fitzgerald doesn’t care, so you probably won’t be hearing anything about it in the future. Gotcha. OK, I lied, there is one more part of the article that is even more ludicrous: In the interest of fairness, any person identified in this story who believes he has been portrayed unfairly or that the information about him is untrue will have the opportunity to respond in this space. In other words, “I was basically pulling things out of my ass here, so please tell me where I was wrong.” After this, the focus went back to Rove again, although the new revelation of Cheney’s notes on the Wilson op-ed set hearts aflutter. However, McGovern and the VIPS crew have seemingly gone silent on Cheney since Libby’s indictment. Have they given up on getting the VP removed from office? Or have they found themselves a mouthpiece to hide behind in Leopold? If Rove doesn’t get indicted and Leopold holds his promise to out his sources, we may find out. Don’t hold your breath, though.
In basso's world, the outing of an undercover CIA agent -- who was working on WMD in Iran during a "war on terror" in which Iran is one of our main concerns -- by top White House officials, for the purpose of revenge against the agent's husband for exposing the lies those same officials were telling us to convince us to support a bogus war, is a "kerfluffle" while a reporter possibly getting a story about the whole thing wrong is a big deal. I think that's super.
glad you're on board, since everything you've cited above is pure speculation. should fitz actually charge someone with the outing of an undercover CIA agent -- who was working on WMD in Iran during a "war on terror" in which Iran is one of our main concerns -- by top White House officials, for the purpose of revenge against the agent's husband for exposing the lies those same officials were telling us to convince us to support a bogus war, i'll be delighted to re-examine my position, but until such time, it is just a kerfluffle, cooked up by the times and it's fellow trav-errr, kossacks, to damage bush when the country is at war. not so supportive of the troops, i might add...
Again with the fairy tale that opposing Bush equals opposing the troops. Nice. Clinton wasn't impeached for extra-marital sex, for sexual harassment or for Whitewater. He was impeached for lying under oath. Was that a kerfluffle? Neither the Times nor dailykos nor any other media outlet or liberal interest could have brought the damage on Bush that he and his top staff brought on themselves by their usual arrogant, scorched earth, political revenge tactics. I also find it hilarious you blame the Times when it was one of their main writers that best carried water for this administration back when it was lying to us to scare us into supporting this unnecessary quagmire of a war.
