Not Another Rove Thread

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Warham
Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat

All evidence to the contrary

[worldbefree]

The plot thickens..

July 28, 2005
Case of C.I.A. Officer's Leaked Identity Takes New Turn
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, July 26 - In the same week in July 2003 in which Bush administration officials told a syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter that a C.I.A. officer had initiated her husband's mission to Niger, an administration official provided a Washington Post reporter with a similar account.

The first two episodes, involving the columnist Robert D. Novak and the reporter Matthew Cooper, have become the subjects of intense scrutiny in recent weeks. But little attention has been paid to what The Post reporter, Walter Pincus, has recently described as a separate exchange on July 12, 2003.

In that exchange, Mr. Pincus says, "an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention" to the trip to Niger by Joseph C. Wilson IV "because it was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, an analyst with the agency who was working on weapons of mass destruction."

Mr. Wilson traveled to Niger in 2002 at the request of the C.I.A. to look into reports about Iraqi efforts to buy nuclear materials. He later accused the administration of twisting intelligence about the nuclear ambitions of Iraq, prompting an angry response from the White House.

Mr. Pincus did not write about the exchange with the administration official until October 2003, and The Washington Post itself has since reported little about it. The newspaper's most recent story was a 737-word account last Sept. 16, in which the newspaper reported that Mr. Pincus had testified the previous day about the matter, but only after his confidential source had first "revealed his or her identity" to Mr. Fitzgerald, the special counsel conducting the C.I.A. leak inquiry.

Mr. Pincus has not identified his source to the public. But a review of Mr. Pincus's own accounts and those of other people with detailed knowledge of the case strongly suggest that his source was neither Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, nor I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and was in fact a third administration official whose identity has not yet been publicly disclosed.

Mr. Pincus's most recent account, in the current issue of Nieman Reports, a journal of the Nieman Foundation, makes clear that his source had volunteered the information to him, something that people close to both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said they did not do in their conversations with reporters.

Mr. Pincus has said he will not identify his source until the source does so. But his account and those provided by other reporters sought out by Mr. Fitzgerald in connection with the case provide a fresh window into the cast of individuals other than Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby who discussed Ms. Wilson with reporters.

In addition to Mr. Pincus, the reporters known to have been pursued by the special prosecutor include Mr. Novak, whose column of July 14, 2003, was the first to identify Ms. Wilson, by her maiden name, Valerie Plame; Mr. Cooper, who testified before a grand jury on the matter earlier this month; Tim Russert, the Washington bureau chief of NBC News, and who was interviewed by the prosecutor last year; Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic reporter for The Post, who was also interviewed last year, and Judith Miller of The New York Times, who is now in jail for refusing to testify about the matter. It is not known whether Mr. Novak has testified or been interviewed on the matter.

Both Mr. Pincus, who covers intelligence matters for The Post, and Mr. Russert have continued to report on the investigation after being interviewed by Mr. Fitzgerald about their conversations with government officials.

Mr. Pincus wrote in the Nieman Reports article that he had agreed to answer questions from Mr. Fitzgerald last fall about his July 12, 2003, conversation only after "it turned out that my source, whom I still cannot identify publicly, had in fact disclosed to the prosecutor that he was my source, and he talked to the prosecutor about our conversation."

In identifying Ms. Wilson and her role, Mr. Novak attributed that account to two senior Bush administration officials. One of those officials was Mr. Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff, according to people close to Mr. Rove, who have said he merely confirmed information that Mr. Novak already had.

But the identity of Mr. Novak's original source, whom he has described as "no partisan gunslinger," remains unknown.

Mr. Cooper of Time magazine, who wrote about the matter several days after Mr. Novak's column appeared, has written and said publicly that he told a grand jury that Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove were among his sources. But Mr. Cooper has also said that there may have been others.

Ms. Miller never wrote a story about the matter. She has refused to testify in response to a court order directing her to testify in response to a subpoena from Mr. Fitzgerald seeking her testimony about a conversation with a specified government official between June 6, 2003, and June 13, 2003.

During that period, Ms. Miller was working primarily from the Washington bureau of The Times, reporting to Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms. Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times.

In e-mail messages this week, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of the newspaper, declined to address written questions about whether Ms. Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson.

The four reporters known to have been interviewed by Mr. Fitzgerald or to have appeared before the grand jury have said that they did so after receiving explicit permission from their sources, most notably Mr. Libby, who was the subject of the interviews involving Mr. Russert, Mr. Kessler, Mr. Pincus and Mr. Cooper. They have declined to elaborate on their statements, citing Mr. Fitzgerald's request that they and others not speak publicly about the matter.

Mr. Russert, Mr. Kessler and Mr. Pincus have indicated in statements released by their news organizations that their conversations with Mr. Libby were not about Ms. Wilson.

In his article in the Summer 2005 issue of Nieman Reports, Mr. Pincus wrote that he did not write about Ms. Wilson when he first heard the account "because I did not believe it true that she had arranged" Mr. Wilson's trip.

Mr. Pincus first disclosed the July 12, 2003, conversation with an administration official in an Oct. 12, 2003, article in The Washington Post, but did not mention in that article that he himself had been the recipient of the information. He wrote in Nieman Reports that he did not believe the person who spoke to him was committing a criminal act, but only practicing damage control by trying to get him to write about Mr. Wilson.

David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting for this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/28/politics/28leak.html?ei=5088&en=0eca1936f541e166&ex=1280203200&adxnnl=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1122520575-UiA6bBeNkAeTLIw1j2twDA&pagewanted=print

[Sarge's Little Helper]

Rove is a pigfucker.

[Warham]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
All evidence to the contrary

Well, he's not the liberal kook that you'd vote for, so I can see why you'd say that.

[FORD]

[Warham]

Democratic Self-Strangulation
By The Prowler
Published 7/27/2005 12:10:27 AM

KEEP ROVE ALIVE

Just how hijacked is the Democratic Party? Former CIA analyst and Joe Wilson advocate Larry Johnson was allowed to give the party's weekly national radio address. Some Democrats in both the House and Senate are wondering why the party continues to beat on the supposed Karl Rove scandal, despite the fact that there is no clear evidence the story is helping the party politically.

"I haven't seen a single, serious poll beyond the media's that attacking Rove helps us one bit with the voters," says a Democratic House member. "No one can show me numbers. This is all the fringe people like MoveOn and even Howard Dean. It's all about not getting past 2000 and 2004. And I really fear we're going to pay for it down the road."

He points to the energy bill wending its way out of both the Senate and House, as well as the USA PATRIOT Act renewal, and the highway bill as evidence that his party is losing sight of good political fights they should be waging, and instead are focusing on what amounts to minor scandals.

"My party is making a huge bet on something we really know nothing about," says the Democrat. "We don't know where this Plame thing is going to go, yet we're giving these people a huge platform. I'd rather be fighting for the issues that we know Americans care about: the environment, more of their tax dollars on national security and homeland defense. That stuff resonates at home."

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8505

[Warham]

Her Code Name Was 'Kerfuffle'
James Taranto

It's inevitable. Every time a Republican is in the White House, Democrats and the press go off in search of "another Watergate." Scandal, the Dems seem to think, is a quick fix for their political woes. And it's true that after George McGovern's landslide defeat in 1972, Watergate helped the Democrats stage a comeback. They made major gains in Congress in 1974 and won the White House in 1976. But that was it: The Republicans picked up congressional seats in 1978 and thoroughly trounced the Democrats in 1980.

Ginning up a scandal in the Bush administration was going to be particularly difficult, because there was no independent counsel statute. That law, a post-Watergate reform, provided for the appointment of prosecutors who had unlimited resources and a mandate to investigate a particular executive-branch official and those around him. Republicans had long complained of the excesses of such unconstrained investigations, and after Bill Clinton's experience with the Whitewater independent counsels, the Democrats came to see that they had a point. By bipartisan consensus, the independent counsel law expired in 2000.

But there is now a special prosecutor--a quasi-independent counsel--at work on one Bush "scandal." We first weighed in on the Valerie Plame kerfuffle on Sept. 29, 2003.

Here's the backstory: On July 6, 2003, a man by the name of Joseph Wilson published an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Wilson had been sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein had sought to acquire uranium there. Wilson said he had found no evidence of this, and in his op-ed he concluded "that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

This created something of a media sensation, and on July 14, Robert Novak published a column explaining why Wilson had been chosen for the mission:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Wilson denied that Plame had anything to do with his getting the Niger gig, and he charged that Novak's sources had "outed" his wife as a covert agent in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act as retaliation for his criticism and in order to "discourage others from coming forward" against the administration. The CIA asked the Justice Department to investigate the matter, and in late September the existence of this investigation became public.

This column was among the first to cast serious doubt on Wilson's allegation. On Oct. 6, 2003, we pointed out that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is a difficult law to break. First of all, the CIA agent in question must be "covert," which by the statute's definition means he must have been working overseas within five years of the disclosure. Plame was known to be working a desk job at CIA headquarters in July 2003; and since she became pregnant with twins in 1999 or early 2000, we surmised that if she had been working overseas during the requisite five-year period, it was most likely only at the very beginning. Further, as we noted:

In order for the alleged leakers to have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, they would have to have known that she was covert and that the government was "taking affirmative measures to conceal" her relationship to the CIA. Novak's statement that the CIA made only "a very weak request" that he not use her name suggests the absence of such "affirmative measures."

Nonetheless, the administration came under strong political pressure to appoint a special prosecutor, and it eventually succumbed. On Dec. 30, 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation and appointed Chicago prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to take it over.

But Wilson's story fell apart. On July 12, 2004, we noted that a Senate Intelligence Committee report had discredited both of his key allegations. As the Washington Post reported:

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly. . . . The panel [also] found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts.

Then, on July 29, 2004, we noted a Wall Street Journal editorial reporting that Wilson had been quietly cast out of the Kerry campaign, which had been trumpeting his role as a foreign-policy adviser. The previous day, at an offsite event during the Democratic National Convention, Wilson railed against his critics, including The Wall Street Journal, which publishes this Web site, implying that the paper is part of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the investigation. What's more, as the Journal editorial noted, "He began his talk by asking 'if it is OK if I harbor just a little bit of violence toward a certain journalist'--presumably a reference to Robert Novak."

Despite Wilson's disintegration, the special prosecutor's investigation ground on, and Fitzgerald sought to question various reporters who had covered the kerfuffle. Most of them reached agreements to testify, but two, Time's Matt Cooper and the New York Times' Judith Miller, held out and said they were willing to go to jail rather than reveal confidential sources.

Suddenly, the Times changed its tune. Its editorial page had beaten the drums loudly for a special prosecutor: "Mr. Fitzgerald is charged with finding out who violated federal law by giving the name of the undercover intelligence operative to Mr. Novak for publication in his column," the Times editorialized on Dec. 31, 2003, applauding the appointment of a special prosecutor. But on Feb. 28, 2005, as we noted, the Times argued:

Meanwhile, an even more basic issue has been raised in recent articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere: the real possibility that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity, while an abuse of power, may not have violated any law. Before any reporters are jailed, searching court review is needed to determine whether the facts indeed support a criminal prosecution under existing provisions of the law protecting the identities of covert operatives.

As we pointed out that day, Times columnists and op-eds had been even more reckless in asserting flatly that a felony had been committed.

Earlier this month, Cooper reached a last-minute agreement to avoid jail, but Miller, having exhausted her appeals, was held in contempt of court and is now behind bars. "Such an outcome might have been avoided," we wrote on Feb. 28, "if journalists--notably including the Times' editorialists and columnists--had treated Wilson's accusations with responsibility and skepticism in the first place."

The revelation this month that Karl Rove, now the White House's deputy chief of staff, was a Cooper source set off a frenzy of speculation among Angry Left fantasists, which eventually bubbled up to Democratic politicians and the mainstream media. Yet there is no publicly available evidence that Rove or anyone else violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or any other law, so on July 12 we engaged in little gentle mockery:

People who think in clichés keep asserting that "there's blood in the water," meaning Rove's. Those of us who have actually gone fishing know chum when we see it.

The special prosecutor's office has played its cards close to its chest, so any prediction as to how this will end would be pure speculation. As Bill Clinton can attest, sometimes prosecutors investigate alleged wrongdoing for years and find nothing worth bringing an indictment over. And as Martha Stewart can attest, an innocent person can become guilty by doing the wrong thing during a criminal investigation--so it's possible Fitzgerald will seek indictments for perjury or obstruction of justice, even if there is no underlying crime.

When it's all over, though, we hope that anti-Bush partisans in the press will think long and hard about whether it was all worth it.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110006974

[ODShowtime]

When it's all over, though, we hope that anti-Bush partisans in the press will think long and hard about whether it was all worth it.

[Warham]

It's not worth it, but they are trying hard to make it so.

[Cathedral]

What yanks my gizzard is that there are more important issues to address than partisan attacks, by either party.

If any other Americans are experiencing an eye opener like i am, they're sick and tired of the scandles too.

It's going to hurt both parties, because they both currently suck and aren't doing what they were elected to do, which is represent the people as opposed to their own power grabbing agenda's.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
It's not worth it, but they are trying hard to make it so.

ROVE's a crook that put partisanship above national security. Fuck him!

[Warham]

Desperate, huh?

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
Desperate, huh?

For justice, I guess I'm desperate. But you could give a shit about that, right?

[Warham]

This isn't about justice. It's about partisan politics.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
This isn't about justice. It's about partisan politics.

You're kidding right?

Oh Jesus, check your CLINTON posts and get back to me...

Let's check the perjury law...yup!