Novakula’s Tea Bag

The Howler notes something important about Novak’s column yesterday in which he wrote:

I have previously said that I never would have written those sentences if Harlow, then-CIA Director George Tenet or anybody else from the agency had told me that Valerie Plame Wilson’s disclosure would endanger herself or anybody.

You have to assume by this statement that he must have talked to Tenet before he ran the story, right? Perhaps this is common knwledge and I’ve just missed it, but this is the first I’ve heard of this. Novak just slinging around Tenet’s name in that context is a little bit bizarre to say the least.

Somerby thinks that there’s a good chance that Tenet was the source Novak refered to as “not a partisan gunslinger,” and I think that’s certainly a possibility. (According to joe Wilson, Novak told him that his original source was with the CIA.) In fact, Tenet was one of the few members of the Bush administration who could even conceivably be characterized that way. Somerby speculates that Tenet being a “hail fellow well met” sort who knew the names of agents and remembered birthdays and such that he might have been the one who knew Valerie Wilson by her maiden name and told it to Novak.

This is intriguing since just a couple of weeks ago the papers were all reporting that a “source who had been briefed on the matter” and others were saying that Karl Rove and Lewis Libby had been working closely with Tenet on the official mea culpa:

“People who have been briefed on the case said the White House officials said Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr., were helping to prepare what became the administration’s primary response to criticism that a flawed phrase about the nuclear materials in Africa had been included in Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address six months earlier. They had exchanged e-mail correspondence and drafts of a proposed statement by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to explain how the disputed wording had gotten into the address. Mr. Rove, the president’s political strategist, and Mr. Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, coordinated their efforts with Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, who was in turn consulting with Mr. Tenet.

[…]

The work done by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby on the Tenet statement during this intense period has not been previously disclosed. People who have been briefed on the case discussed this critical time period and the events surrounding it to demonstrate that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were not involved in an orchestrated scheme to discredit Mr. Wilson or disclose the undercover status of his wife, Valerie Wilson, but were intent on clarifying the use of intelligence in the president’s address. Those people who have been briefed requested anonymity because prosecutors have asked them not to discuss matters under investigation.

We all wondered why that odd bit of information was revealed by the Rove forces. It was interesting, of course, as all these tid-bits are, but during that flood of friendly Rove-camp leaking, this always struck me a strange. How was this supposed to exonerate Rove? Somehow, we were supposed to believe that Tenet and Hadley and Rove and Libby were working together coordinating a Tenet’s response. But, so what? Why would that have prevented Rove and Libby from leaking about Plame? Can’t they walk and chew gum at the same time?

Then, on the 27th, the WaPo prints this and we are reminded that this has always been a battle between the white house and the CIA and it seems to be escalating as Rove comes under closer public scrutiny in the leak probe:

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet’s statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, had a role in Tenet’s statement.

If I had to guess, Novak’s seemingly innocuous mention of Tenet yesterday wasn’t an accident. Tenet is being fingered as the source quite deliberately. It’s another salvo aimed at laying the blame for this whole mess (and I mean the WHOLE mess — wmd’s and all) at the CIA’s feet:

Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush’s speech. As part of this effort, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not think Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.

Obviously, this article is informed by CIA sources who are enacting their own damage control. But it’s pretty clear to me on whose side Novak is coming down.

Somerby chastises me a little bit for assuming that Novak was carrying water for the White House when it’s possible his source was actually George Tenet. It’s true that Novak’s original column was fairly measured. It often is. But Novak’s appearances on CNN leave absolutely no doubt as to his loyalty to the Republican party and his willingness to carry water for the Bush administration. When a journalist appears regularly on television to openly advocate for one political party or a specific administration I think he gives up any right to claim journalistic objectivity or even journalistic integrity in a situation like this.

For instance, here’s one we can all appreciate Speaking of Al Gore at the Democratic convention last summer Novak said:

They [Democrats] just pray he doesn’t go into one of his rants where he’s screaming and yelling and can’t control himself. They shouldn’t feed him too much Coke before the uh– Coca-Cola before tonight.

Any journalist who says things like that can be fairly assumed to be “sympathetic” to white house spin, I think.

We know that Karl Rove, and very likely, Scooter Libby, were passing the “wife” information around, whether Tenet was the original source (and whether he was involved in the smear) or not. Rove has admitted that he spoke with Novak. And, finally, we also know that Robert Novak is the only one of several journalists reportedly approached who ran with that information. I do not think it is all that unreasonable for me to characterize Novak as doing Rove’s bidding in this. As I wrote yesterday, there really was no legitimate reason to report that Wilson’s wife was involved if what they were trying to do was say that Wilson’s mission was low level.

The man who likes to call Hillary Clinton “Madame Defarge” and a “very mean lady” who has “done very bad things” is just the guy I’d go to if I wanted to create a little smear about a henpecked little wimp and his overbearing spy of a wife who just wanted him to get a damned job.

Certainly, Novak’s statements subsequent to the leak have been just as dicey as Sommerby has documented Wilson’s of being. And I would suggest that they are far more worthy of condemnation since Novak is supposed to be a journalist.

In his original column revealing Plame’s name, he wrote this about Wilson:

That’s where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein’s wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed “the stuff of heroism.” President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.

[…]

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wilson had taken a measured public position — viewing weapons of mass destruction as a danger but considering military action as a last resort. He has seemed much more critical of the administration since revealing his role in Niger. In the Washington Post July 6, he talked about the Bush team “misrepresenting the facts,” asking: “What else are they lying about?”

Here is his characterization of Wilson a few months later when he spoke with Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: Joining me now for an exclusive conversation, the veteran journalist, is my colleague, Bob Novak. Bob, thanks very much for joining us. Let’s talk about this. What made you decide to go out, first of all, and write about former Ambassador Joe Wilson?

NOVAK: Former Ambassador Wilson broke the secrecy that a retired diplomat, unknown, had gone to Niger in the year 2002 to investigate whether the Iraqis tried to buy yellow cake, uranium from Niger.

BLITZER: You mean when he wrote that op-ed page article in The New York Times?

NOVAK: New York Times … That was on a Sunday morning. On Monday, I began to report on something that I thought was very curious. Why was it that Ambassador Wilson, who had no particular experience in weapons of mass destruction, and was a sharp critic of the Iraqi policy of President Bush and, also, had been a high-ranking official in the Clinton White House, who had contributed politically to Democrats — some Republicans, but mostly Democrats — why was he being selected?

I asked this question to a senior Bush administration official, and he said that he believed that the assignment was suggested by an employee at the CIA in the counterproliferation office who happened to be Ambassador Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame. I then called another senior official of the Bush administration, and he said, Oh, you know about that? And he confirmed that that was an accurate story. I then called the CIA. They said that, to their knowledge, he did not — that the mission was not suggested by Ambassador Wilson’s wife — but that she had been asked by her colleagues in the counterproliferation office to contact her husband. So she was involved.

Novak seems to be trying to make a case that he’s the one who asked how Wilson got selected for the mission, not that anyone offered it up to him. In that same interview, he furiously denies that he ever told Newsday, “I didn’t dig it out. They gave it to me.” His characterization of Wilson is quite dramatically at odds with the way he wrote of him in the original column.

I would imagine that this discrepancy is something that Patrick Fitzgerald wondered about and why he was checking phone records after the Novak column came out. It reeks of cover up.

I realize that this does not demonstrate absolutely that Novak was carrying water for the administration when he revealed her name, but it certainly does show that he was carrying water for them after the fact. This entire line of bullshit about Wilson being a partisan is White House damage control chapter and verse.

I want to make clear that I’m not picking on Bob Somerby here. In the midst of that minor criticism, he also positively linked to my piece on Novak from yesterday, which I appreciate. He made a reasonable point, I think, that I was making an assertion that was not grounded in specific evidence. My response here is to demonstrate that I think it’s a reasonable assertion based upon observing Robert Novak’s career, his other public statements and the fact that he is, quite demonstrably, a douchebag for liberty.

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