Neverending Story

by digby

This is an interesting attempt by the NY Times to suss out the “narrative” of Fitzgerald’s case based upon his recent filing:

Every prosecutor strives not just to prove a case, but also to tell a compelling story. It is now clear that Mr. Fitzgerald’s account of what was happening in the White House in the summer of 2003 is very different from the Bush administration’s narrative, which suggested that Mr. Wilson was seen as a minor figure whose criticisms could be answered by disclosing the underlying intelligence upon which Mr. Bush relied.

[…]

Mr. Fitzgerald said he was preparing to turn over to Mr. Libby 1,400 pages of handwritten notes — some presumably in Mr. Libby’s own hand — that could shed light on two very different efforts at getting out the White House story.

One effort — the July 18 declassification of the major conclusions of the intelligence estimate — was taking place in public, while another, Mr. Fitzgerald argues, was happening in secret, with only Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby involved.

Last week’s court filing has already led the White House to acknowledge, over the weekend, that Mr. Bush ordered the selective disclosure of parts of the intelligence estimate sometime in late June or early July. But administration officials insist that Mr. Bush played a somewhat passive role and did so without selecting Mr. Libby, or anyone else, to tell the story piecemeal to a small number of reporters.

But in one of those odd twists in the unpredictable world of news leaks, neither of the reporters Mr. Libby met, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post or Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, reported a word of it under their own bylines. In fact, other reporters working on the story were talking to senior officials who were warning that the uranium information in the intelligence estimate was dubious at best.

I don’t know why the NY Times fails to mention this but Fitzgerald makes it quite clear in his filing that this “piecemeal” story was designed to discredit Wilson not just with the selective (and misleading) leaks of the NIE but with the bogus notion that his wife sent him on this “junket.” After all, Judy Miller wrote the words “Valerie Flame” in her notebook in the first meeting she had with Scooter in June of 2003. They were the same operation.

And that operation almost assuredly involved at least one other person who was conspicuously absent from Fitzgerald’s narrative. That person told Fitzgerald all about the “concerted effort” inside the white house to discredit Wilson. Once again, here’s Murray 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.

The NY Times seems to take at face value that this secret cabal only involved Bush, Cheney and Libby — and Bush only tangentially. That is very doubtful. Karl Rove is likely the mastermind of this campaign. Discrediting critics is his job.

The question for Bush, Cheney and Libby is whether Karl is cooperating even more fully with Fitzgerald than when he spoke proudly to the FBI of this campaign to discredit Joe Wilson (probably assuming that John Ashcroft would never let the information see the light of day.) His lawyer certainly has been tightlipped lately.

If Waas’ story is correct, Karl Rove undercut Libby’s defense from the get. No wonder Libby wants to see what Karl specifically said.

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