Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Ooops

I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby’s testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson’s husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration’s handling of intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program to justify the war.

Lawyers said the notes show that Mr. Cheney knew that Ms. Wilson worked at the C.I.A. more than a month before her identity was made public and her undercover status was disclosed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003.

Mr. Libby’s notes indicate that Mr. Cheney had gotten his information about Ms. Wilson from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, in response to questions from the vice president about Mr. Wilson. But they contain no suggestion that either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby knew at the time of Ms. Wilson’s undercover status or that her identity was classified. Disclosing a covert agent’s identity can be a crime, but only if the person who discloses it knows the agent’s undercover status.

Hmmm. I’d have to say that Cheney wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the Monsignor in September of 2003, was he?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson. A question had arisen. I’d heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa, Niger in particular. I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, “What do we know about this?” They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said, “This is all we know. There’s a lot we don’t know,” end of statement. And Joe Wilson—I don’t who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.

I guess the intriguing thing, Tim, on the whole thing, this question of whether or not the Iraqis were trying to acquire uranium in Africa. In the British report, this week, the Committee of the British Parliament, which just spent 90 days investigating all of this, revalidated their British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa. What was in the State of the Union speech and what was in the original British White papers. So there may be difference of opinion there. I don’t know what the truth is on the ground with respect to that, but I guess—like I say, I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him. I have no idea who hired him and it never came…

MR. RUSSERT: The CIA did.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Who in the CIA, I don’t know.

Evidently, when he was chatting with Tenet and Libby about Wilson’s CIA wife he forgot to ask Tenet who in the CIA hired him. Now, that doesn’t sound right, does it?

.

East Of The Potomac

Mediagirl reminds us of:

the horrible situation in Pakistan, where tens of thousands have died, and tens of thousands more, including children, still have not received any aid.

Let’s look at the facts:

50,000 dead, maybe more, many of whom were children, who were in school at the moment the quake hit.

10,000 more children are facing imminent death due to injury, infection, disease, starvation, dehydration, exposure to the sub-zero temperatures at night. 120,000 children are at risk.

These figures are conservative. And aid money has not been coming.

Almost two weeks after the quake, less than 14 per cent of the UN’s emergency appeal for £180 million has been received.

Unicef, the UN children’s organisation, yesterday estimated that 10,000 children will die in weeks. The figure was described as “conservative” by a UN field worker.

Although the official death count remains at 49,739, local authorities put it at almost 80,000.

And once again, it is not only simple humanity that cries out for a concerted effort to help. Sheer self-interest points to making the rescue of the abject in Pakistan a major international priority. Guaranteed: if the rest of the world wont help, Osama will.

Liberals With Guns

As of 5:49 am Monday (EST), it seems Jeffrey Goldberg’s already famous article on Scowcroft in the New Yorker will not be posted – you’ll have to buy the zine, unless it gets liberated and posted elsewhere. But the New Yorker did put up an interesting interview with the author.I’ll leave it to others to analyse the political ramifications and content. But I seem to be unusually sensitive to Republican rhetorical hanky-panky (“pro-life,” “tax relief,” etc), and I couldn’t help but notice some spanking new jargon bubbling up into the mainstream:

…the deeper meaning here is ideological: George W. Bush’s father was committed to a realist understanding of foreign policy. This served him well in Iraq, and not so well in Bosnia. George W. Bush, on the other hand, has become a leading proponent of democratic transformationalism; he believes it is America’s job to help non-democratic countries become democratic. The realists don’t believe that the internal organization of another country is any of our business; George W. Bush, evidently, does.

[snip]

Are the conservatives turning against the neoconservatives?

They’ve been doing so for some time. Just read George Will. Their complaint is that neoconservatives aren’t conservative; they’re liberals with guns. [emphasis added.]

You got that? “Democratic transformationalists” are “liberals with guns.” Those are the clowns that got us into that stupid mess in Iraq.

In other words, the term “conservative” has been surgically removed from the failed ideology of neoconservativism and replaced with the word “democratic.” This of course is purely coincidental, no associations to a certain political party should be inferred.

And “democratic” is paired with the brain-twisting neologism “transformationalist.” Only a paranoid mentality would wonder whether the pairing of “democratic” with something invented, something hard to understand, and something hard to say, is intentional.

As for “liberals with guns,” well…what could be a scarier image, given the relentless demonization of liberals that has been going on since McCarthy, if not earlier?

But never mind, as so many expert Democratic consultants are quick to tell us, it’s not the language that matters, but the ideas. I mean it’s not as if you can easily redefine failed Republican strategies as liberal and Democratic, y’know. That’s preposterous. No one would fall for that and repeat it. LIke if you tried, people would just get confused about what things mean and then they wouldn’t listen to anyone. What good would that be?

(By the way, reporter Jeffrey Goldberg shouldn’t, necessarily, be blamed for the terminology. It’s likely he’s probably just repeating jargon that’s getting tossed up into the air. As for passing it on, shame, shame, shame!)

{Update:} Content edited somewhat after original posting to focus the sarcasm.

Paterfamilias

I have often felt that the real story of this time will be written as a family history between a father and a son. If only Shakespeare were alive to write it.

Steve Clemons has excerpts of the New Yorker’s Brent Scowcroft article that has everyone on pins and needles. Scowcroft is 80 years old and has apparently decided that he should speak out clearly. And he does:

The first Gulf War was a success, Scowcroft said, because the President knew better than to set unachievable goals. “I’m not a pacifist,” he said. “I believe in the use of force. But there has to be a good reason for using force. And you have to know when to stop using force.” Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force.

“I thought we ought to make it our duty to help make the world friendlier for the growth of liberal regimes,” he said. “You encourage democracy over time, with assistance, and aid, the traditional way. Not how the neocons do it.”

The neoconservatives — the Republicans who argued most fervently for the second Gulf war — believe in the export of democracy, by violence if that is required, Scowcroft said. “How do the neocons bring democracy to Iraq? You invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize.” And now, Scowcroft said, America is suffering from the consequences of that brand of revolutionary utopianism. “This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism,” he said.

The underlying narrative, however, is the subconscious rivalry between the father and the son, Scowcroft becoming the stand-in for 43’s resentment toward 41. You wonder how many of the tragic blunders of the last five years are the result of crafty neocons playing into Junior’s desire to gainsay his father:

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay. “There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out,” he told me. “But he wasn’t really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn’t recovered from sanctions.” Scowcroft’s colleagues told me that he would have preferred to deliver his analysis privately to the White House. But Scowcroft, the apotheosis of a Washington insider, was by then definitively on the outside, and there was no one in the White House who would listen to him. On the face of it, this is remarkable: Scowcroft’s best friend’s son is the President; his friend Dick Cheney is the Vice-President; Condoleezza Rice, who was the national-security adviser, and is now the Secretary of State, was once a Scowcroft protege; and the current national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is another protege and a former principal at the Scowcroft Group.

[…]

According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son, “Forty-three,” and his former national-security adviser to no avail, according to people with knowledge of these intertwined relationships. “There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren’t conducive to talking about substantive issues,” a Scowcroft confidant said.

George H.W. Bush was a bastard in many ways. He was one of the first to bring the new generation of operative thugs into national politics. Lee Atwater ran his 1988 campaign. But his spawn took it to a new level. This is but one of many good arguments against monarchy and succession. Think of the average family Thanksgiving table and imagine that it’s the ruling elite of the most powerful country in the world.

I recommend that you read all of Clemens post and the New Yorker article when it is posted. This on top of the Lawrence Wilkerson speech from last week shows that things are breaking down in a most serious way for the Bush administration.

Lambert at Corrente notes that Wilkerson even predicts some very dangerous times ahead — not from terrorists, but internal revolution:

WILKERSON: We have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina… we haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city [“Reckless Indifference to the Nightmare Scenario”] , or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again. … Read in there what they say about the necessity of people to [inaudible – background voice] tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do.

And you’re talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don’t get our act together.

Shakespearean indeed.

Update: Matthew Yglesias makes the important point that this would have been oh so much more courageous if they had backed up the likes of Richard Clarke instead of waiting until Junior was tanking in the polls. And he points to this op-ed by Richard Holbrook on Wilkerson’s speech, which points out that Colin Powell is a putz.

.

Perjury Smergury

Lying is a moral wrong. Perjury is a lie told under oath that is legally wrong. To be illegal, the lie must be willfully told, must be believed to be untrue, and must relate to a material matter. Title 18, Section 1621 and 1623, U.S. Code.

If President Washington, as a child, had cut down a cherry tree and lied about it, he would be guilty of `lying,’ but would not be guilty of `perjury.’

If, on the other hand, President Washington, as an adult, had been warned not to cut down a cherry tree, but he cut it down anyway, with the tree falling on a man and severely injuring or killing him, with President Washington stating later under oath that it was not he who cut down the tree, that would be `perjury.’ Because it was a material fact in determining the circumstances of the man’s injury or death.

Some would argue that the President in the second example should not be impeached because the whole thing is about a cherry tree, and lies about cherry trees, even under oath, though despicable, do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution. I disagree.

The perjury committed in the second example was an attempt to impede, frustrate, and obstruct the judicial system in determining how the man was injured or killed, when, and by whose hand, in order to escape personal responsibility under the law, either civil or criminal. Such would be an impeachable offense. To say otherwise would be to severely lower the moral and legal standards of accountability that are imposed on ordinary citizens every day. The same standard should be imposed on our leaders.

Nearly every child in America believes that President Washington, as a child himself, did in fact cut down the cherry tree and admitted to his father that he did it, saying simply: `I cannot tell a lie.’

I will not compromise this simple but high moral principle in order to avoid serious consequences to a successor President who may choose to ignore it.

That is from the bizarre incoherent statement Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson gave in the impeachment case against Bill Clinton’s penis. (The cherry tree story is apocryphal — “a lie” if you will — but whatever.)

Today, on Press The Meat, she was not quite so convinced that perjury and obstruction of justice were terrible things at all, much less “morally wrong.” She talked about overzealous US Attorneys and prosecutors abusing the statute and how troubling it all was that people were being prosecuted for lies when there is no underlying crime. She said that the Clinton penis case was different because he was charged with an underlying crime — which is, of course, “a lie.”

If the Republicans are going to use the “perjury and obstruction aren’t real crimes” defense then I think we need to gather all the material that Mr Google (and the Washington Post, here) conveniently provide and bombard the gasbags and the alleged journalists with them. They need to be spoonfed this stuff.

The Democratic defense for Clinton was that Republicans conducted a witchhunt that led their handpicked prosecutor Ken Starr to start digging inappropriately into Clinton’s sex life. The country understood this and agreed with it and the Republicans lost seats in the 1998 election because of it.

The underlying crime here is outing a CIA agent and lying about a war. They apparently believe that this is politics as usual, no big deal. William Kristol wailed this morning:

Scooter Libby or Karl Rove are going to be judged criminals for perhaps acknowledging her name, perhaps knowing, though there’s no evidence they did, that she was a covert operative…That’s a crime?

Tom DeLay is not a criminal…Are we seriously going to pretend that shuffling hard and soft money around which hundreds of politicians have done over the last two decades, before McCain-Feingold was enacted [is a crime]?

This from the whining moralists who screeched like a bunch of deranged harpies for years that lying about 10 furtive blow-jobs in a dismissed civil case was a High Crime that was destroying the fabric of our country.

I just can’t help but reprise again this little gem from the man himself:

Politicians, jittery as they are, may wish to reread the prophetic words of author Mark Helprin, in a Wall Street Journal piece from October 1997. For Republicans, wrote Helprin, “there can be only one visceral theme, one battle, one task” — “to address the question of William Jefferson Clinton’s fitness for office in light of the many crimes, petty and otherwise, that surround, imbue, and color his tenure. The president must be made subject to the law.”

Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp — and, of course, Ken Starr — Helprin’s call to arms carries a new urgency. Starr’s report will reveal, in Helprin’s words, “a field of battle clearly laid down.” The lines have been drawn. What Republicans now need is the nerve to fight. They must stand for, to quote Helprin again, “the rejection of intimidation, the rejection of lies, the rejection of manipulation, the rejection of disingenuous pretense, and a revulsion for the sordid crimes and infractions the president has brought to his office.” (William Kristol, Weekly Standard, May 25, 1998, page 18.)

And now the party who rode into Washington on a promise to “restore honor and dignity” are on television saying that revealing the names of covert CIA agents isn’t a crime and perjury and obstruction are just politics as usual and shouldn’t be “criminalized.”

So much for the Strict Daddy party. Welcome to the Juvenile Delinquent party.

Update: Haha. ReddHedd has a beautiful take down of Mizz Bailey Hutchison, here. Here’s the money quote from her appearance on Press The Meat this morning:

I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars.

Yes, those Republicans hate to waste money on those bogus investigations.

.

Day 2000

The Daou Report directs us to a national memorial marking the sadly inevitable passing of the 2000th US combat death in Iraq. Please consider attending a local gathering.

Such a terrible milestone should be a somber moment that the entire country, as one, should acknowledge. After all, pro-war or anti-war, no one wants our friends, our neighbors, and our children to die. It is clearly a time when all of us should support the troops by making sure they understand all Americans share in the mourning.

But no. Michelle Malkin, Peter Daou informs us (and I sure as hell won’t pollute Digby’s blog with a link to her), thinks we’ll be partying, i.e. celebrating, on Day 2000.

And to prove it, no doubt Ms. Malkin and her fellow maniacs will grab their digicams and stalk the memorials, like the good fascist volunteers they are, looking to capture any and all grimaces of grief that could possibly be construed as a triumphant smile. After all, they photog’d us during the war protests, pretending the occasional nut represented all the middle-class marchers with families who were there. So they’ll do it again on Day 2000. And they’ll call us traitors again.

Well, Michelle, ma belle, I think we know who the real traitors are, don’t we now? Oh, I’m not only talking about the clowns who placed loyalty to Texas Moses above their country’s security. I’m also thinking of the people who sent American soldiers into battle with inadequate armor, inadequate intelligence, and deliberately false information on what they could expect in terms of a reception among the people they had been repeatedly told they were “liberating.”

Below, Digby makes the point that Republicans have for a long time been the preferred party of criminals. Not just Republicans like Nixon and the goons who did Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Starr witchhunt. Not even Libby, Rove, Lay, DeLay, Frist, Franklin, Wurmser, Brownie, Allbaugh, Abramoff. But also a huge felonious database, brimming with GOP scoundrels, statutory rapists, corporate thieves and assorted unclassifiable scumbags so large, there isn’t a server on the internet big enough to store all their names and their multiple serial crimes against their country. Face it, Michelle: For every decent Republican like Jim Jeffords, who finally had to quit his longtime party in disgust, it seems there’s 50 or more DeLay clones snorking around the pigsty, just waiting to pork honest taxpayers and other rubes.

No, Michelle. Those of us opposed to the crooks you admire will not be celebrating on Day 2000; we’ll be weeping.

But if there’s a day that these bastards who got us into this insane war, who ruined all Americans’ reputations by authorizing systematic, repeated torture and murder, who abandoned America’s most vulnerable parents, children, and workers, to a horrible death from flood and neglect –

If ever there’s a day that the fuckers who did all this, and so much more, start getting hauled in front of the courts of law they have been conspiring so long to subvert and ruin – We, the people, who love our country and revere its traditional liberal values, we will raise a huge… what’s the word, I’m thinking of? oh yes…Hullabaloo!

The (French) champagne will flow like water; the banners will fly in the (globally warmed, hurricane-strength, another rightwing fuckup) winds. And we’ll dance to the Dixie Chicks all night long.

And the next day, we’ll recycle the empty bottles, give any leftover brie to the homeless shelter, and then drink a very strong double espresso latte. We’ll get right back to work, making sure that you and your far-right asshole buddies are never taken seriously in American politics again.

Of course, that’s a huge if…

Judy’s Enablers

I have been unable to find a complete copy of Craig Pyes’ e-mail, the reporter who refused to share a byline with Judy Miller back in 2000 on the al Qaeda series. Howard Kurtz quoted pieces of it last week:

“I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller… I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies,” and “tried to stampede it into the paper.”

The LA Times today has a few more choice quotes today:

“A reason I don’t have my name on any of her stories is precisely because of this sloppy, single-source reporting,” warned Pyes, now a contract reporter with the Los Angeles Times, in the e-mail. “Which, believe me, when she reports closer to home, you’re going to pay for someday. You heard it here first.”

Has anyone seen this entire e-mail? This guy was prescient, as were a lot of people who worked with Miller.

The LA Times article delves deeply into how Judy was given so much rope to hang herself on the WMD stories — it was clearly the work of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, both of whom resigned over the Jayson Blair scandal.

After the prize-winning Al Qaeda series, then-Executive Editor Howell Raines (later forced out by the scandal over fabrications by reporter Jayson Blair) reportedly urged Miller to “go win [another] Pulitzer.”

That directive made her even bolder, colleagues said.

Douglas Frantz, then Miller’s boss as investigative editor — and more recently a Los Angeles Times reporter who this month was named an L.A. Times managing editor — said he and then-Foreign Editor Roger Cohen were undercut when their doubts led them to delay publishing several of Miller’s stories on weapons of mass destruction.

After Miller complained, the New York Times’ then-Managing Editor Gerald Boyd instructed the lower-ranking editors to get out of the star reporter’s way, according to Frantz.

“Judy Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter,” Frantz recalled Boyd telling him, “and your job is to get her stories into the paper.”

Frantz said that despite that admonition, he blocked a Miller story about claims of 1,000 weapons sites in Iraq and also a profile of exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a source of many of the overblown weapons reports.

Boyd could not be reached for comment.

I had not realized until I read this that Raines and Boyd had been around the paper as late as June of 2003. This clears something up for me. I have found it completely bizarre that Miller claimed she pitched the story to an editor and yet her editor, Jill Abramson, says it never happened. Miller refused to name the editor yesterday, which means she’s either lying outright or she has a reason not to name the person.

The White House had been agitated about Wilson since the spring, particularly about Nicholas Kristoff’s NYT columns in May, using Wilson as an anonymous source.
Raines and Boyd resigned on June 5, 2003.

I think it’s likely that Miller pitched the idea to Raines or Boyd before they left, which means that she was on this Wilson beat weeks before she admits to it. And it explains why she won’t say to whom she pitched it.

It also means that she could have been operating independently during this period, before Bill Keller was named executive editor and pulled her off the WMD beat. Keller wasn’t kicked upstairs until July 14, 2003, coincidentally the day that Novak published his famous column.

Somebody should probably try to get Gerald Boyd and Howell Raines on the record.

Update: Expert Plame Kremlinologist Emptywheel writes in to remind me that Joseph Lelyveld was the interim editor during the period between Raines’ and Boyd’s resignations and Keller’s promotion. I had assumed that the writers of the big story had asked him if he turned down Judy’s pitch, but there is no record of it, so perhaps they didn’t. If they haven’t, they should.

If there is an editor (current or former)at the NY Times who knew of Judy Miller’s interest in writing this story they need to come forward. And somebody needs to ask Judy why she’s refusing to name him or her.

.

The Sinning Choirboy

And little Karl too:

… in at least one instance, [Ralph]Reed acknowledges he used his White House access for Abramoff. In December 2001 the lobbyist was eager to prevent Angela Williams from being appointed head of the Interior Department’s Office of Insular Affairs, which oversees the government’s dealings with the Northern Mariana Islands, an important Abramoff client. Williams is married to former Federal Trade Commissioner Orson Swindle, who was a Vietnam pow with Senator John McCain. The subject header of Abramoff and Reed’s e-mail exchange (it is unclear who initiated it) contained a misstatement about Williams that is practically Freudian in what it reveals about their animosity toward McCain: “Were you able to whack McCain’s wife yet?” Reed assured Abramoff he had “weighed in heavily” with the White House personnel office to block her appointment but had received no commitment. “Any ideas on how we can make sure she does not get it?” Abramoff asked. “Can you ping Karl on this? I can’t believe they just don’t get this done?” Reed replied, “I am seeing him tomorrow at the WH and plan to discuss it with him as well.” Baron says, “Ralph passed the information on to the White House. He is confident the Administration’s decision was based on the merit.” As for Rove, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy tells TIME, “It is my understanding that Mr. Rove does not recall any of these incidents.”

[…]

Reed has rested his defense on fine distinctions, saying the payments he received from Indian tribes didn’t come from gambling. But that line may be tested when the Senate Indian Affairs Committee—chaired by his old nemesis McCain—holds another hearing on the Abramoff scandal next week. Reed has not yet been called to testify, but the hearing will focus on the Louisiana Coushattas, whom Abramoff arranged to pay more than a million dollars to Reed for his services.

Inconveniently, the tribe has no profitmaking ventures other than gambling.

Imagine that. Saint Ralphie Reed supporting gambling and then lying about it.

If I were a member of the religious right I’d start to think I’d been royally conned. It turns out that Reed and Abramoff’s buddy Grover Norquist not only consorts with gays (*gasp*) he also launders pro-gambling money for his pal Abramoff, which he excuses by saying that he supports gambling “on libertarian grounds.”

One has to wonder how long the Christian Soldiers on the right are going to put up with that crap. Beverly LaHaye just woke up with a gay-loving libertarian gambler in her bed.

hu·bris Pronunciation Key (hybrs) also hy·bris (h-)
n.

Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance

.

Monsignor Tim

Surprise, suprise. Nobody asked (and he didn’t offer) an explanation about his own role in the Plame affair this morning despite discussing it in great depth during the program. Apparently, there is nothing even remotely relevant about the fact that his only public statement sounds like he’s covering his ass from here to next Tuesday:

Mr. Russert told the Special Prosecutor that, at the time of that conversation, he did not know Ms. Plame’s name or that she was a CIA operative and that he did not provide that information to Mr. Libby. Mr. Russert said that he first learned Ms. Plame’s name and her role at the CIA when he read a column written by Robert Novak later that month.[emphasis mine]

It appears that the first we will learn about Russert’s role in this when he appears as a witness at Scooter Libby’s trial. And yet he still a revered figure in DC journalism and considered the toughest interviewer on television. Interesting standards we have these days.

I’m beginning to wonder if he’s covering somebody’s ass other than his own.

.

The Good Aspen

This article in the Columbia Journalism Review is the first I’ve seen that comes to the same conclusion I did about Judy Miller’s mea culpa:

The more you analyze Miller’s story (I have read it four times now) the less it seems like a straightforward recitation of events and the more it seems like a carefully scripted message to Libby, and perhaps to other sources with whom Miller spoke about Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson.

I confess part of this impression may stem from my own legal background. I know too well that once a prosecutor starts circling, especially a super predator like Patrick Fitzgerald, it can get very hard for parties to communicate with one another without stepping on a landmine. This, for example, is why Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, went ballistic when Floyd Abrams, one of Miller’s lawyers, suggested that Libby had “signaled” to Miller that she shouldn’t testify. To reporters such a request might be a normal part of the reporter-source relationship, but to a prosecutor it’s witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Abrams put Libby on the spot. That’s why Miller’s insistence on a personal letter or telephone call from Libby releasing her to testify was so problematic. Anything much beyond “please testify” could easily be construed as an attempt to influence Miller’s testimony. As Libby, a seasoned lawyer in his own right surely knows, a more complex communication is what obstruction charges are made of.

Which makes it all the more amazing that Libby wrote just such a letter to Miller while she was still in prison. The September 15 letter pointedly reminded Miller that no other reporter subpoenaed in the investigation had testified that Libby had discussed Valerie Plame with them. It also contained a loaded reference to how “out West where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters because their roots connect them.” Their roots connect them? Is it a coincidence that Libby and Miller shared a long-held concern about the intersection of WMD and Islamic militantism? Miller’s story implies in several places that she didn’t know Libby all that well (going so far as to point out she didn’t even recognize him when she bumped into him on a trip out West, a trip that Libby mentions in his letter to her). But it doesn’t address the key question of whether Libby was a source for Miller’s post-9/11 WMD reporting, or whether he helped arrange meetings with the Iraqi defectors who were peddling fabricated stories about Saddam’s weapons.

In analyzing Miller’s account, several themes emerge. First, with Fitzgerald clearly probing Vice President Cheney’s office, the administration would obviously have a concern that Miller’s notes might cause problems. But in her account in the Times Miller goes out of her way to stress that Libby protected Cheney at all times. This is key. While there seems little doubt that Libby would fall on his sword to protect his boss, a reporter is an altogether different matter. Miller’s account clearly signals that her notes don’t give Fitzgerald an avenue of attack on Cheney.

Second, as many have noted, Miller makes the suspect claim that she now can’t recall who gave her Valerie Plame’s name. Obviously then her direct testimony won’t be the lynchpin that lets Fitzgerald make a case that Libby or anyone else supplied Valerie Plame’s name, though the presence of her name in the same notebook as the notes of the Libby interview could allow a grand jury to draw a strong inference. Miller says she doesn’t recall who gave the name, which, by default, doesn’t finger Libby. But neither does it clear him.

It was a strange meandering account written using the odd affectation of “what she told the grand jury” instead of a straightforward, chronological account of what she knows about the case. I felt from the beginning that its purpose was to signal Libby as much as it was to inform the public. She was, as I wrote last week, a good little aspen and let them know she didn’t do any “turning” on the crucial stuff.

I would bet money that her very bizarre anecdote about accidentally meeting up with Libby in Jackson Hole was a message to him as well. Can any of you say that you could spend two hours looking across a table at someone and not recognise them a few weeks later? Please. I would recognise Scooter Libby even if he were dressed up as Howdy Doody, and I’ve never been within a hundred miles of him.

.