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.
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.
Kevin makes note of the eery sameness of Novak and Miller’s contention that Plame was idly brought up in unrelated casual conversation and asks that these assholes (my paraphrase) stop insulting our intelligence with this nonsense. He points out that someone within the White House spilled those beans long ago when he or she told the Washington Post:
A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife…”Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.
It’s clear to me that it was meant to discredit Wilson, but even if you take away that explanation, the mere fact that six different reporters (at a minimum) were “casually” told in “idle converstaion” ought to be enough for Judy to have gotten a fucking clue by now.
And let’s not forget that Novak sang a different tune when he was first questioned about this:
“Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information,” New York Newsday reporters Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce wrote. They quoted Novak saying: “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.”
That doesn’t sound like idle water cooler talk to me.
Kevin concludes with this:
I have no doubt that these officials did their best to make their disclosures sound casual. Miller and Novak either fell for it, or else were willing accomplices. Neither option speaks well for their ability to do their job.
Considering the histories of both of these “journalists” I would have to say that they are lying accomplices. These are two reporters with many decades of national security reporting between them. They knew exactly what they were hearing.
The question still remains as to what Miller was doing. She claims that she wasn’t writing an article because she had pitched the idea to “an editor” and was turned down. The editor to whom she supposedly reported says that no such conversation occurred. Yet, Judy was making agreements with Libby that she would refer to him as a “hill staffer” because she “assumed Mr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson.” Seen by whom? If she wasn’t writing a story, if this was casual conversation, why would Libby be concerned about how she would portray him. Why wouldn’t the conversation just be on backround and leave it at that?
Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether I ever pursued an article about Mr. Wilson and his wife. I told him I had not, though I considered her connection to the C.I.A. potentially newsworthy. I testified that I recalled recommending to editors that we pursue a story.
Mr. Fitzgerald asked my reaction to Mr. Novak’s column. I told the grand jury I was annoyed at having been beaten on a story. I said I felt that since The Times had run Mr. Wilson’s original essay, it had an obligation to explore any allegation that undercut his credibility. At the same time, I added, I also believed that the newspaper needed to pursue the possibility that the White House was unfairly attacking a critic of the administration.
It is quite clear that she was writing a story and that she was writing the story that Novak actually published — outing Valerie Plame. She admits that she was annoyed that she was “beaten” to it. Indeed, she felt the Times had an obligation to explore allegations that undercut Wilson’s credibility.
And there is not one piece of evidence that she was concerned in the least that the White House was unfairly attcking a critic of the White House. All during the period when she and Libby were buttering each other’s toast at the St Regis (thank you James Wolcott) and chatting on the phone and agreeing that she would refer to him as an ex hill staffer, Judy never once called Joe Wilson to get his side of the story.
I am with Billmon on this. I find it highly doubtful that Fitzgerald is going to indict on charges unrelated directly to the Plame leak and ensuing cover-up, but I do think he’s going to indict. As much as I’d like to believe that he’s spent the last 22 months getting to the bottom of the forgeries and Iraq lies and the inner workings of the propaganda campaugn that led us to war, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
First of all, I think he would have sought a specific expansion of his mandate (which he helpfully supplied here on his brand new web site yesterday.) As Billmon points out, it was almost certainly done to show that he was charged with more than investigating the potential violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act — and that the Justice Department explicitly gave him the power to investigate charges of perjury, obstruction etc in a second follow-up letter dated February 6, 2004. Fitzgerald asked for this explicit permission in order to make it very clear that he wasn’t going outside his mandate by investigating a cover-up. Posting this on his web-site was very likely done to quell the predictable GOP line of defense that he is an out of control prosecutor who strayed far outside his mandate. (I doubt that he was asleep during the Starr investigation.) For this reason I don’t think he’s gone far outside it.
This, however, doesn’t mean that these issues are not going to finally get an airing. Judy Miller’s little drama is a crucible for the Washington press corps. If any of them hope to save their journalistic souls, now’s the time to do it. They are already publishing articles about the WHIG, about Cheney’s monomaniacal insistence on the war. Critics are coming out of the woodwork (better late than never, I guess) and the lies that perpetrated this debacle in Iraq are being examined.
I realize that this is too little too late to save the blood and the treasure that has been wasted since the media turned themselves into a group of evil teen-aged girls and helped Karl Rove propel his creature into the White House. But the country must recover somehow and we need the press to try to right itself. Democracy depends upon it.
Fitzgerald’s probe may focus on the Valerie Plame leak and it may only touch upon the larger issues peripherally. But it is the hook, the opening, that allows the media to revisit the run-up to the war and correct the jingoistic cheerleading they called journalism for the first two years after 9/11. It means that there is a second chance for the American public to learn the truth of what really happened then, outside the manufactured hysteria that engulfed the culture for the last three years.
This is the most important thing. Much of the public already know a lot of this subconsciously. This case gives them a way to understand what happened without losing face. The “grown-ups” who led them into this war were liars and criminals. We need to make sure they realize that the “grown-ups” are the Republican establishment.
Many of us wrote a lot about certain memes the Republicans used to make the Dems look bad during the last few years. We are “soft” on terrorism, crime, morals — whatever. Soft. It’s a powerful primal image that they have used to great effect to put us on the defensive and turn the country to the right with coded slogans like “law and order” and “fight em there so we don’t have to fight em here.” It works because they’ve been saying it so long, and there is just enough truth in it, that people have internalized it.
But the Republicans have some baggage of their own that goes back just as far. They have long been associated with corruption and criminality in office and their poster boy is Richard Nixon, the father of the modern Republican party. “I am not a crook” has a resonance far beyond that moldy time. People know this, deep down, in their subconscious, just as surely as they know that Democrats are flip-flopping libertines. “Republicans are crooks.” It just rings true.
These primitive heuristics cut both ways. If we choose to play that game, and we should, we have a perfect opportunity to portray the Republicans the way that people already think they are.
[T]here is no question from private remarks and public grimaces, some reaching back to early 2001, neither Powell nor Armitage had or has much trust or respect for Rice, and they share with other senior Republican wisemen the conviction that Rumsfeld is quite literally mad, and Cheney a dangerous, vindictive monomaniac.
But it does the beg the obvious question. If you have this kind of a situation, aren’t you, you know, kind of obligated to speak up before an election? Doesn’t loyalty to country trump loyalty to party?
Well, it really is looking like it’s gonna happen, don’t it, boys and girls? Maybe Rove, Maybe Libby, and maybe a whole bunch of other scuzballs – it looks like they just may be feelin’ old Mr. Law’s big paw on their shoulders soon. It will be a sad day for America, a tragedy shared by all, not a time for partisan gloating. Not. It will be a totally great day. And those fuckers brought it on themselves.
On the day after Fitzmas, what do you think a truly effective opposition party should do?
No fair trying to predict what the Democrats will do. Instead, what should they do? I’ll start the ball rolling:
They should demand a full independent investigation of the charges of encouraging and covering-up murder, torture and “extreme rendition” at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Any other ideas? Let your imaginations soar, dear friends…
[Update: Added a link to Billmon’s post that emphasizes the point I originally made with the remark about counting chickenhawks: that whatever happens may be less than overwhelming.]
A defense lawyer in Saddam Hussein’s mass murder trial has been found dead, his body dumped near a Baghdad mosque with two gunshots to the head, police and a top lawyers union official said Friday.
In other violence, four U.S. service members were killed in two attacks Thursday, the U.S. military said. Three Marines died when a bomb hit their patrol in the village of Nasser wa Salam, 25 miles west of Baghdad, and other American troops clashed with gunmen, killing two insurgents and capturing four, the military said.
An American soldier was killed in the northwestern town of Hit by ”indirect fire,” a term that usually means a mortar or rocket attack, the military said.
Nineteen Americans have been killed in the past week. The latest deaths brought to 1,992 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the war in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
And it looks like we’ll hit the ghastly 2000 soldiers dead soldiers mark right around the time Fitzgerald makes an announcement.
My oh my, it appears that Libby was stalking Wilson all the way up until April 2004 when the white house finally put a stop to his psychotic obsession:
Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was so angry about the public statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson’s television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public campaign against him, former aides say.
Those efforts by the chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, began shortly after Wilson went public with his criticisms in 2003. But they continued into last year — well after the Justice Department began an investigation in September 2003, into whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the CIA operative’s identity, say former White House aides.
[…]
Libby’s anger over Wilson’s 2003 charges has been known. But new interviews and documents obtained by The Times provide a more detailed view of the depth and duration of Libby’s interest in Wilson. They also show that the vice president’s office closely monitored news coverage.
On one occasion, the office prohibited a reporter from traveling with Cheney aboard Air Force Two, because the vice president’s daughter said Cheney was unhappy with that newspaper’s coverage.
Libby “would see something had appeared in the newspaper or on television and wanted to use the White House operation to counter it,” one former official said.
After Wilson published a book criticizing the administration in April 2004, during the closely fought presidential campaign, Libby became consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair to Cheney, former aides said. He ordered up a meticulous catalog of Wilson’s claims and public statements going back to early 2003.
The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and television transcripts of Wilson’s statements that were divided into categories, such as “political ties” or “WMD.”
The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney “a lying son of a bitch.” It also highlighted Wilson’s answers to questions from television journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.
Yes, it’s now entirely believable to me that Libby just “heard” something in casual conversation with a reporter and had no idea that Valerie Plame was a covert agent. His friend Mary Matalin doesn’t help when she characterizes him like this:
“Scooter is the most methodical, detail-oriented and comprehensive worker of anybody I’ve ever worked with in my life,” said Mary Matalin, a former Cheney advisor who worked as a consultant on the 2004 campaign.
“He leaves no stone unturned, and it doesn’t matter what the topic is,” she said. “That’s the nature of Scooter, and that’s why he’s such a superior intellect and why Cheney and the president and everybody over there respects him.”
It seems to me that someone like that would find out specifically what Wilson’s wife did at the CIA.
The White House has obviously decided that Scooter is a goner so they are planting the idea that Wilson was his white whale. But that doesn’t leave our friend Karl off the hook. Libby may have had a special hatred for Wilson but Karl had a special reason for wanting him destroyed. An earlier LA Times article had this:
Prosecutors investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson’s wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson’s credibility, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
Although lower-level White House staffers typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.
A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove’s interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove reportedly responded: “He’s a Democrat.”
This is that everyday political hardball the beltway chatterers like Andrea Mitchell and William Kristol are all worried will be “criminalized.” Back in Nixon’s day, the media, at least, were incensed to find out that he was using the taxpayers resources to pursue his political enemies. Now it’s business as usual, the poltical press content to be nothing more than the Republican party’s bitches, begging for juicy scraps from Karl and Scooter’s table.
Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA regional director, told a Senate panel investigating the government’s response to the disaster that he gave regular updates to people in contact with then-FEMA Director Michael Brown as early as Aug. 28, one day before Katrina made landfall.
In most cases, he was met with silence. In an Aug. 29 phone call to Brown informing him that the first levee had broke, Bahamonde said he received a polite thank you from Brown, who said he would check with the White House.
[snip]
Later, on Aug. 31, Bahamonde frantically e-mailed Brown to tell him that thousands are evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that “estimates are many will die within hours.”
“Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical,” Bahamonde wrote.
Less than three hours later, however, Brown’s press secretary wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. “He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes,” wrote Brown aide Sharon Worthy.
“We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you.”
Remember what Michael Brown said when he “stepped aside?” How he was gonna go home and have a margarita and some yummy Mexican food ? Y’know, I think he may have a heckuva eating disorder. The poor guy.
But let’s not dwell on the past, shall we?
Meanwhile, at a separate hearing, lawmakers considering Louisiana’s request for $32 billion for Gulf Coast rebuilding were told that Mississippi would need tens of billions of dollars of its own to restore its coastline.
Gulf Coast lawmakers and state officials have been pushing for vast infusions of federal aid since Katrina hit Aug. 29, killing more than 1,200 people and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate.
“It will be in the billions, with a ‘b,’ level, it may be in the tens of billions; it won’t be in the hundreds of billions,” William W. Walker, head of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, told a House transportation panel.
But Rep. John J. Duncan (news, bio, voting record) Jr., chairman of that panel, earlier had said flatly that Congress cannot afford Louisiana’s request. “This is just not going to happen,” he said.