For the last year or so, Matt has been a subpoenaed witness in a grand jury investigation.I advised him and he accepted the advice that he should not have private conversations with other people who may be witnesses in the grand jury proceeding. I was concerned about the perception. I was concerned about what Mr. Fitzgerald might think. And so it was on my advice that he did not personally contact his source.
For me to contact Mr. Rove’s lawyer at the time, prior to the time that Mr. Rove had been identified as Matt’s source, would have actually been a breach of confidentiality. My conversation with Mr. Rove was not privileged and would not have been privileged — with Mr. Rove’s attorney.
There was no indication that we had that Mr. Rove or his lawyer were interested in receiving such a request. And it was really only in the last few days, when Mr. Luskin started making some of his comments, especially the one that I just quoted to you that was in the Wall Street Journal that led us to feel that we were on firm footing picking up the phone and calling and saying, “Based on your public comments, we would ask for an express and personal…,” and that’s what we did.
Rove could have made it clear, though legal channels, during the solid year that Fitzgerald was litigating this, that he didn’t expect Cooper to keep his confidence, if that’s what he was doing. He obviously knew that there was a battle royale going on between Time magazine and the special prosecutor and he knew that he’d spoken to Cooper. He could have let it be known that if Cooper was going to all this trouble over him, he needn’t bother.
Rove’s lawyer has been bloviating all week — and the RNC shills are repeating it like a mantra — that Rove had waived the privilege long ago and had nothing to hide. But he was willing, apparently, to let Cooper go to jail without lifting a finger to clarify that fact. I wouldn’t call that “fully cooperating with the investigation,” which is what both Scotty and Junior have been emphasizing is the prime directive.
He let Fitzgerald spend millions of taxpayer dollars to get Cooper to testify. He certainly had no legal obligation to help. But his boss, the president, did say that he wanted his staff to fully cooperate. Rove knew very well that Cooper was way out on a limb, and it was probably because of him, and he said nothing. And now he’s acting like he was a big hero.
He should be fired for that too. And asked to pay back the money that was spent by the prosecutor getting Cooper and TIME to reveal their source when all Rove had to do was make it clear through his lawyer that if Cooper was holding out because of him, he didn’t need to.
I think the RNC has made a mistake in going back into the original Wilson smear. Chris Matthews just showed footage of Cheney on Press The Meat. He was talking about how he’d personally been interested in the Niger story. It seems to back up Wilson. And the last thing they want is to have Cheney’s mug all over this story.
They also are making a mistake by pounding the fact that the entire leadership of the Democratic party including Kerry and Clinton are calling for Rove to resign. Mehlman even seemed a little gobsmacked by it. The problem is that almost everybody in the country believes that Democrats are the last people on the planet to go out on a limb. Without realizing it, Mehlman is being hoist by his own petard. Somebody just turned to me and said, “Jesus, if they’re saying it, he must be toast.”
Calling Democrats wimps for 20 years has its effects. It means that when they actually do say something people automatically assume that they aren’t acting out of political courage. They assume that there is no risk involved.
Mehlman also said that everyone knows that Karl Rove has the highest ethical standards. Hahahahahaha. To quote the Clenis — that dog won’t hunt. Once again, they are hoist by their own petard. You can’t go around telling everyone who’ll listen that Karl Rove is a cross between Sun Tzu and Machiavelli for years on end and then suddenly portray him as a simple, straight shooting public servant. Only the most ardent neanderthals are going to buy this. Certainly not one member of the press will.
This was a very weak performance. They aren’t on their “A” game.
Oh and the new NBC Wall Street Journal Poll is out and it ain’t good news for Bush. Check this out:
Only 41 percent give Bush good marks for being “honest and straightforward” — his lowest ranking on this question since he became president. That’s a drop of nine percentage points since January, when a majority (50 percent to 36 percent) indicated that he was honest and straightforward. This finding comes at a time when the Bush administration is battling the perception that its rhetoric doesn’t match the realities in Iraq, and also allegations that chief political adviser Karl Rove leaked sensitive information about a CIA agent to a reporter. (The survey, however, was taken just before these allegations about Rove exploded into the current controversy.)
If anyone would like to see the full manifestation of the Rove smear against Plame and her pathetic, henpecked husband in all it’s glory, you only need to watch the video (via Crooks and Liars) of John Gibson’s insane rant yesterday.
Newshounds has the transcript. Here’s just a little taste:
You wouldn’t send a peacenik to see if we should go to war, if we need to go to war, now would you? That’s exactly what happened, as they say in the news biz, inquiring minds now want to know how the heck did this happen? Well, it turns out little wifey did it.
[…]
So why should Rove get a medal?
Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq – she was married to him – and sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies. Where I come from, we want to know who that is. We do not want secret spymasters pulling the puppet strings in the background. That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.
Yeah. Senior white house advisor and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove was an interepid whistleblower, putting himself on the line exposing government wrongdoing when he outed Plame. He is the Daniel Ellsberg of the Bush administration bravely risking all to let the people know what its government was doing.
My head hurts.
Newshounds came up with something else quite interesting about Gibson’s schizoid ramblings, however:
Notes: This is something I haven’t done before; I compared the transcript posted on FoxNews.com with what he actually said, reading along. The discrepancies are interesting:
website: conclusions from a Senate investigation actual: conclusions from a joint investigation of Congress
website: Well, turns out the wife did it. actual: Well, it turns out little wifey did it.
website: Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq and George W. Bush’s policies. Sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies. actual: Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq – she was married to him – and sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies.
website: That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should own up to it. actual: That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.
website: Rove should get a medal if he did what he says he didn’t. actual: Rove should get a medal even if he did do what he says he didn’t do.
Somebody didn’t think Gibson’s statement was quite the thing so they doctored it. But hey, they never said they told the truth, only that they were fair and balanced. Which isn’t true either.
Oh, and be sure to check out this extension of that theme from today’s Wall Street Journal: Karl Rove, Whistleblower.
Does anyone find it at all ironic that Rick Santorum is blaming Boston for the priest molestation scandal? Has he ever heard the phrase “banned in Boston?” Does he know where it comes from?
From the late 19th century until the mid-20th century, the phrase “Banned in Boston” was used to describe a literary work, motion picture, play, or other work prohibited from distribution or exhibition. During this time, Boston city officials took it upon themselves to “ban” anything that they found to be salacious, immoral, or offensive: theatrical shows were run out of town, books confiscated, and motion pictures were prevented from being shown—sometimes stopped in mid-showing after an official had “seen enough”. This movement had several effects. One was that Boston, arguably the cultural center of the United States since its founding, now came across as less sophisticated than many lesser cities without such stringent censorship practices. Another is that the phrase “banned in Boston” began to be associated in the popular mind with something sexy and lurid; many distributors of such works were happy when they were banned in Boston, as it gave them more appeal elsewhere; many distributors also advertised that their products had been banned in Boston when in fact they had not to increase their appeal.
It hasn’t actually changed all that much. I love Boston, but a free-wheeling sexual libertine town it ain’t.
In fact, if we were to accept Rick Santorum’s silly cause and effect it would probably make more sense to say that it was the repressive sexual attitudes of Boston combined with the unnatural state of celibacy that “caused” the priests to molest countless children.
This is, of course, completely ridiculous. But it actually makes more sense than Santorum’s armchair sociology, which isn’t saying much. It would also make more sense to say that the priests’ bodies had been taken over by demons. Which I’m sure Santorum also believes. Liberal demons, naturally. Is there any other kind?
Gene Lyons writes in to point out this little tid-bit about our good friend Judith Miller. One of the things missed in all the paeans to Judy’s martyrdom to the confidential source is that the Jeanne D’arc of the Gray Lady had been known to burn her sources without a second thought if it suits her. Seems Judy has some shifting standards when it comes to betraying the reporter’s privilege:
In April, Miller interviewed an expert from the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington on background, then made up a quote and attributed it to the person, who she then named.
It infuriated colleagues and a senior editor, but it only merited a small editors’ note on April 9: “An article on Saturday about the search by United States forces for chemical, biological and radiation weapons in Iraq included a comment attributed to Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the [Stimson] Center, a research institute in Washington. Ms. Smithson was depicted as suggesting that Bush administration officials might be less certain of finding such weapons now than before the war. She was quoted as saying that ‘they may be trying to dampen expectations because they are worried they won’t find anything significant.’ In fact the comments were paraphrases of a remark Ms. Smithson made in an e-mail exchange for the Times’s background information, on the condition that she would not be quoted by name. Attempts to reach her before publication were unsuccessful. Thus the comments should not have been treated as quotations or attributed to her.”
This is actually what Miller did: the interview was conducted by e-mail, Miller added that “if I don’t hear back from you I’ll assume it’s OK to use.” Not hearing back, she used it. But the scientist didn’t check her e-mail further that day.
In fairness, it may be that this confidential source didn’t explicitly say she wanted to be on “super-double-secret-deep” backround and Karl Rove evidently did. So it was probably her own fault for thinking she could rely on “backround” alone to keep Judy from making up quotes and spilling her name all over the New York Times. She should have known better. And, after all, this source was questioning the evidence for WMD and Judy couldn’t really sanction that. Indeed, one might even wonder if she burned this source on purpose.
So, before we get all gooey about Judy’s great sacrifice in fighting for the reporter’s privilege, maybe we need to ask whether or not she believes in it in the first place. The evidence suggests that she doesn’t.
A friend of mine asked me to give her a synopsis of Rovegate in easy to understand, non-insider language. Perhaps you will find it interesting too:
In his op-ed on July 6th,2003, Wilson gave a straighforward account of who he is and why he went on this fact-finding trip to Niger. He says “I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report.” He does not say that Cheney had sent him personally on the mission. He reports that he found no evidence that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger.
He says that he assumes from working in the government for many years that his report had been forwarded through channels. When he heard the president use the claim about African uranium in the SOTU, he became alarmed and asked the State department about it. He accepted that the excuse that the president might have been talking about a different African country than Niger until he later learned that Niger was specifically mentioned quite recently in official documents. He concludes at this time, based upon the fact that he had personally been involved in debunking this claim, that the administration had been “fixing” intelligence.
The administration was now for the first time explicitly and openly being accused of knowingly using false information to sell the war. And since Wilson had specifically named the Vice president as having been the one to request additional information that led to his trip, the White House was involved at a very high level. The administration claims that this was not true, that in spite of a series of mishaps, there was no concerted or conscious effort to mislead the country about the intelligence. And whatever mistakes were made were the result of shoddy intelligence work, not the “fixing” or “sexing up” of the evidence. When the Niger episode became public, they decided that it was time for George Tenet to admit that he had screwed this particular case up and they arranged for him to make a public statement to that effect.
The White House response to Wilson’s piece is that Cheney never asked for the information in the first place. And they said they had no idea about Wilson’s evidence because his trip was a low level nepotistic boondoggle arranged by his wife, a CIA “employee.” Karl Rove and others spoke to several reporters to that effect (They now claim, since Matthew Cooper’s e-mail was leaked that it was only in order to “warn them off” taking Wilson seriously.) Robert Novak — an extremely unlikely columnist for the white house to feel they had to warn off Wilson — was the first to put this into print on July 13th.
When it came out, exposing Valerie Plame as an undercover operative, Wilson believed that it was an act of retaliation and a signal to anyone else who might be thinking of coming forward. Novak was quoted shortly after the column ran 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.” (He has since said that he used the term “operative” inappropriately, although he has used that word very precisely throughout his career to mean “undercover.”)In the days after the column appeared there were reports that the administration was actively pushing the column, claiming that Wilson’s wife was “fair game.”
I have no idea if Joe Wilson’s wife or the ghost of Ronald Reagan was involved in sending him on that trip and I don’t care. It’s irrelevant and it’s always been irrelevant and they were either incredibly malevolent or incredibly negligent in settling on using her as the best way to discredit Wilson. But as I wrote earlier, I think it was a P.R. decision, and it has the mark of Rove all over it. Thuggishness is his hallmark. Any chance they have to portray a male opponent as a milksop, they do it. I think the “wife” being involved in getting her husband a job was central to their calculations.
I don’t know if Cheney read his report but considering what we now know, I don’t find it credible that he didn’t. He has been proven to have been immersed in the pre-war intelligence, particularly the claim that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program. That was his baby. But Wilson didn’t claim in the op-ed that Cheney knew, only that he assumed his report had been circulated. And since he’d been told that the trip itself was a result of Cheney’s question he assumed that it had filtered up to Cheney.
That is what sent the administration into overdrive — Wilson merely mentioning Cheney in the context of fixing the intelligence. Quite a panicked reaction, don’t you think?
The White House response to Joe Wilson’s report was that it was something cooked up in the bowels of the CIA by his (gasp) wife and it was not very compelling and nobody paid any attention to it, even there, and they never sent the information back to the White House anyway.
If it weren’t for the fact that Wilson’s conclusions about the uranium were right, you might even believe their tale. If it weren’t for the fact that Dick Cheney was knee deep in the intelligence, even personally spending time at the CIA, leaning over the shoulders of desk officers, you might believe it. If it weren’t for the fact that the aluminum tubes “evidence” was shown to be false, the drone plane “evidence” was shown to be laughable and the mobile labs “evidence” was shown to be non-existent you might even believe it. If it weren’t for the fact that the meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and the Iraqis was proven false, that we had chances to take out Zarquawi and refused and that the inspectors were at the very moment of the SOTU reporting that they were not finding any stockpiles, we might even believe it. If it weren ‘t for the fact that the Downing Street Memos show definitively that the US knew its intelligence was weak and decided to “fix” it we might even believe it.
If we’d found even one scintilla of evidence that Saddam had the stockpiles, the programs or the means to make weapons of mass destruction, we might even believe it.
Unfortunately for the White House, there have been so many revelations now aside from the “16 words” that they no longer can claim credibility on this issue. It is quite clear to any sentient being that they manipulated, misled and outright lied about the intelligence. Joe Wilson knew back in 2003 that something was wrong. He had been involved in one particular part of the intelligence gathering and he knew the facts were being misrepresented. He spoke out. And the white house responded by portraying him as a partisan loser whose report was so low level that nobody ever saw it. In the course of that they also exposed his wife’s covert status, likely endangering national security.
If we knew then what we know now, would there be any question as to who should get the benefit of the doubt about this?
And knowing what we’ve always known about how the Rove operation works, is there really any question that they were smearing Wilson in the press and were thoroughly capable of outing an undercover operative in retaliation for attacking the white house? It occurs to me that all this talk about Valerie Plame these last few days — how she wasn’t “credible” as an NOC, how she was a “desk jockey,” how her cover was thin etc — I’m beginning to wonder if they weren’t retaliating against her as much as him. If she was involved in the meeting in which it was decided to send Joe Wilson to Niger I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to teach her a little lesson too. It’s what Tony Soprano would do.
Remember. It doesn’t matter who sent Wilson on the trip. What matters is that his questions in that op-ed, the questions they didn’t want anyone asking — have been answered. As the drip, drip drip of new evidence comes to the fore, we become more sure, not less, that the administration took this country to war on false pretenses. That’s what they are trying to hide.
Here’s the conclusion of Wilson’s piece that started this whole thing:
I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program — all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.
But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America’s foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor “revisionist history,” as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.
I think you’ll find it amazingly bracing to see in stark relief the two columns at the heart of this. You’ll see why it’s so absurd that they tried to make these questions about Joe Wilson’s wife so central to the story. The story is about Dick Cheney. And they knew it.
If he hadn’t defaulted to his patented South Carolina smear tactics, Karl would be in a much safer place today.
“By any definition, he burned Karl Rove,” Luskin said of Cooper. “If you read what Karl said to him and read how Cooper characterizes it in the article, he really spins it in a pretty ugly fashion to make it seem like people in the White House were affirmatively reaching out to reporters to try to get them to them to report negative information about Plame.”
Oooh. That’s dangerous stuff there. It may not be the smartest thing in the world for Karl Rove’s lawyer to be disparaging Matt Cooper on the day before he testifies, do you think? They only know what one e-mail says and they have no idea what Cooper is going to say. Bizarre.
There’s more:
According to Luskin, Cooper originally called Rove — not the other way around — and said he was working on a story on welfare reform. After some conversation about that issue, Luskin said, Cooper changed the subject to the weapons of mass destruction issue, and that was when the two had the brief talk that became the subject of so much legal wrangling. According to Luskin, the fact that Rove did not call Cooper; that the original purpose of the call, as Cooper told Rove, was welfare reform; that only after Cooper brought the WMD issue up did Rove discuss Wilson — all are “indications that this was not a calculated effort by the White House to get this story out.”
“Look at the Cooper e-mail,” Luskin continues. “Karl speaks to him on double super secret background…I don’t think that you can read that e-mail and conclude that what Karl was trying to do was to get Cooper to publish the name of Wilson’s wife.”
Nor, says Luskin, was Rove trying to “out” a covert CIA agent or “smear” her husband. “What Karl was trying to do, in a very short conversation initiated by Cooper on another subject, was to warn Time away from publishing things that were going to be established as false.” Luskin points out that on the evening of July 11, 2003, just hours after the Rove-Cooper conversation, then-CIA Director George Tenet released a statement that undermined some of Wilson’s public assertions about his report. “Karl knew that that [Tenet] statement was in gestation,” says Luskin. “I think a fair reading of the e-mail was that he was trying to warn Cooper off from going out on a limb on [Wilson’s] allegations.”
Gosh, is it ever too bad that whoever talked to Bob Novak didn’t make it just as clear in their conversation (after they were done answering questions about welfare reform or maybe the latest news on stem cell research, of course) that they were only giving him this information to keep him from “going out on a limb.”
Old Bob must be getting senile because he went right out and wrote a whole damned column about it, mentioning senior white house officials and everything. Man I’ll bet whoever spoke to Bob is in the doghouse now, huh?
Here they were just trying to make sure the old duffer didn’t embarrass himself by writing any supportive columns about Wilson (which you know he was planning to do) and look what happened. Now everybody thinks just because they had a few casual conversations on the run with a couple of reporters (only to to warn them off, of course) that this was a calculated effort to get the story out. What are the odds that two such different reporters would both get the story wrong in essentially the same way? Talk about bad luck. Do they all have egg on their faces or what?
Looks to me as if Bob Novak was a rat bastard too. Will he go down with the ship?
Update: Via &y in the comments, Murray Waas, who seems to have some good sources on this matter, has an update today on Novak:
Columnist Robert Novak provided detailed accounts to federal prosecutors of his conversations with Bush administration officials who were sources for his controversial July 11, 2003 column identifying Valerie Plame as a clandestine CIA officer, according to attorneys familiar with the matter.
[…]
Novak had claimed to the investigators that the Bush administration officials with whom he spoke did not identify Plame as a covert operative, and that use of the word “operative” was his formulation and not theirs, according to those familiar with Novak’s accounts to the investigators.
White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and at least two other Bush administration officials have told federal investigators that they had spoken to reporters about Plame, but that they did not know at the time that she was a covert operative with the CIA, the same sources told me.
And, as has now been widely reported, an email turned over last week by Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper to investigators shows that Cooper spoke to Rove just prior to Novak’s column. The notes indicate that Rove told him that Plame worked for the CIA, and that Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, obtained an assignment from the CIA, on her recommendation, to go to the African nation of Niger to investigate allegations that the then-Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was attempting to covertly purchase uranium to build a nuclear weapon.
When Wilson made known that the Niger allegations were untrue, but were still cited by President Bush to make the case to go to war with Iraq, Rove and other administration officials mounted a campaign to discredit Wilson by claiming that he obtained the assignment only because of his wife.
[…]
Federal investigators have been skeptical of Novak’s assertions that he referred to Plame as a CIA “operative” due to his own error, instead of having been explicitly told that was the case by his sources, according to attorneys familiar with the criminal probe.
That skepticism has been one of several reasons that the special prosecutor has pressed so hard for the testimony of Time magazine’s Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
[…]
Also of interest to investigators have been a series of telephone contacts between Novak and Rove, and other White House officials, in the days just after press reports first disclosed the existence of a federal criminal investigation as to who leaked Plame’s identity. Investigators have been concerned that Novak and his sources might have conceived or co-ordinated a cover story to disguise the nature of their conversations. That concern was a reason– although only one of many– that led prosecutors to press for the testimony of Cooper and Miller, sources said.
Lending credence to those suspicions was that a U.S. government official questioned by investigators said Novak specifically asked him whether Plame had some covert status with the CIA. The official told investigators that Novak appeared uncertain whether she was undercover or not. That account, on one hand, might lend credence to the claims by Rove and other Bush administration officials that they did not know Plame was a covert CIA officer. Conversely, however, the fact that Novak asked the question in the first place appeared to indicate that he might have indeed been told Plame was a covert operative, and was seeking confirmation of that fact.
Atrios says that certain people remain concerned that corporate entities or politicans will infiltrate the web and pour big money into it to influence politics. As if the amount of money that MSNBC is flushing down the toilet each night on Tucker Carlson isn’t pouring big money into television to influence politics. What, is Tucker an unbiased “journalist?”
And what do they plan to do about guys like Sean Hannity, who appears regularly at campaign rallies speaking on behalf of big shot republicans. Is he an activist subject to regulation on his web site, but a member of the media on his radio show?
It’s awfully hard to know where to draw these lines, isn’t it? But let’s not let that stop us. It makes perfect sense to draw it by regulating the web, the one place where there is at least a small chance that a regular person, or a group of citizens, can compete with the huge money that already dominates the media — which is exempted from regulation. Awesome, awesome logic. I guess we can content ourselves with calling in to Rush and hoping he lets us on the air.
After all, someday some rich person might find a way to influence the political system by putting lots on money into a web site somewhere that will be so grand that all the other voices are drowned out by its incredible incredibleness. I can hardly wait. Will it dispense cash? Blow jobs? Because that’s what it’s going to take to make “production values” be the difference on the internet. God speed to the person who figures out how to make that work. I suspect he or she will not waste his or her time on political talk, however. There are much bigger fish to fry once you crack that nut.
For all those who are still breathless with appreciation at the White House press corpses performance yesterday, a commenter reminded me of this incident as an illustration of how the White House and the Press Corps normally interact. I remember writing about it at the time:
The story not told was that the president of the United States was acting like a 15 year old trash talking punk in the above mentioned restaurant and refused repeatedly to answer any of the questions posed by reporters by throwing his weight around and making stupid, juvenile jokes for about 15 minutes.
Maybe he was drunk, I don’t know. But he was certainly an asshole to David Gregory and Terry Moran, the two most tenacious questioners yesterday. In that little show of manhood, he’s calling both reporters “Stretch,” which he apparently think is hilarious:
Remarks by the President to the Press Pool Nothin’ Fancy Cafe Roswell, New Mexico
11:25 A.M. MST
THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.
Q Mr. President, how are you?
THE PRESIDENT: I’m hungry and I’m going to order some ribs.
Q What would you like?
THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I’d like.
Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven’t spent enough to keep the country secure.
THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. But I’m here to take somebody’s order. That would be you, Stretch — what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It’s part of how the economy grows. You’ve got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?
Q Right behind you, whatever you order.
THE PRESIDENT: I’m ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?
Q But Mr. President —
THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady’s business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?
Q Yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?
Q Ribs.
THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let’s order up some ribs.
Q What do you think of the democratic field, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: See, his job is to ask questions, he thinks my job is to answer every question he asks. I’m here to help this restaurant by buying some food. Terry, would you like something?
Q An answer.
Q Can we buy some questions?
THE PRESIDENT: Obviously these people — they make a lot of money and they’re not going to spend much. I’m not saying they’re overpaid, they’re just not spending any money.
Q Do you think it’s all going to come down to national security, sir, this election?
THE PRESIDENT: One of the things David does, he asks a lot of questions, and they’re good, generally.
You should have seen the footage. It was unbelievable. Gregory and Moran looked like a couple of idiots. I’m sure they remember.
And then there was this one when Gregory addressed a question to Jacques Chirac in French:
NBC’s David Gregory, unwisely pushing Bush to explain “why it is you think there are such strong sentiments in Europe against you and your administration,” had the bad taste to ask President Chirac—in French, of all languages—if he also wanted to comment.
“Very good,” shot back a very petulant Bush, “The guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he’s intercontinental.”
When Gregory offered to go on in French, Bush was determined to squelch the bilingual upstart: “I’m impressed—que bueno. Now I’m literate in two languages.” At the end of the press conference, the President of the United States called to Gregory: “As soon as you get in front of a camera, you start showing off.”
It turned out that what set him off was Gregory’s turning to the French leader. Later Bush told Chirac: “I’ll call on the Americans.”
What Gregory said later was: “Well, that’s it for my career.”
Bush owns all the Americans, you see. It’s the ownership society thing.
If these guys are turning on lil’ Scotty McClellan now that Rove is injured and bleeding that’s nice. But let’s not kid ourselves that they haven’t allowed themselves to be treated like freshmen frat pledges for the last four and half years. It hasn’t been pretty to watch.
For the last couple of days I’ve been saying that the GOP’s new excuse is that Karl Rove was just setting the record straight about that lyin’ Joe Wilson. Deborah Orrin prattled about it last night on Hardball. Here are the official RNC talking points and my suggested answers::
Cooper’s Own Email Claims Rove Warned Of Potential Inaccuracies In Wilson Information:
“[Time Reporter Matt] Cooper Wrote That Rove Offered Him A ‘Big Warning’ Not To ‘Get Too Far Out On Wilson.’ Rove Told Cooper That Wilson’s Trip Had Not Been Authorized By ‘DCIA’ – CIA Director George Tenet – Or Vice President Dick Cheney.” (Michael Isikoff, “Matt Cooper’s Source,” Newsweek, 7/18/05)
Inaccuracies? You mean Bush’s 16 words in the SOTU were right after all? Wow.
Wilson Falsely Claimed That It Was Vice President Cheney Who Sent Him To Niger, But The Vice President Has Said He Never Met Him And Didn’t Know Who Sent Him:
Wilson Says He Traveled To Niger At CIA Request To Help Provide Response To Vice President’s Office. “In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. … The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.” (Joseph C. Wilson, Op-Ed, “What I Didn’t Find In Africa,” The New York Times, 7/6/03)
* Joe Wilson: “What They Did, What The Office Of The Vice President Did, And, In Fact, I Believe Now From Mr. Libby’s Statement, It Was Probably The Vice President Himself …” (CNN’s “Late Edition,” 8/3/03)
Vice President Cheney: “I Don’t Know Joe Wilson. I’ve Never Met Joe Wilson. … And Joe Wilson – I Don’t [Know] Who Sent Joe Wilson. He Never Submitted A Report That I Ever Saw When He Came Back.” (NBC’s “Meet The Press,” 9/14/03)
CIA Director George Tenet: “In An Effort To Inquire About Certain Reports Involving Niger, CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Experts, On Their Own Initiative, Asked An Individual With Ties To The Region To Make A Visit To See What He Could Learn.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release, 7/11/03)
* Tenet: “Because This Report, In Our View, Did Not Resolve Whether Iraq Was Or Was Not Seeking Uranium From Abroad, It Was Given A Normal And Wide Distribution, But We Did Not Brief It To The President, Vice-President Or Other Senior Administration Officials.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release, 7/11/03)
So, because Wilson says that he was told Cheney had requested a report and Cheney says he never met Wilson, that means that Joseph Wilson’s report was wrong?
Why did the White House keep saying that there were WMD in Iraq when there haven’t been any found? Was it Joe Wilson who got everything wrong or was it the administration?
Wilson Denied His Wife Suggested He Travel To Niger, But Documentation Showed She Proposed His Name:
Wilson Claims His Wife Did Not Suggest He Travel To Niger To Investigate Reports Of Uranium Deal; Instead, Wilson Claims It Came Out Of Meeting With CIA To Discuss Report. CNN’S WOLF BLITZER: “Among other things, you had always said, always maintained, still maintain your wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, had nothing to do with the decision to send to you Niger to inspect reports that uranium might be sold from Niger to Iraq. … Did Valerie Plame, your wife, come up with the idea to send you to Niger?” JOE WILSON: “No. My wife served as a conduit, as I put in my book. When her supervisors asked her to contact me for the purposes of coming into the CIA to discuss all the issues surrounding this allegation of Niger selling uranium to Iraq.” (CNN’s “Lade Edition,” 7/18/04)
* But Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Received Not Only Testimony But Actual Documentation Indicating Wilson’s Wife Proposed Him For Trip. “Some [CIA Counterproliferation Division, or CPD,] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’ and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, ‘my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.’” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)
So the white house revealed that Valerie Plame was an undercover Cia agent working in the field of weapons of mass destruction because they thought she sent her husband on the trip. Was that really good judgment do you think? And, anyway, does this mean that Saddam did try to buy uranium after all? What did his wife sending him have to do with that anyway?
Wilson’s Report On Niger Had “Thin” Evidence And Did Not Change Conclusions Of Analysts And Other Reports:
Officials Said Evidence Was “Thin” And His “Homework Was Shoddy.” “In the days after Wilson’s essay appeared, government officials began to steer reporters away from Wilson’s conclusions, raising questions about his veracity and the agency’s reasons for sending him in the first place. They told reporters that Wilson’s evidence was thin, said his homework was shoddy and suggested that he had been sent to Niger by the CIA only because his wife had nominated him for the job.” (Michael Duffy, “Leaking With A Vengeance,” Time, 10/13/03)
Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Unanimous Report: “Conclusion 13. The Report On The Former Ambassador’s Trip To Niger, Disseminated In March 2002, Did Not Change Any Analysts’ Assessments Of The Iraq-Niger Uranium Deal.” (Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessments On Iraq, 7/7/04)
* “For Most Analysts, The Information In The Report Lent More Credibility To The Original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Report On The Uranium Deal, But State Department Bureau Of Intelligence And Research (IN) Analysts Believed That The Report Supported Their Assessments That Niger Was Unlikely To Be Willing Or Able To Sell Uranium.” (Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessments On Iraq, 7/7/04)
CIA Said Wilson’s Findings Did Not Resolve The Issue. “Because [Wilson’s] report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was not seeking uranium from abroad, it was given a normal and wide distribution, but we did not brief it to the president, vice president or other senior administration officials. We also had to consider that the former Nigerien officials knew that what they were saying would reach the U.S. government and that this might have influenced what they said.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release 7/11/03)
The Butler Report Claimed That The President’s State Of the Union Statement On Uranium From Africa, “Was Well-Founded.” “We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: ‘The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ was well-founded.” (The Rt. Hon. The Lord Butler Of Brockwell, “Review Of Intelligence, On Weapons Of Mass Destruction,” 7/14/04
)
Aha. So now we’re getting somewhere. So Saddam was trying to buy that uranium. Wasn’t he? For his nuclear program. That doesn’t exist.
Didn’t I hear something about the documents being forgeries and the administration admitting that they shouldn’t have included the “16 words” in the SOTU speech? Are you taking that all back now? Wilson’s report was wrong but it was right?
Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Kit Bond (R-MO) And Orrin Hatch (R-UT) All Stated, “On At Least Two Occasions [Wilson] Admitted That He Had No Direct Knowledge To Support Some Of His Claims And That He Was Drawing On Either Unrelated Past Experiences Or No Information At All.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)
* “The Former Ambassador, Either By Design Or Through Ignorance, Gave The American People And, For That Matter, The World A Version Of Events That Was Inaccurate, Unsubstantiated, And Misleading.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)
* “[J]oe Wilson Told Anyone Who Would Listen That The President Had Lied To The American People, That The Vice President Had Lied And That He Had ‘Debunked’ The Claim That Iraq Was Seeking Uranium From Africa … Not Only Did He NOT ‘Debunk’ The Claim, He Actually Gave Some Intelligence Analysts Even More Reason To Believe That It May Be True.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)
Oh, That must be the bipartisan commission everybody’s quoting. When did Bond, Hatch or Roberts become a Democrat?
I’m actually only half kidding on this. If the talkers would think about it, the best thing they can do is constantly shift this back to the very salient fact that what Wilson said was true. Wilson said Saddam didn’t try to buy the uranium and that he (Wilson) told the CIA he didn’t try to buy the uranium. And he wasn’t the only one who disbelieved the story. So did George Tenet hiumself who insisted it be pulled from Bush’s first big speech in Cincinnatti. Then, months later, after even more evidence was available that it was bullshit, Bush went ahead said Saddam DID try to buy the uranium in the big State of the Union speech. He was forced to retract that statement a couple months later. Wilson was right.
All the rest of this is inside baseball mumbo jumbo designed to discredit Wilson after the fact because he criticized the administration.
Let’s not forget. What Wilson criticized the administration for was putting the Niger uranium business into the State of the Union speech when he knew they were aware that it was bullshit. And let’s not forget — it was bullshit.
And where are those WMD, anyway?
Here is an informative article on the commission in Wikipedia. It’s being challenged for neutrality by wingnuts because, as Rob Cordry says, “The facts are biased, Jon.”
Just in case anyone’s wondering about the status of this bipartisan commission’s look at whether the administration may have cooked the intelligence, there’s this:
At the time of the report’s release (July 9, 2004), Democratic members of the committee expressed the hope that “phase two” of the investigation, which was to include an assessment of how the Iraqi WMD intelligence was used by senior policymakers, would be completed quickly. Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) said of phase two, “It is a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done.”
On March 10, 2005, during a question-and-answer session after a speech he had given at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Senator Roberts said of the failure to complete phase two, “[T]hat is basically on the back burner.” Senator John D. Rockefeller (D-WV), vice chairman of the Committee, made a statement later that day in which he said, “The Chairman agreed to this investigation and I fully expect him to fulfill his commitment… While the completion of phase two is long overdue, the committee has continued this important work, and I expect that we will finish the review in the very near future.”
In a statement regarding the release of the report of the presidential WMD commission on March 31, 2005, Senator Roberts wrote, “I don’t think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence. I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further.”
On April 10, 2005, Senators Roberts and Rockefeller appeared together on NBC’s Meet the Press program. In repsonse to a question about the completion of phase two of the investigation, Roberts said, “I’m perfectly willing to do it, and that’s what we agreed to do, and that door is still open. And I don’t want to quarrel with Jay, because we both agreed that we would get it done. But we do have–we have Ambassador Negroponte next week, we have General Mike Hayden next week. We have other hot-spot hearings or other things going on that are very important.”
Moderator Tim Russert then asked Senator Rockefeller if he believed phase two would be completed, and he replied, “I hope so. Pat and I have agreed to do it. We’ve shaken hands on it, and we agreed to do it after the elections so it wouldn’t be any sort of sense of a political attack. I mean that was my view; it shouldn’t be viewed that way.”
As of July, 2005, phase two of the Committee’s investigation had not yet been completed.