Mr Helpful
It occurs to me as I read the pithy Charles Pierce piece I’ve been yearning for, that it’s quite wonderful that Karl Rove makes it a practice to warn reporters off of stories he thinks will embarrass them. I guess he must have been out of town the day CBS submitted its National Guard story to the white house for comment.
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Rove Food
New detail about what Fitzgerald knows from the LA Times:
Prosecutors investigating whether White House 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 I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson’s credibility, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.
While lower-level White House staff members 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 responded: “He’s a Democrat.” Rove then cited Wilson’s campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said.
[…]
Activities aboard Air Force One are also of interest to prosecutors — including the possible distribution of a State Department memo that mentioned Wilson’s wife. Prosecutors are seeking to find out whether anyone who saw the memo learned Plame’s identity and passed the information to journalists. Telephone logs from the presidential aircraft have been subpoenaed; among those aboard was former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who has testified before the grand jury.
The source familiar with the investigation said Saturday that prosecutors had obtained a White House call sheet showing that Novak left a message for Fleischer on the afternoon of July 7, 2003, the day after Wilson’s op-ed article appeared and the day that Fleischer left with the president for Africa. Fleischer declined to comment for this article, but has flatly denied that he was the source of the leak.
Wilson said in an interview Saturday that he had known that Novak was interested in him a week or so before the column appeared. He said that a friend who saw Novak on the street reported that Novak told him, “Wilson is an (expletive) and his wife works for the CIA.”
[…]
There have been other indications of a concerted White House action against the former envoy. Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus has said that two days before Novak’s column, he was told by an “administration official” that the White House was not putting much stock in the Wilson trip to Africa because it was “set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction,” according to an account of the conversation Pincus wrote for the Summer 2005 issue of Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Let’s suppose you are a straight shooting prosecutor or a grand juror. And let’s suppose an extremely powerful and arrogant asshole testifies that he thinks it’s perfectly ok to “discredit” his political opponents with derogatory information about them. Let’s assume that a whole bunch of people from the White House testify that this arrogant asshole was obsessed with smearing a critic “because he was a Democrat.”
Do you think he’d get the benefit of the doubt asbout whether he actually smeared this critic from either the straight shooting prosecutor or the grand juror?
I don’t either. If they can nail him they’re going to. He’s a pig.
Closing Ranks
Bob Novak, who is now Karl Rove’s howling bitch until the day his rotting cadaver finally admits it’s dead, says that Ed Gillespie (whom he pointedly calls a protege of Karl Rove) may be the new chief of staff. It appears they are easing Andy Card out.
He has been disloyal in the past:
I made these inquiries in part because last spring, when I spoke to White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of senior adviser Karen Hughes’s resignation: “I’ll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are going to have to really step up, but it won’t be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary.
One wonders if Karl may think he’s been disloyal more recently. After all, as Weldon Berger has been reminding us, there is still the question of who leaked to the Washington Post that the Plame leak was done “purely and simply for revenge.” I always speculated it was Andy, who’s not part of the Texas mafia.
In any case, it looks like the hankie twisting, pearl clutching Ed “political hate speech” Gillespie is being brought on to shore up Karl and “send a message.” That’s what they do. It’s only a matter of time before we see Ben Ginsberg on the scene.
When they call in James “divaaaaaahn” Baker, we’ll know the jig is up.
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Is It Safe?
Via Crooks and Liars, I see that Bob Schieffer takes the president to task for not just hauling in his top aides two years ago and telling them he wanted to know who talked to the press. This is a good question and one which I think the press should be asking every day. But then, Bush has always been a little cagey on this, hasn’t he? Why you’d almost think he already knew all about it.
And then there’s David Broder who seems to have popped half a viagra this morning and actually condemns the White House for it’s ruthless behavior AND takes the press corpse top task for its wimpiness. Father Tim came close to giving Ken Mehman an Al Goring this morning.
The DC establishment has opened one droopy eye and they see that the Republicans might actually be vulnerable. So they pulled their guts from the storage box under the bed and tried them on for size. I wonder if they still fit after all this time?
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Another Unhappy Ambassador
I sure hope this guy’s wife didn’t have any pecadilloes in college or anything because they are going to be after him, for sure.
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Memo Minutia
Warning: Extreme parsing of arcane Rovegate evidence follows. Read at the risk of being put to sleep immediately.
Michael at Reading A1 suggests that I’ve misinterpreted the Fred Barnes piece I wrote about yesterday and that Cheney may have seen an earlier memo from an American diplomat rather than the now infamous June 10, 2003 classified memo that everybody’s talking about. He may very well be right. I even questioned whether there even were any earlier memos.
Well, there were, and a whole bunch of them. (See the SSCI Report on Pre-War Intelligence, here.) And there was an American diplomat who debriefed Wilson whose report Cheney very likely saw if he requested information about Wilson’s trip — Barbara Owens-Kirkpatrick, the Ambassador of Niger. It’s entirely believable that if the VP wanted to see a report on someone they’d send him the report of an Ambassador. He may have even picked up the phone and called her. In any case, it’s certainly true that Cheney could have seen earlier memos and probably did. (We don’t know when he saw those memos, but they do exist.) My speculation was probably off base.
Michael sets forth a theory about Cheney’s revenge that I find quite persuasive. Along with him and Josh Marshall I would not be in the least bit surprised that this whole thing stemmed from the turf wars that characterized the run up to the invasion. I’m sure they are still fighting them. Negroponte may have to find some of his old friends in the Honduran Army to quell them.
Yesterday, like me, Marshall asked who wrote the June memo and why:
Who requested that the memo be written? Who actually wrote it? Why does it contain the inaccuracies the CIA claims it does? Who were the administration officials who continued to circulate the classified document to conservative news outlets even after Plame’s identity was initially revealed? And how did it get into the hands of Jeff Gannon?
I think I have discovered some answers:
The answer to the first question is that we don’t know who requested the memo.
The answer to the second question appears to be an INR analyst who is quoted heavily in the SSCI report and seems to be the only real source for the fact that Plame somehow finagled to get Wilson the trip.
In answer to the third, there is a big question as to whether anybody in the administration continued to circulate the memo to conservative news outlets (although they were certainly discussing it with mainstream news outlets.) Rather it appears that the CIA got the impression Jeff Gannon of Talon News had seen the memo (and rightly so, he acted as if he did) when he had in fact seen this article from October of 2003 in the WSJ (sorry can’t find working link) which said:
An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.
The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.
Ms. Plame, a member of the agency’s clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband, Africa expert and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports, according to current and former government officials familiar with the meeting at the CIA’s Virginia headquarters. Soon after, midlevel CIA officials decided to send him, say intelligence officials.
Classified memos, like the one describing Ms. Plame’s role, have limited circulation and investigators are likely to question all those known to have received it. Intelligence officials haven’t denied Ms. Plame was involved in the decision to send Mr. Wilson, but they have said she was not “responsible” for the decision.
Gannon played games for quite a while pretending he was protecting sources and the like but finally he admitted that he was actually referring to the WSJ story. (The CIA was misled by Jeff Gannon into thinking that this classified memo was making the rounds of conservative male prostitutes. You can understand why they were upset. Might as well plaster it all over the Web. In living color.)
They were also likely upset that this memo was being discussed (and in such detail) because it was still classified. (I’ll leave it up to the lawyers to figure out whether releasing new details of a classified document that has been preivously leaked contitutes a crime.)
In the end, it appears to me that there is only one primary source of the “Wilson’s wife sent him” story and it is a single INR (state department intelligence) analyst. I suspect he is the one who wrote the 2003 memo. The SSCI Report entry on this specific subject begins:
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 activitv.” This was just one day before CPD sent a cable-requesting concurrence with CPD’s idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him “there’s this crazy report” on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.
(This allegedly unbiased SSCI report is big on the scare quotes when describing the Wilsons’s testimony.It tries to make a not very subtle case that she was trying to slant the evidence to favor Saddam even before the trip. It’s this biased language to which the Democrats on the panel rightly objected in their dissent.)
The Plame memo in question here has been explained as one written about Wilson’s qualifications, but not one that suggested he go. The interviews mentioned indicate only two people, the person who said “she offered up his name” and the INR analyst who said the first meeting with Wilson was “apparently convened by [the former ambassador’s] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him.]” There appears to be no other corroboration although the meeting was full of people. The only other documentation the SSCI report provides is the INR analyst’s notes:
On February 19,2002, CPD hosted a meeting with the former ambassador, intelligence analysts from both the CIA and INR, and several individuals DO and CPD divisions. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the merits of the former ambassador traveling to Niger. An INR analyst’s notes indicate that the meeting was “apparently convened by [the former ambassador’s] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.” The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that she only attended the meeting to introduce her husband and left after about three minutes.
The CIA has disputed in press reports that this analyst could have been at the meeting in which sending Wilson was broached. And that meeting must have been before the one the analyst refers to, since Wilson attended the one he’s discussing. I don’t know if the analyst had attended any earlier meetings in which Wilson was discussed for the mission, but the report doesn’t mention it if he did. I think the press has been confused about this or deliberately misled.
What appears to have happened is that there was an earlier meeting in which it was decided (we don’t know how) that Wilson should be sent. Plame introduced her husband at a later meeting with a bunch of people from throughout the intelligence community and then left. The analyst’s impression was that she arranged the meeting and he put that in his notes. The rest is history.
Here’s the bottom line as I see it. It’s still quite possible that Cheney saw Wilson’s report. According to the SSCI report, the CIA issued one and sent it up the line specifically because they knew that Cheney had asked about the Niger question. They did not make a special delivery to his office, so there is no way to prove one way or the other if Cheney ever saw it short of subpoenaeing the VP’s records — which I’m sure have long since been “misplaced.” There were other reports issued as well, including the one written by this INR analyst called Niger: Sale of Uranium To Iraq Is Unlikely.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that Cheney didn’t see any reports. It’s clear that people were trying to give him information he wanted to see. Wilson’s report backed up Owen-Kirkpatrick and others who said Iraq was very unlikely to have been trying to buy yellowcake from Niger. Therefore, since it wasn’t dispositive in their view on that fact, they may not have wanted to draw Cheney’s ire by bringing it up.
One thing that’s intriguing, however, is that the CIA told Cheney’s briefer on March 5th that a source was coming back from Niger that day who could shed further light on the subject. That source was Joe Wilson. Either the briefer never gave Cheney that heads up or Cheney never followed up with it. Then again, maybe he did.
Whatever the case, Cheney says that he didn’t know anything about it until he started to read the anonymous quotes in the newspapers from “a former ambassador” at which point he got a debriefing from an American diplomat. At this same time a memo was requested by somebody about the provenance of Wilson’s trip (Wilson was saying it was to answer questions raised by Cheney.) It appears to me that at this point the INR analyst wrote up his notes about his involvement in the trip and those notes became the June 10th memo. And the White House seized on the fact that he said Wilson’s wife was involved.
I suspect that’s as far as they got. With the modern Republicans, all you have to do is mention that there might be some dirt on somebody’s wife and they are all over it like slavering wolves. This would be exactly the kind of smear they’d jump on. This, then, would be their counterattack.
If that’s so, the question then becomes, did they ever follow up with anyone to find out Plame’s status with the CIA? Did anyone ever even contemplate that she might be in a delicate position there? Did they ever ask anyone at CIA if it was true that she had “arranged” the trip? And then of course there are the pivotal questions of who saw this memo and when — and who leaked it to whom and when.
That’s my theory of how the June 2003 memo came to be. And I’m pretty convinced that it’s the real source of this whole thing. Judy Miller may complicate this, but I suspect that if she’s a source, she’s a cut-out for Libby (to whom we know she spoke during this period) not an original source herself. However, since I know fuck-all about what she knows, I can’t really speculate.
Given what we know today from news reports and the SSCI report, this single INR analyst’s notes, which people have conflated with a meeting he may never even have attended, seems like the simplest most believable source of this mess.
Update: Clarification on the Plame memo in which she discusses her husbands qualifications. TIME magazine says today:
Or, more personally, was Rove suggesting that Wilson was chosen not for his expertise but because his wife was trying to help him stay in the game? Certainly Rove distorted her role when he claimed she had authorized the trip. “She was not in a position to send Joe Wilson anywhere except to bed without his supper,” says Larry Johnson, a Plame classmate at the CIA who later worked on Central American issues for the agency and then moved to the State Department as a counterterrorism officer. According to a declassified July 7, 2004, report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was Plame’s boss, the deputy chief of the CIA’s counterproliferation division, who authorized the trip. He did so after Plame “offered up” her husband’s name for the Niger mission, according to the report. In a Feb. 12, 2002, memo to her boss, Plame wrote that “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.”
It’s highly unlikely that her boss was involved in the classified state department memo that made the rounds because well … he actually knew she was clandestine.
If he was consulted by the White House on this matter, and told them (as I assume he would) that she was undercover, then they are criminal scumbags for outing her. If they didn’t bother to consult they are stupid scumbags for outing her. Either way, they’re scumbags.
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The Dog Ate My Classified Memo
So it’s finally been revealed that Libby and Rove were Cooper’s sources. What a coincidence. And both of them “heard” about Wilson’s wife sending him on the mission from a reporter. Man oh man, what are the odds? It’s even more shocking that the two most powerful political operatives in the White House were so out of the loop because we now know that on the trip to Africa on AF One, for reasons unknown, Rove subordinates Dan Bartlett and Ari Fleischer “prompted clusters of reporters” to look into how Wilson got his job while classified memos on the subject were being faxed back and forth to Condi to prepare her to go on television. Colin Powell was reported to be waving another secret classified memo around the cabin, a memo prepared more than a month earlier, that contained the information that Wilson’s wife sent him on the trip.
And yet we are supposed to believe that Karl and Scooter never saw or heard about any of this classified information, but rather heard about it from a reporter. And I’m assuming that Bartlett and Fleischer are supposed to have heard all about this from reporters too, or maybe second hand from Rove or Libby. None of these people in the white house political and press operation who were aware of Wilson’s wife’s alleged involvement had ever seen the classified document that was all over the place. They just heard the “gossip” and had nothing to do with planting it.
(I had not heard this business about Fleischer and Bartlett throwing out hints to the press corps on the Africa trip. Certainly, the press corps knew it, but I guess they were protecting their super-double deep backround confidential communal gaggles with the White House Press Office by not telling anyone.)
And if we are to believe they all got this information from reporters who told Libby and Rove (who because there exists no political assassin shield law are forced to say they don’t recall who they were) we must also then believe that throughout all of these very innocent exchanges of water cooler gossip among the press corps and the White House, neither Rove nor Libby nor anyone else thought to check with the CIA about Plame’s actual job in WMD and whether it was appropriate that her job become public. Even Novak now denies that he thought of it and only used the word “operative” by accident. Nobody anywhere had a second thought that there might be a reason not to publicize the identity of someone who works in weapons of mass destruction at the CIA. This is what we are supposed to believe.
It seems more likely to me now that Fitzgerald is building an obstruction and conspiracy case. Unless he’s stupid, which no one has ever said he is, he cannot believe these laughable excuses. If he has evidence that ties Novak into it after he shot his mouth off then that’s a real cover-up.
And, yes,to answer those readers who think that it’s a big waste of time to be talking about Rove in this detail, I think we all know the real story here is that “Karl Rove and others in the White House outed an undercover CIA operative to cover-up their lies about Iraq.” I’ve been saying that for some time. John Podesta said so this morning. Frank Rich wrote it yesterday. Even Monsignor Russert seemed to be seeing the bigger picture when he brought Woodward and Bernstein on to talk about how the Watergate burglary was part of a bigger story of White House corruption. (Woodward is spinning pretty badly, but then what would you expect? He wrote the allegedly definitive story of “Bush at War” and didn’t really get the story did he?)
But there is value in parsing the Rove stories in meticulous detail (besides being fun.) It feeds the scandal beast and if you don’t feed that beast it dies. So, I’m going to keep writing about both aspects of this story — the big picture and the detail about Rove — because that’s how you sustain a scandal. See, I learned this at the feet of the Mighty Wurlitzer. You just keep pounding in whatever way you can — relentless, focused and loud.
And I truly believe that Rove and his antics in this case are symbolic of the whole corrupt political machine that he has built — and the outing of a CIA agent is symbolic of the reckless desire to invade Iraq and roll over anyone who stood in their way. I think people are starting to get this in their gut.
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War Of The Chickenhawks
Apparently the wingnut braintrust thinks that H.G. Wells is a Hollywood scriptwriter living in Laurel Canyon with a gold retriever and BMW Z8. Jesus, it’s almost enough to make me cry.
Amanda links to Fred at Slacktivist as they both try to come to grips with some of the stupidest people on this planet — the 101st keyboarders — who seem to think that Spielberg wrote “War of the Worlds” and Michael Moore invented anti-colonialism.
These critics believe that WOTW is an anti-American screed. But they are very confused. Here’s why:
To anyone with a brain, the story is anti-colonial so if it can be interpreted as representing events of today, it represents the war in Iraq. The US would be the aliens, right?
The alien invaders arrive. We cannot understand them. Our best technology cannot harm them. They are inscrutable and unstoppable. There is nothing we can do.
Big tough America. Hooyah!
But the keyboarders are complaining about the behavior of the humans:
Right-wing critics of the film complain that Spielberg’s hero, played by Tom Cruise, spends most of the movie running away and hiding. But that’s the point — there’s nothing else he can do.
But, see, if this is an allegory about Iraq (presciently written a hundred years before it happened) then the humans represent the Iraqis. Which means that if they think the humans are behaving in a cowardly fashion, the Fighting Hellmice must admire the real life Iraqi insurgents who are ferociously fighting back the alien invaders — the US. The Iraqi “terrorists” are behaving precisely in the manner the Cheeto Brigade insists brave people should behave.
In other words, these chickenhawks are terrorists sympathizers.
However, I don’t think the fighting keyboarders understand that the movie is anti-colonial. I think they think it’s about 9/11 and the martians are supposed to be al Qaeda. They think it shows America as being weak and afraid because Tom Cruise tries to get away from the aliens.
I actually agree with them, although not in quite the same way, I’m afraid. Before I ever knew that Spielberg was re-making WOTW, I saw the crazed reaction of the right wing as being comparable to the hysteria we would see if Martians had landed rather than the intelligent, critical response we would expect a superpower to show in the face of a bunch of Islamic fundamentalist losers. Rightwing behavior from the beginning has been one of extreme overreaction — the “existential threat” the “our oceans no longer protect us,” the whole litany of fear inducing lies about Iraq are all manifestations of severe panic. Look at the difference between the way everyone else in the world behaved in the face of terrorist attacks and look at us. It’s embarrassing.
I think you can see the movie both as a criticism of the invasion of Iraq and as a criticism of the inchoate frenzy that overtook the right wing after 9/11. Their hysterical reaction betrayed what they would do if a real existential threat emerged — they’d lose their heads.
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Who Read The Memo?
Reader Suzanne D sent me this tantalizing little tid-bit this morning. Last night I wondered who received this 2003 classified State Department Memo and it seems that Fred Barnes answered that question, at least in one respect, back in July of 2003:
Nonetheless, it was reported in the media and repeated by politicians that Cheney had asked the CIA to send someone to Niger to look into the matter. This is untrue. What did happen is that CIA officials, without the knowledge of Cheney or Tenet, dispatched a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate. Columnist Robert Novak has reported that Wilson’s wife, a CIA employee, recommended him for the job. Wilson traveled to Niger, interviewed current and former officials, and decided that no deal for uranium had been made with Iraq.
When Wilson returned, he gave an oral report to the CIA. But he didn’t meet with Cheney or send him a written report on his trip. Cheney didn’t learn of Wilson’s trip until he read in the New York Times in May 2003 that an ex-ambassador had been sent. Cheney later received a document from an American diplomat who had debriefed Wilson. It was marked with a warning that the information might be unreliable. Leaders in Niger were not likely to admit to an American envoy that they’d violated United Nations sanctions by selling uranium to Saddam, it suggested.
If this document from an “American diplomat” who had debriefed Wilson is the same classified state department document from June of 2003 we are now talking about, Vice President Dick Cheney was one person who was aware that it was being alleged that “Wilson’s wife” had sent him on the trip. Perhaps he didn’t receive it until after Wilson’s op-ed, but it seems unlikely since that wasn’t published until two months after Cheney became aware of Wilson’s charges. Is it reasonable to believe that he would have waitied that long to inquire about someone who was saying the intelligence was fixed in Iraq? I seriously doubt it.
If that’s the case, then the idea that Libby and Rove didn’t see it is preposterous.
I think that the oddest thing about this memo is that it was written in June of 2003. Surely, there were earlier real-time documents that reflect Wilson’s debriefing upon his return? Why did they need to create this new memo at all? If Cheney really was unaware of Wilson’s trip (and he may very well have been) why didn’t they just send over the original debriefing instead of writing a new one?
And here’s another piece of information in that article that I hadn’t heard before:
Finally, last week, the truth started to emerge. At his press conference with President Bush, Prime Minister Blair said, “In case people should think that the whole idea of a link between Iraq and Niger was some invention, in the 1980s we know for sure that Iraq purchased round about 270 tons of uranium from Niger.” The White House, for its part, had had enough and started what it’s calling a “counteroffensive.”
The first step was to declassify and release the portion of the NIE entitled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Iraq, the intelligence document says, has been “vigorously trying to procure uranium ore” in Somalia and Congo as well as Niger. And there’s more to come in the campaign for Bush’s recovery. Congressional Republicans are joining the fight. The White House has brought back Mary Matalin, the Republican operative and ex-Cheney aide, to manage the media campaign. Maybe it will work. But the truth is, it shouldn’t have been necessary at all.
The media campaign she was managing was the media campaign that also happened to smear Wilson. This was the period in which Karl Rove admits to pushing the story all over town — reportedly claiming it is perfectly legitimate to ferociously discredit (smear) your political critics and use the entire Republican Noise Machine to do it. It appears that Mary Matalin was right in the middle of that.
We haven’t seen much of her lately, have we?
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Canteloupe Eyes, Judy In Disguise
So, Judy actually met with an unnamed government official on July 8th, the same day Rove spoke with Novak? I don’t know what it means, but it sure sounds interesting. Rove to Miller to Novak to Rove? He’s known for using cut-outs.
But this, I think, is even more interesting:
In court papers filed earlier this month urging that Ms. Miller be jailed, Mr. Fitzgerald said that “the source in this case has waived confidentiality in writing.”
George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, said Ms. Miller would not say who that source was. “She has never received,” Mr. Freeman said, “what she considers an unambiguous, unequivocal and uncoerced waiver from anyone with whom she may have spoken.”
Mr. Freeman declined to say what efforts, if any, Ms. Miller and her lawyers have made to obtain a satisfactory waiver.
Presumably, like Cooper’s, Miller’s lawyers don’t feel it’s a good idea to be contacting her source, if they even know who it is.
This statement from Miller’s attorney strikes me as an explicit call for her source to give her an “unambiguous, unequivocal and uncoerced waiver.” Maybe Judy isn’t enjoying herself as much in jail as she thought she would.
So who’s going to ask Karl and Scooter to give Judy this unambiguous, unequivocal and uncoerced waiver? Surely they will be happy to do it, right? Neither of them have anything to hide.
In fact, every person who previously signed a waiver in the matter should be asked to sign this explicit one, even if they never talked to her, in order to give the guilty party some cover so that Judy can testify and the public won’t automatically know who she’s been protecting. That seems fair, doesn’t it?
Maybe Michael Isikoff could suggest this next time he’s on TV. It might focus his mind on who’s really responsible for Miller being in jail.
Oh and this business about the classified state department memo being the source is quite interesting. I wrote about this earlier in the week but there is a significant detail that’s been changed since the early reports about it. It was evidently written in June of 2003, just a month before Wilson’s op-ed — probably at the behest of someone who was reading Nicolas Kristoff’s columns about a trip to Africa by an unnamed ex-ambassador. (The story says it was written for Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs, but that may only mean he was the bureaucrat charged with getting a report.) All the original stories had it dated in 2002, which made me assume that it was the original state department report about Wilson’s trip, written in real time. It wasn’t. It was written a year and a half later based on the memory of a staffer who said he had been present at the meeting, a fact which the CIA disputed.
This memo being written just a month before the op-ed changes the equation. Who wrote it and who requested it? And did anyone in the White House see it before Wilson’s op-ed was published? If so, who?
Update: Maybe this is why Miller’s lawyers are starting to “ask” that her source give her a special waiver:
Lawyers in the CIA leaks investigation are concerned that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may seek criminal contempt charges against New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a rare move that could significantly lengthen her time in jail.
[…]
While media coverage in recent days has focused on conversations that White House senior adviser Karl Rove had with reporters, two sources say Miller spoke with Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, during the key period in July 2003 that is the focus of Fitzgerald’s investigation.
The two sources — one who is familiar with Libby’s version of events, and the other with Miller’s — said the previously undisclosed conversation occurred a few days before Plame’s name appeared in Robert Novak’s syndicated column on July 14, 2003. Miller and Libby discussed former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, who had recently alleged that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, according to the source familiar with Libby’s version.
But, according to the source, the subject of Wilson’s wife did not come up.
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