Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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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Anticipation

Unless something really exciting happens, I’m done for the day. But here’s something to look forward to: Matt Cooper is writing an article about his Grand Jury appearance that probably has the White House boyz ‘n grlz wetting their pants. I would guess it will come out on Sunday, maybe tomorrow in anticipation of the gasbags.

They are going to try to “Rather” him if says anything damaging. Rove’s lawyer already laid the groundwork:

“By any definition, he burned Karl Rove,” Luskin said of Cooper.”

I still think that was probably not the smartest thing they ever did, but they probably thought they could intimidate Matt Cooper. And maybe they did. We’ll see.

Swopa has some interesting thoughts on what Cooper might say and how it might affect the case. And if you haven’t read Murray Waas’ account of how this mysterious “lawyer who has been briefed on the case” came to talk with the NY Times and Washington Post, do so. It’s fascinating.

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Awwwww

Attaturk has a special gift for Karl. Check it out.

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Joe And Dick On The Same Page

September, 2003

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, “MEET THE PRESS“)

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I had heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa, Niger in particular.

I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, “What do we know about this?” They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said, “This is all we know. There’s a lot we don’t know,” end of statement. And Joe Wilson — I don’t know who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.

Here’s what Wilson said in the op-ed on July 6th, that Ken Mehlman and half the Washington Press Corps is characterizing as “Cheney sent me to Africa:”

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. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990’s. 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.

When Karl Rove was talking to Bob Novak on July 8th about Valerie Plame this is what Wilson had actually said. If Karl was “knocking down” a story it was one that he was making up in his head because Cheney himself backed up Wilson’s story long after the brouhaha had hit the fan. Nothing in Cheney’s statement contradicts what Wilson said, even about the disposition of the report:

I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.

Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador’s report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

All Karl and his hit squad had to do to “knock down” Wilson was say, “Cheney had some questions back in 2002, but he never saw any report on Wilson’s trip and was unaware that the CIA had dispatched him. And frankly, after looking into the matter and seeing his report for the first time we can see why it wouldn’t have been forwarded to the White House. Ambassador Wilsons himself says that there was nothing earth shattering in it. In retrospect he was on the right track but nobody knew that at the time. Fog of war and all that…”

But no. They couldn’t try to be reasonable and put the thing into perspective. They had to immediately smear Wilson with this business about his wife. And a smear it was — it was the main thrust of Rove’s “evidence” in his discussion with Cooper and he admits that he at least confirmed this information to Novak. That’s the mark of Rove.

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I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip up…

Goddamn, no matter what else happens, if this sadist goes down, I’ll be happy. General Geoffrey D. Miller aka General Geoff D. Ripper truly is one of the most malevolent pieces of garbage in the US Army and he really should be court martialed. Today it’s been revealed the Ripper was actually meeting, apparently in secret, with Wolfowitz and Cambone and lied to congress about it. I am not surprised.

An Army general who has been criticized for his role in the treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has contradicted his sworn congressional testimony about contacts with senior Pentagon officials.

Gen. Geoffrey Miller told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004 that he had only filed a report on a recent visit to Abu Ghraib, and did not talk to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or his top aides about the fact-finding trip.

But in a recorded statement to attorneys three months later, Miller said he gave two of Rumsfeld’s most senior aides – then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary for Intelligence Steve Cambone – a briefing on his visit and his subsequent recommendations.

“Following our return in the fall, I gave an outbrief to both Dr. Wolfowitz and Secretary Cambone,” Miller said in the Aug. 21, 2004, statement to lawyers for guards accused of prisoner abuse, a transcript of which was obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

“I went over the report that we had developed and gave them a briefing on the intelligence activities, recommendations, and some recommendations on detention operations,” Miller added.

Specific interrogation techniques, he said, were not discussed.

Miller’s statement about the meeting, if true, suggests that officials at the very top of the Pentagon may have been more involved in monitoring activities at the prison than previously disclosed. Abu Ghraib was later at the center of a scandal surrounding prisoner abuse, which has led to punishments for soldiers.

Here’s the thing. After artillery officer Miller showed such pluck and spunk down at Gitmo with his novel interrogation techniques, they sent him to Iraq to see what he could do. See, the Iraqis weren’t behaving like the grateful liberated people they were expected to be. He made an evaluation and then sent his “best guys” from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to implement his techniques. We have recently had it confirmed that many of the techniques authorized by Miller at Gitmo were of the same ilk as those captured in the pictures at Abu Ghraib.

And in a bizarro world decision worthy of Wil E Coyote, after the scandal broke they sent Miller in to “straighten things out.”

All of this has been known for some time. I wrote back on May 29th, 2004:

It wasn’t a bunch of bad apples. It was at the explicit instruction of General Geoffrey D Ripper, who sent in his best leg breakers to teach ’em how to get the job done.

And then, as reports of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib were coming to light the Bush administration decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to put in charge the same guy who had recommended and implemented the abuse and torture in the first place.

How long will it take for somebody to ask, considering his history at the prison, why in the world General Ripper was brought in after the scandal broke? I’m just asking. He is, after all, an obviously sadistic freak who is one of the causes of the greatest foreign policy PR disaster in American history.

That not hyperbole. Abu Ghraib did us greivous harm around the world and probably helped al Qaeda more than any single act we’ve done. And General Geoff D Ripper was the go-to guy.

It looks now as if he was doing all this with the express knowledge and permission of Rumsfeld’s top brass and presumably Rumsfeld himself. (Remember Rumsfeld weighed in on “interrogation” techniques in some detail — “why shouldn’t they have to stand for longer than four hours, I do!”) This is not surprising either.

These guys picked a sadistic amateur to run both Gitmo and Abu Ghraib because his predecessors were insufficiently willing to “take the gloves off.” This is in keeping with their over-arching theory about how to fight the War on Terror. It’s worked out awfully well.

Today, we know that Bush administration loose lips are sinking ships all over the place, and their zeal to fear monger at home combined with their desire to treat the wogs with maximum ferocity has resulted in the US actively encouraging terrorism. It’s a fucking miracle we’ve escaped another hit, and it’s no thanks to anything these clowns have done.

Update: Lest anyone get the idea that I do not condemn the torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib on a moral basis because I did not explicitly say so in this piece, please feel free to check these posts in which I discuss torture in great detail in moral,ethical,practical and strategic terms. I regret not mentioning in this particular post that I think torture is immoral. Consider that oversight corrected.

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Toadys

…Mr. Rove and other administration officials had a legitimate interest in rebutting Mr. Wilson’s inflated claims — including the notion that he had been dispatched to Niger at Mr. Cheney’s behest. It’s in that context, judging from Mr. Cooper’s e-mail, that Mr. Rove appears to have brought up Ms. Plame’s role. Whether Mr. Rove or others behaved in a way that amounted to criminal, malicious or even merely sleazy behavior will turn on what they knew about Ms. Plame’s employment. Were they aware she was a covert agent? Did they recklessly fail to consider that before revealing her involvement? How they learned about Ms. Plame also will matter: Did the information come from government sources or outside parties?

None of that matters. Her cover was blown and Rove participated in it. I don’t care if he thought he was saving the world from an invasion from aliens, his act, not his motive should be the primary concern of a white house that is in the middle of what they tell us every day is a global war on terror. He could have had the best reasons in the world, but he either fucked up or he committed a crime, neither of which should be tolerated at his level. We know right now, at this minute, that at a minimum he fucked up.

Do you think that in the private sector if a person in Rove’s position of trust and power had “accidentally” told the press about a secret patent or a new formula that he’d be allowed to keep his job? Would he be trusted going forward with information about patents and secret formulas? Why is this so hard to understand? What Rove did may or may not have been a criminal offense. But it definitely was a firing offense.

And what’s this bullshit about “Mr. Rove appears to have brought up Ms. Plame’s role.” “Appears” nothing. He clearly did bring up Ms Plame’s role, and for reasons that are very hard to make sense out of. And just today, the WaPo itself reports that Rove admits that he confirmed that fact to Bob Novak. There’s no appearance about it. Rove admits it.

Update: MediaMatters has a thorough debuning of all these RNC spin points masquerading as an editorial here.
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Spikey’s Threat

I woke up this morning thinking about Michael Isikoff, which isn’t my favorite thing to think about first thing in the morning. Last night he told Jon Stewart that Pat Fitzgerald had better have something really, really strong to justify this investigation taking the turns its taken. It had better be about something really important — it had better be about national security. He was quite fierce about it.

I didn’t hear the rest because I threw the remote at the TV and it mercifully turned off.

The idea that Michael Isikoff, of all people, is laying down the gauntlet — warning Fitzgerald that if he’s thinking of prosecuting someone for perjury, say, or obstuction of justice, he will lead the chorus denouncing him as an overzealous prosecutor — is stunning. I don’t know what is in the Chardonnay in DC but it’s causing a lot of people to have severe problems remembering things — and seeing themselves in the mirror.

Michael Isikoff was practically Ken Starr’s right hand man in the media. He performed at only a slightly less partisan level than Drudge or Steno Sue Schmidt. He admits in his book that he became convinced that the president treated women badly and therefore needed to be exposed. He didn’t seem to think that throwing a duly elected president from office for lying about a private matter was overzealous in the least. He was on that bandwagon from the very beginning and one of the guys who drove it.

Michael Isikoff did not go on television and say that the punishment didn’t fit the crime or that Starr should have had something really, really important to justify his 70 million dollar investigation. Indeed, he did exactly the opposite.

Isikoff has done good work on this story. He continues to do good work. But apparently he doesn’t see outing CIA agents as serious as presidential fellatio. I suspect that holds true for the entire press corpse. They haven’t really had the fire in the belly for this one, have they?

Isikoff was a fine help to the Bush administration last night and I hope it makes up for that unfortunate Koran in the toilet business. He set the frame for indictments to be seen as unreasonable if don’t show national security was compromised. If Fitzgerald indicts members of the administration for lying or covering their tracks, it will not be taken well by the king of the kewl kidz. I have no doubt that the lemmings of the independent press corpse will fall into line as well, in the unfortunate event that Karl Rove is indicted for perjury or obstruction. After all it’s not as if he’s anything like that mean bitch Martha Stewart or that cruel lothario Bill Clinton. Those people really deserved it.

Update:

I realize that Isikoff was talking about the heinous, heinous crime of sending poor Judy Miller to jail. But I don’t really think that should be the standard by which a prosecutor should decide that only proveable crimes of national security should be investigated.

The point here is that this case is intrinsically about the press. Fitzgerald wasn’t conducting a fishing expedition to find out what Judy and Matt might know about a potential crime — he wanted them to testify because they may have been an element of the crime itself. This is a very important distinction.

It’s nice that Mikey and others are such zealous defenders of the freedom of the press. But freedom of the press is a right. Serving our democracy by giving the public the information it needs to govern itself is their responsibility. It is very hard to see how Judy’s martyrdom can be seen as a pure unalloyed matter of principle when(as Stewart pointed out) the press’ privilege seems to have been used pretty exclusively these last few years to protect their access to powerful government officials who want to use them to spread official lies.

I compare the coverage and attitude of the press covering this investigation to the shrill and breathless reporting of the Clinton years because it’s instructive. Never once did Isikoff express reservations about the non-stop partisan character assasination, the invasion of privacy, the perjury trap or the clear overstepping by the prosecutor as he “investigated” whether Bill Clinton lied about sex in a case that had already been dismissed — all of which were betrayals of principle just as important as the reporter’s privilege in my mind. But because this case involves a member of the press caught in a prosecutors net, suddenly he isn’t so sanguine about charging people with the crimes of lying or covering-up. That’s just not a good enough reason to put one of them on the hot seat. He and all of his brethren salivated at the idea that our democracy would be weakened by the partisan removal of a duly elected president, but let Judy go to jail and the hinges are coming off the nation.

I am reserving judgment on Judy’s status in the investigation because I have no facts one way or the other. I suspect it is more complicated than just protecting Karl Rove or someone else, but I don’t really know. I do know that she is the type of person who relishes drama, so I have a feeling that this little sojourn in lock-up isn’t exactly traumatizing for her. She’s already compared herself to soldiers in Iraq (where she wore a military uniform for god’s sake!) I’m figuring she’ll soon be saying she’s like MLK in the Birmingham jail. I think ole Judy can handle doing the time. In fact I think she relishes it.

Mickey and his friends can stop worrying about that part of the case and worry about why this government has lied to the nation repeatedly and blown over 200 billion dollars on an illegal and unnecessary war when terrorists are blowing shit up all over the world. Judy is more than happy to do her time for the principle of the reporter’s privilege.

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Short Term Memory Loss

The NY Times is reporting than an anonymous Rove defender who has been briefed on the case (by Rove?) says that Novak was the one who told Karl Plame’s name and informed him of “the circumstances” in which her husband traveled to Africa — at which point we are supposed to believe Karl suddenly remembered that he’d heard some of this from other journalists and confirmed the story to Novak by saying either “I heard that too” or “oh, you know about it.”

I can certainly understand why Fitzgerald might have been suspicious of this tale — especially when he read that Novak’s first comment on the matter was:

“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.”

According to this article “they” refers to an unknown source and … Karl Rove.

Rove Reportedly Held Phone Talk on C.I.A. Officer

Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a C.I.A. officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist the name of the C.I.A. officer, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, the person said.

After hearing Mr. Novak’s account, the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: ‘I heard that, too.’

The previously undisclosed telephone conversation, which took place on July 8, 2003, was initiated by Mr. Novak, the person who has been briefed on the matter said.

Six days later, Mr. Novak’s syndicated column reported that two senior administration officials had told him that Mr. Wilson’s ‘wife had suggested sending him’ to Africa. That column was the first instance in which Ms. Wilson was publicly identified as a C.I.A. operative.

It’s late and I’m tired so I’m not going to look it up, but didn’t I also hear a bunch of people saying over the last few days that Rove didn’t know Plame’s name when he spoke with Cooper? This conversation took place three days earlier. Not that it matters because he “identified” her as Wilson’s wife, but it’s interesting anyway.

Update: from the WaPo:

The lawyer, who has knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors, said President Bush’s deputy chief of staff has told investigators that he first learned about the operative from a journalist and that he later learned her name from Novak.

Rove has said he does not recall who the journalist was who first told him that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, or when the conversation occurred, the lawyer said.

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Get To Work, Kewl Kidz

Dan Froomkin nicely linked to my post from yesterday asking why Rove hadn’t saved the country some time and money and made sure that Cooper knew he didn’t have to keep his confidence. He says:

But here’s what that makes me think: if reporters want to help get New York Times reporter Judith Miller out of jail, let’s contact every conceivable person who might have been her source, and ask them (or their lawyers): if for some reason Judy Miller were in jail thinking that she’s protecting you, would that be a mistake? Would you tell that to her lawyer?

Let’s start with Rove, Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams, Cheney national security adviser John Hannah, counselor Dan Bartlett, press secretary Scott McClellan, former press secretary Ari Fleischer — and every other person’s name who has ever even remotely been attached to this story in the past.

What have we got to lose? Is anyone with me, or shall I get going myself.

I think that’s a terrific idea. Certainly you’d think Judy’s pals in the press corps would want to do her this service. Help her out kidz.

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