Claim Karl Rove was leak in CIA outing

Parent Cafe
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<p>Sources said the timing of an announcement had been moved up in part to deflect attention away from a
CIA leak controversy that has engulfed Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove.</p>

<p>“It helps take Rove off the front pages for a week,” one Republican strategist said.</p>

<p><a href=“http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-07-19T183515Z_01_SCH966812_RTRUKOC_0_BUSH-COURT.xml[/url]”>http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-07-19T183515Z_01_SCH966812_RTRUKOC_0_BUSH-COURT.xml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>“Thank you for bringing that up and spelling out so succintly.”</p>

<p>Sandra Day O’Connor was so inconsiderate to resign when she did. :lol</p>

<p>“The smear was on Wilson, and you know it.”</p>

<p>Make up your mind. I still don’t see the smear. Wilson wrote something patently false. It deserved to be rebutted.</p>

<p>“Did you see the WSJ article out today that referred to the the work up memo.”</p>

<p>No. The only thing on this I’ve seen is Wilson’s claim that someone leaked that information information about a workup to him. Back then he said that this was at Cheney’s request which would suggest that Lewis Libby saw it, but not nessarily Rove. BTW, any legitimate evidence it existed or used classified sources?</p>

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<p>[White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.</p>

<p>The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame’s name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.</p>

<p>Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove’s accounts was the claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information.]<a href=“http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10016[/url]”>http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10016&lt;/a&gt;
Here’s what one of the judges that ruled against Cooper and Miller wrote:</p>

<p>Applying this standard to the facts of this case, and considering first only the public record, I have no doubt that the leak at issue was a serious matter. Authorized “to investigate and prosecute violations of any federal criminal laws related to the underlying alleged unauthorized disclosure, as well as federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to intefere with, [Fitzegerald’s] investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses…”</p>

<p>Concurring opinion of Judge Tatel, United States Court of Appeal, District of Columbia Circuit ruling against Miller in Cooper on February 15, 2005.</p>

<p>Judge Tatel is explicitly stating what the grand jury that wants Cooper’s and Miller’s testimony is investigating in a section of his opinion explaining why the press privilege he believes exists is outweighed by the gravity of the matters being investigated. I don’t think he would enumerate those latter crimes unless Fitzgerald’s grand jury was actively investigating those kind of charges. </p>

<p>TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE PART I - CRIMES</p>

<p>CHAPTER 47 - FRAUD AND FALSE STATEMENTS</p>

<p>Sec. 1001. Statements or entries generally</p>

<p>Whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact, or makes any false, fictitious or fraudulent statements or representations, or makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or entry, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.</p>

<p>June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 749; Sept. 13, 1994, Pub. L. 103-322, title XXXIII, Sec. 330016(1)(L), 108 Stat. 2147.)</p>

<p>Mary Matalin comments to Peggy Noonan in the WSJ(another WSJ article)January 2002.</p>

<p>"I called Mary Matalin and asked her why this White House doesn’t leak when every other White House she ever worked in did. She said, “There’s this notion (in the press) that this White House is just so well disciplined and well organized. They think it’s run like a camp!” But the real key to the success of the No Leak Law is simple: “Because we have a common agenda we’re not trying to advance any position but the president’s. So we don’t use the vehicle of leaks to advance our own agenda. The Washington press thinks of leaking as ‘conflict leaking’–you leak to them to advance an agenda that is apart from the president’s, or to force an argument in a certain direction. We don’t have that. There aren’t any separate ideological or policy vents, we’re here to advance his policy. Previous administrations, you didn’t like the way it was going you’d leak it out in the press.”</p>

<p>Then she said something no White House aide in modern history has ever felt compelled to say, “We do leak!” she insisted. “We leak stuff all the time about what we’re doing and why, but it’s not conflict leaking.”</p>

<p>And they leak what Mr. Bush wants leaked. “He speaks in English not just to America but to us. He makes the agenda clear. It’s not unclear, there’s no guessing, what he’s thinking or wanting or going–he’s straightforward.”</p>

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<p>Pssst. You can’t commit perjury except under oath. No judge is going to consider omitting something in the first meeting with the FBI material so long as Rove testified to what happened to the grand jury. It raises suspicions, but won’t qualify as a crime. </p>

<p>The “I forget” defense would be a problem if someone could show convincingly that Rove had access to the information from a classified source. That’s a big if. </p>

<p>For instance, the State Department memo that Powell was supposed to be showing around Air Force One on the trip to Africa. Unfortunately, Rove wasn’t on that trip. That was the time his phone records show he was in the US taking calls from, wait for it, Novak and Cooper.</p>

<p>Actually, this seems more a sign of desparation than anything else. If there was no other crime, maybe we can get him on perjury. And, of course, that someone is being investigated is hardly proof that that someone is necessarily Rove.</p>

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<p>How would Rove have leaked if he wasn’t on AF1? you figure it out.
<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112170178721288385,0[/url]”>http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112170178721288385,0&lt;/a&gt;…
WSJ article about this memo:On July 6, 2003, former diplomat Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, disputing administration arguments that Iraq had sought to buy uranium ore from Africa to make nuclear weapons. The following day, President Bush and top cabinet officials left for Africa, and the memo was aboard Air Force One.</p>

<p>The paragraph in the memo discussing Ms. Wilson’s involvement in her husband’s trip is marked at the beginning with a letter designation in brackets to indicate the information shouldn’t be shared, according to the person familiar with the memo. Such a designation would indicate to a reader that the information was sensitive. The memo, though, doesn’t specifically describe Ms. Wilson as an undercover agent, the person familiar with the memo said.</p>

<p>Generally, the federal government has three levels of classified information – top secret, secret and confidential – all indicating various levels of “damage” to national security if disclosed. There also is an unclassified designation – indicating information that wouldn’t harm national security if shared with the public – but that wasn’t the case for the material on the Wilsons prepared by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It isn’t known what level of classification was assigned to the information in the memo.</p>

<p>Who received the memo, which was prepared for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and how widely it was circulated are issues as Mr. Fitzgerald tries to pinpoint the origin of the leak of Ms. Wilson’s identity. According to the person familiar with the document, it didn’t include a distribution list. It isn’t known if President Bush has seen the memo.</p>

<p>Mr. Fitzgerald has subpoenaed the phone logs from Air Force One for the week of the Africa tour, which precedes the revelation of Ms. Wilson’s CIA identity in a column by Robert Novak on July 14. In that piece, Mr. Novak identified Valerie Plame, using Ms. Wilson’s maiden name, saying that “two senior administration officials” had told him that Ms. Wilson suggested sending her husband to Niger.</p>

<p>Mr. Novak attempted to reach Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary, in the days before his column appeared. However, Mr. Fleischer didn’t respond to Mr. Novak’s inquiries, according to a person familiar with his account. Mr. Fleischer, who has since left the administration, is one of several officials who testified before the grand jury.</p>

<p>…
NYT July16
The memorandum was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memorandum was written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr. Wilson’s wife, according to a government official who reread the document on Friday.</p>

<p>When Mr. Wilson’s Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr. Ford to send a copy of the memorandum to Mr. Powell, who was preparing to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford sent it to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.</p>

<p>It is not clear who asked for the memorandum, but in the weeks before it was written, there were several accounts in newspapers about an unnamed former diplomat’s trip to Africa seeking intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program. On May 6, 2003, Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times, wrote of a “former U.S. ambassador to Africa” who had reported to the C.I.A. and the State Department that reports of Iraq seeking to acquire uranium in Niger were “unequivocally wrong.”</p>

<p>…If Guckert/Gannon (who is not and never has has a security clearance haad this info about the memo the WH was handling the memo loosly. Who gave it to a guy who did business on mail prostitute web sites advertising himself as a top while he was in the WH.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A30842-2003Dec25[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A30842-2003Dec25&lt;/a&gt;
On Oct. 28, Talon News, a news company tied to a group called GOP USA, posted on the Internet an interview with Wilson in which the Talon News questioner asks: “An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?”</p>

<p>***Gannon/Guckert(outed as a suedo reporter who posed for hard corps gay(military theme prostitution sites he set up and having zip point squat reporter training unless you call Bobby Eberle and GOP/USA legit[<a href=“http://blogs.salon.com/0002874/2005/02/08.html#a1473]:[/url”>http://blogs.salon.com/0002874/2005/02/08.html#a1473]:[/url</a>] Gannon web sites include and were active while he was hanging out in the WH press room:Hotmilitarystud.com
Militaryescorts.com
Militaryescortsm4m.com)</p>

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<p>Gannon had only 49 days of passes for the 2 years he was in the WH according to the Secret Service; Secret Service Papers Raise Issue of Propaganda, National Security, </p>

<p>Secret Service’s Disclosure of “Temporary Appointments” Granted to “Jeff Gannon” Reveals That the Service Can Only Account for 49 Days of Security Clearance for Gannon Out of the More Than Two Years He Spent “Reporting” in the White House Press Corps.
This clearance was his pass into the WH, it was not for classified information. </p>

<p>How does Novak, Gannon/Guckert obtain this classified info?</p>

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<p>"December 26th, the leak to Gannon is mentioned in the Washington Post.</p>

<p>Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband’s trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.</p>

<p>CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame’s alleged role in arranging Wilson’s trip could not have attended the meeting.</p>

<p>“It has been circulated around,” one official said. CIA and State Department officials have refused to discuss the document."</p>

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<p>Interesting, Sweetkidsmom. It’s funny how this story seems to be tying together nearly all of the scandalous things that have bubbled up to the surface of this administration. In that sense, this reminds me of Watergate (the break-ins, the slush funds, the cover-up, the enemies’ list). </p>

<p>That was less true of the various Clinton scandals (known to some as “File-gate,” “Whitewater-gate,” “Travel-Gate,” and “Monica-gate”, the last-minute pardons), or the Reagan scandals (“Iran-Contra-gate” more or less stood alone), Bush I (the “Glassby” controversy, the last-minute pardons, Neil’s savings and loan collapse), or Carter (Burt Lance, and Hamilton Jordan’s visit to Studio 54 where he did nothing illegal, as it turned out). </p>

<p>I don’t see this turning into Watergate Redux, by the way. Rove by nature seems as fond of slander as Nixon was (and as Joe McCarthy before him); but I haven’t seem many signs of the “If the President does it, it’s not against the law” heresy that pervaded the Nixon White House. (I recognize that this mania was antithetical to true conservatism, Strick. Here’s one liberal who’s actually hoping nothing remotely impeachable comes out of this investigation.)</p>

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<p>GBD, Zogby poll shows that 42% said they would favor impeachment hearings if it was found the pResident misled the nation into war. And in contrast, in the Clinton impeachment saga in October 1998, a Zogby poll found that 39% of voters supported the House action, while 56 percent opposed it…as the House moved to impeach President Bill Clinton over the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal,</p>

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<p>If you lie under ANY circumstances to the FBI, you can go to jail…</p>

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<p>What did Wilson say that was false…he never claimed that Cheney sent him…in fact he said he probably didn’t know about the mission,
and WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH OUTING HISWIFE!!</p>

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<p>

</p>

<p>The story I’ve heard is that the leak to Kristof was from Wilson. Actually this whole uproar about “the” leak is made too funny by the number of leaks of different types of secrets and classified things related to it. DC leaks. If it were a boat, it would have sunk long ago.</p>

<p>This memo has been the source of a number of supenas during the investigation. It was in Powell’s hands. Don’t know who had access to it, if there copies or who might have leaked it. Does anyone?</p>

<p>“If you lie under ANY circumstances to the FBI, you can go to jail…”</p>

<p>Maybe, maybe not. Depends on what about and how you correct the omission. Don’t you watch Law and Order?</p>

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<p>“The story I’ve heard is that the leak to Kristof was from Wilson.”</p>

<p>sources please?</p>

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<p>I think it’s more accurate to say Wilson was Kristof’s source. This doesn’t qualify as a leak. </p>

<p>Here’s a quote from Frank Rich column in the NY Times that confirms the source:</p>

<p>“Specifically, it began with the former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s July 6, 2003, account on the New York Times op-ed page (and in concurrent broadcast appearances) of his 2002 CIA mission to Africa to determine whether Saddam Hussein had struck a deal in Niger for uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons. Wilson concluded that there was no such deal, as my colleague Nicholas Kristof reported, without divulging Wilson’s name, that spring. But the envoy’s dramatic op-ed article got everyone’s attention: A government insider with firsthand knowledge had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity to expose the administration’s game authoritatively on the record. He had made palpable what Bush critics increasingly suspected, writing that ‘some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.’”</p>

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<p>Sweetkidsmom,</p>

<p>Thanks for posting the Zogby numbers.</p>

<p>What angered me about the Clinton impeachment was that so many Republican members of the House and Senate had so frivolously and recklessly lowered the Constitutional bar on what is an impeachable offense. In doing so, they forfeited any claim to the label “conservative.” (They would have forfeited it anyway by running up irresponsible deficits by spending like drunken sailors while cutting taxes in war-time.)</p>

<p>The reason I hope nothing impeachable comes out of the Rove mess is that if we impeach two presidents in a row, I suspect we’ll impeach three in a row, and I don’t think that’s in our national interest.</p>

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<p>sorry us lefties like to keep our CIA agents names safe>></p>

<p>Does anyone else see the irony in this statement? I had a good laugh over this, thinking of all of the “lefty” bashing the CIA has taken over the years. Is it just me or does anyone else find it humorous that self-identified “lefties” have now appointed themselves as CIA defenders? :)</p>

<p>I won’t comment on the whole Rove issue just yet. I’m waiting for more facts before I make up my mind.</p>

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<p>Carolyn,</p>

<p>I do see the irony of “lefties” defending the privacy of CIA agents, and “righties” saying it was no big deal to out one.</p>

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<p>Carolyn, </p>

<p>so did I.</p>

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<p>If there were any smoke here there might be a fire. Or as my father used to say om camping trips, “I wish we had some bacon because if we had bacon we could have bacon and eggs if we had eggs.”</p>

<p>I have every confidence that the Bush admin would be invoking executive privilege left and right the way the Clintons did if there was anything that needed hiding.</p>

<p>The real question is, “What didn’t the press know about Wilson and Plame and when didn’t they know it?”</p>

<p>There is a NY Times reporter willing to go to jail to keep that a secret.</p>

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<p>Executive privilege doesn’t attach to conversations with the press.</p>