The Press Gangbang the Press Secretary

[DudeAsInCool]

Cheney Authorized Leak Of CIA Report, Libby Says

Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report.

There is a growing body of information showing that at the time Plame was outed the vice president was deeply involved in the effort to undermine her husband.

The March 2002 intelligence report was a debriefing of Wilson by the CIA's Directorate of Operations after Wilson returned from a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims, later proved to be unfounded, that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation, according to government records.

Source

[DudeAsInCool]

Rove Back on the Witness Stand!:

Rove to Testify Again in C.I.A. Leak Case

WASHINGTON, April 26 — Karl Rove, the senior counselor to President Bush, is expected to appear this afternoon before a federal grand jury investigating the leak of a Central Intelligence Agency officer's identity.

Karl Rove walks into Federal District Court in Washington today to appear before the grand jury.

Documents and articles related to the case looking into the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer.

The appearance in federal court comes at a politically sensitive time for Mr. Rove, who was relieved of his policy portfolio at the White House in a staff reshuffling earlier this month and now faces the challenge of helping Republicans maintain their primacy in the midterm elections this fall.

Source

[DudeAsInCool]

Prosecutor Weighs Charges Against Rove in Leak Case

WASHINGTON, April 27 — Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, is expected to decide in the next two to three weeks whether to bring perjury charges against Karl Rove, the powerful adviser to President Bush, lawyers involved in the case said Thursday.

With the completion of Mr. Rove's fifth appearance before the grand jury on Wednesday, Mr. Fitzgerald is now believed to have assembled all of the facts necessary to determine whether to seek an indictment of Mr. Rove or drop the case.

Read more:

Source: NYTimes

Let's hope the Prosecutor doesnt stop with Rove...there are more heads to fall

[DudeAsInCool]

Valerie Plame worked on Iran: Cover blown when she was outed!

David Shuster reported on Hardball today that:

INTELLIGENCE SOURCES SAY VALERIE WILSON WAS PART OF AN OPERATION THREE YEARS AGO TRACKING THE PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MATERIAL INTO IRAN. AND THE SOURCES ALLEGE THAT WHEN MRS. WILSON'S COVER WAS BLOWN, THE ADMINISTRATION'S ABILITY TO TRACK IRAN'S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS WAS DAMAGED AS WELL."

See the Video Report

[DudeAsInCool]

Judge calls Net wiretap rules 'gobbledygook'

WASHINGTON A U.S. appeals court panel challenged the Bush administration Friday over new rules making it easier for the police and the FBI to wiretap phone calls made over the Internet. One judge told the government that its courtroom arguments were "gobbledygook" and suggested its lawyer return to his office and "have a big chuckle."

The skepticism expressed so openly toward the government's case during a hearing in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia emboldened a broad group of civil liberties and education groups, which argued that the government improperly applied telephone-era rules to Internet services.

"Your argument makes no sense," Judge Harry Edwards told the lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission, Jacob Lewis. "When you go back to the office, have a big chuckle. I'm not missing this. This is ridiculous."

Source: International Herald Tribune

[DudeAsInCool]

Rove's Time in Limbo Near End in CIA Leak Case

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald is wrapping up his investigation into White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove's role in the CIA leak case by weighing this central question:

Did Rove, who was deeply involved in defending President Bush's use of prewar intelligence about Iraq, lie about a key conversation with a reporter that was aimed at rebutting a tough White House critic?

Fitzgerald, according to sources close to the case, is reviewing testimony from Rove's five appearances before the grand jury. Bush's top political strategist has argued that he never intentionally misled the grand jury about his role in leaking information about undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in July 2003. Rove testified that he simply forgot about the conversation when he failed to disclose it to Fitzgerald in his earlier testimony.

Read more at the

Source: Washington Post

Time is running out for Mr. Rove...tick tock goes the clock said the Spider to the Fly

[DudeAsInCool]

Notes Are Said to Reveal Close Cheney Interest in a Critic of Iraq Policy

WASHINGTON, May 13 — Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten notations on a July 2003 newspaper column that indicate he was focused on a critic of the administration's Iraq policy, according to a court filing in the C.I.A. leak case.

Mr. Cheney's notes were cited in a prosecution brief in the case against the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr. The entries were made on a copy of an Op-Ed article by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, that was published in The New York Times on July 6, 2003. The leak case involves the disclosure that Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie, was a C.I.A. officer.

"Those annotations support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op-Ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant — his chief of staff — on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to those assertions," said the legal papers filed Friday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case.

In neat writing above the text of the column, prosecutors say, Mr. Cheney wrote: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

Read more at

The NY Times

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"Inside the west wing the lowering atmosphere of dread is like that of Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum: "Down - steadily down it crept." · Sidney Blumenthal

[DudeAsInCool]

The Nation questions Karl Rove about the Plame Leak...live

Watch Me

[DudeAsInCool]

Libby Prosecutor Focuses on CIA Officer's Status

Filings Say Ex-Cheney Aide Knew That Plame Was Classified, Giving Him Reason to Lie to Grand Jury

The classified status of the identity of former CIA officer Valerie Plame will be a key element in any trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, according to special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald has said that at trial he plans to show that Libby knew Plame's employment at the CIA was classified and that he lied to the grand jury when he said he had learned from NBC News's Tim Russert that Plame, the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, worked for the agency.

Read more at the

Washington Post

[DudeAsInCool]

CIA LEAK INVESTIGATION

Rove-Novak Call Was Concern To Leak Investigators

By Murray Waas, National Journal

On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men.

Read more here:

Source

[DudeAsInCool]

Experts says Cheney can't avoid testifying

WASHINGTON - If a prosecutor calls him as a witness, Vice President Dick Cheney probably can't avoid testifying in his former chief of staff's perjury trial, legal experts said Thursday.

"There may be significant issues of executive privilege and significant issues of classified information. But there are obviously significant factual issues that bear on the charges the prosecutor has brought" in the CIA leak investigation, said former federal prosecutor E. Lawrence Barcella Jr.

Read more:

Source: Yahoo News

"Inside the west wing the lowering atmosphere of dread is like that of Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum: "Down - steadily down it crept." · Sidney Blumenthal

[DudeAsInCool]

Top White House aide Karl Rove has been told by prosecutors he won't be charged with any crimes in the investigation into the leak of a CIA officer's identity, his lawyer said Tuesday, lifting a heavy burden from one of President Bush's most trusted advisers.

Attorney Robert Luskin said that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald informed him of the decision on Monday, ending months of speculation about the fate of Rove, the architect of Bush's 2004 re-election now focused on stopping Democrats from capturing the House or Senate in this November's elections.

Read more:

Source

I'm curious as to why not . The White House made a concerted effort to go after Wilson and his wife...

[DudeAsInCool]

Here's a pretty good explanation of why Rove got off - so I am posting the article in its entirety:

"Analysis: Telling FBI the truth saved Rove

WASHINGTON - The decision not to charge Karl Rove shows there often are no consequences for misleading the public.

In 2003, while Rove allowed the White House to tell the news media that he had no role in leaking Valerie Plame's CIA identity, the presidential aide was secretly telling the FBI the truth.

It's now known that Rove had discussed Plame's CIA employment with conservative columnist Robert Novak, who exposed her identity less than a week later, citing two unidentified senior administration officials.

Rove's truth-telling to the FBI saved him from indictment.

And by misleading reporters, the White House saved itself from a political liability during the 2004 presidential campaign.

While the president and the vice president underwent questioning by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in 2004, Rove's role never surfaced. The lone blip on the radar screen was a one-day flurry of news stories the month before Election Day when Rove was brought before a federal grand jury — one of his five grand jury appearances in the probe.

The extent of Rove's involvement didn't become official until Oct. 28 of last year, when Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, was indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of Plame's CIA identity and what he told reporters about it.

The indictment recounted Rove's conversation with Novak about the CIA officer, as Rove later related it to Libby.

For nearly three years, the White House has refused to discuss the Plame investigation, citing the fact that it is still under way.

"The ability of this White House to stiff the press is probably better than any previous administration," said presidential scholar Stephen Hess, a former speechwriter for President Eisenhower and an adviser to Presidents Ford and Carter. "Clearly if there are no leaks, there's no damage."

Hess said Tuesday the Plame case is an example of the news media being complicit in the White House's conduct.

"I'm saying that there was a handshake and Bob Novak was honorable to the handshake" by refusing to publicly identify his sources, said Hess. "It's not quite a deal with the devil because these people are our elected and appointed officials, but it's a question of how much you want to let them off the hook."

Lee Edwards, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said other administrations have "flinched or blinked or said 'we've got to do more in response to this or that crisis.'"

"Rove and everyone else has been under enormous pressure and yet they have been able to stick to it and that's remarkable," said Edwards.

Among the many unanswered questions in the Plame probe are what, if anything, Rove told President Bush about his conversation with Novak. Another question is whether Rove told Bush about his conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.

It was the Rove-Cooper conversation on July 11, 2003, that threw the investigation back on the front pages a year ago.

Facing jail unless he cooperated with prosecutors, Cooper testified that Rove said Wilson's wife worked at the "agency" and that she was responsible for sending her husband on a CIA mission to Africa in 2002 to check out intelligence about Iraq.

"I inferred that he obviously meant the CIA and not, say, the Environmental Protection Agency," Cooper wrote in Time, recounting his conversation with Rove.

Wilson's mission to Africa was the basis for his later criticism of the Bush administration. In his State of the Union speech in 2003 in the run-up to war, Bush embraced intelligence that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of yellowcake uranium from Africa.

From his trip, Wilson had concluded it was highly doubtful any such transaction between Iraq and Niger had taken place.

It was the Rove-Cooper conversation about Wilson's wife that became the focus of Fitzgerald's investigative interest in the president's political adviser.

Unlike the conversation with Novak, Rove didn't reveal it to the FBI until more than a year into the criminal investigation of the Plame leak.

Rove's explanation for his belated disclosure of the conversation? He says he forgot about it."

Source

Personally, it looks to me as if the White House deliberately went after Joe Wilson. It was a concerted effort and all those involved should be charged

[DudeAsInCool]

Tom Delay: "Valerie Plame Was Not a CIA Agent"

Source

[moonglow]

and we should trust Tom DeLay

[DudeAsInCool]

Bush Directed Cheney To Counter War Critic

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's statement.

Bush told prosecutors he directed Cheney to disclose classified information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

Read more:

Source

Well that answers my Topic Title question...

[DudeAsInCool]

WASHINGTON - The CIA officer whose identity was leaked to reporters sued Vice President Dick Cheney, his former top aide and presidential adviser Karl Rove on Thursday, accusing them and other White House officials of conspiring to destroy her career.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, accused Cheney, Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of participating in a "whispering campaign" to reveal Plame's CIA identity and punish Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.

Read more:

Source: Yahoo News

[DudeAsInCool]

In the Libby Case, A Grilling to Remember

With withering and methodical dispatch, White House nemesis and prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald yesterday sliced up the first person called to the stand on behalf of the vice president's former chief of staff.

If I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was not afraid of the special counsel before, the former Cheney aide, who will face Fitzgerald in a trial beginning Jan. 11, had ample reason to start quaking after yesterday's Ginsu-like legal performance.

Read more at The Washington Post

[DudeAsInCool]

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney will be called to testify on behalf of his former chief of staff in the CIA leak case, defense attorneys said Tuesday, ending months of speculation over what would be historic testimony.

"We're calling the vice president," attorney Ted Wells said in court. Wells represents defendant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is charged with perjury and obstruction.

Sitting presidents, including Clinton and Ford, have testified in criminal cases, but presidential historians said they knew of no vice president who has done so.

Read More

[slum_goddess]

YES!

[DudeAsInCool]

Is the Prosecutor zeroing in on Cheney????

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Both Cheney and Libby have repeatedly denied -- both publicly and to federal investigators -- that Cheney ever encouraged Libby specifically to leak information to the press about Plame. But since the early days of the leak probe in fall 2003, even before it was taken over by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, investigators have maintained that Libby devised an elaborate cover story even though he must have known that contemporaneous records and the testimony of others was very likely to show that he was lying. Other than the motive to protect himself, the only other driving force behind Libby's actions, federal investigators have theorized, was to protect Cheney or other superiors, according to attorneys who have been involved in the CIA leak probe.

On July 6, six days before Cheney's trip to Norfolk, Wilson had charged in an op-ed piece in The New York Times that during a March 2002 CIA-sponsored trip to Niger he found no evidence to substantiate Bush administration claims that Saddam had attempted to purchase uranium from that African country. Despite Wilson's report, and other warnings to administration officials that the Niger information might have been untrue, it was cited in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech as evidence of an Iraqi program to build an atomic weapon, a major argument in the case to go to war.

Cheney was incensed as Wilson's allegations gained public currency in the days following the op-ed, his top aides would recall later.

The vice president had apparently first learned in June 2003, according to the indictment, that Wilson's wife was a CIA officer, and that she might have been responsible for her husband being sent to Niger. He scribbled in the margins of Wilson's New York Times op-ed: "Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb. [sic] to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

During testimony before the federal grand jury in the CIA leak case, a federal prosecutor approached Libby with a copy of the marked-up column and asked if he recalled the Vice President expressly raising the same issues with him. A small amount of grand jury testimony has been made public in court filings by the special prosecutor. Additional accounts of what occurred in the grand jury were provided by sources with first-hand knowledge of the testimony.

"Do you recall ever discussing those issues with Vice President Cheney?"

"Yes, sir."

"And tell us what you recall about those conversations," the prosecutor pressed Libby.

"I recall that along the way he asked, 'Is this normal for them to just send somebody out like this uncompensated, as it says?' He was interested in how did that person come to be selected for this mission. And at some point, his wife worked at the Agency, you know, that was part of the question."

The extraordinary amount of time and energy that Cheney personally devoted to the issue, as well as his intensity of emotion regarding it is underscored by this exchange between a federal prosecutor and Libby when Libby testified before the grand jury:

"Was it a topic that was discussed on a daily basis?" a federal prosecutor asked.

"Yes, sir," answered Libby.

"And it was discussed on multiple occasions each day in fact?"

"Yes, sir."

"And during that time did the vice president indicate that he was upset that this article was out there which falsely in his view attacked his own credibility?"

"Yes, sir."

"And do you recall what it is the vice-president said?"

"I recall that he was very keen to get the truth out. He wanted to get all the facts out about what he [Cheney] had or hadn't done--what the facts were or were not. He was very keen on that and said it repeatedly. 'Let's get everything out.'"

Read more at The National Journal

[slum_goddess]

Is the Prosecutor zeroing in on Cheney????

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE!

[DudeAsInCool]

At Libby Trial, Power Players Face Uncomfortable Spotlight

When Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff goes on trial Tuesday on charges of lying about the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity, members of Washington's government and media elite will be answering some embarrassing questions as well.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's case will put on display the secret strategizing of an administration that cherry-picked information to justify war in Iraq and reporters who traded freely in gossip and protected their own interests as they worked on one of the big Washington stories of 2003.

The estimated six-week trial will pit current and former Bush administration officials against one another and, if Cheney is called as expected, will mark the first time that a sitting vice president has testified in a criminal case. It also will force the media into painful territory, with as many as 10 journalists called to testify for or against an official who was, for some of them, a confidential source.

Read more at The Washington Post

[DudeAsInCool]

Potential Jurist quote of the day:

Re: Cheney: “I’m not sure I’d want to go bird hunting with him, either.”

[DudeAsInCool]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE!

Attorney Theodore Wells, in the opening statements of I. Lewis Libby's perjury trial, said Libby went to Cheney in 2003 and complained that the White House was subtly blaming him for leaking Valerie Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.

"They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb," Wells said, recalling the conversation between Libby and Cheney. "I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected."

Source

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WASHINGTON - Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald used his opening statement in the CIA leak trial Tuesday to allege that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff lied and destroyed a note showing Cheney's early involvement.

Fitzgerald said Cheney told his chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby, in 2003 that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA and Libby spread that information to reporters. When that information got out, it triggered a federal investigation.

“But when the FBI and grand jury asked about what the defendant did,” Fitzgerald said, “he made up a story.”

Source