Supreme Court Pick Shifts Attention From Rove, Agent Disclosure

By Kristin Jensen and Richard Keil

July 20 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's nomination of a new Supreme Court justice may give White House adviser Karl Rove a temporary reprieve from public scrutiny of his role in the disclosure of an intelligence operative's identity.

About six in 10 Americans who are paying close attention to reports about who leaked information that helped unmask a covert intelligence agent say Rove should resign, according to a poll conducted last week by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

The Supreme Court announcement may freeze things, ``and that's probably a good thing for the White House,'' said Carroll Doherty, an editor at the Washington-based Pew Center.

Bush accelerated his search for a Supreme Court nominee in part because of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name, according to Republicans familiar with administration strategy.

Bush originally had planned to announce a replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on July 26 or 27, just before his planned July 28 departure for a month-long vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch, said two administration officials, who spoke on the condition they not be named.

The officials said those plans changed because Rove has become a focus of Fitzgerald's interest and of news accounts about the matter.

Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett said the only reason Bush announced his selection of appeals court Judge John G. Roberts Jr. last night was to allow the nominee to pay courtesy calls on members of the Senate before Congress begins its scheduled summer recess on July 29.

Questions

Bush has been questioned about Rove and his role in the matter during appearances with foreign leaders. His spokesman has deflected daily queries from reporters since Time magazine turned over notes and e-mails to a special prosecutor that revealed Rove was one of the sources for a 2003 Time.com report identifying Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame, who is married to a critic of Bush's Iraq policy.

Time reporter Matthew Cooper wrote in this week's issue of the magazine that Rove didn't give him Plame's name. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, said last week his client has done ``nothing to expose him to any legal liability.''

The nomination debate will distract public attention while Fitzgerald finishes his investigation, said Ed Rollins, a Republican political consultant who served as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

`Battle Through'

``Rove is not going out the door unless the U.S. attorney comes forward and says, `He did it and I am going to indict him,''' Rollins said. ``Anything less than that and they are going to just battle through it.''

Bush this week said any member of his administration who committed a crime would be fired. Previously, he suggested that revealing the identity of a CIA agent would be enough to warrant termination. Rove, 54, is a longtime Bush adviser and the man the president called ``the architect'' of his election victories.

Bush and spokesman Scott McClellan have refused to answer questions about Rove's status, citing the investigation. Some Democrats, including Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who ran against Bush in 2004, have called on the president to fire Rove. Others say he should lose his security clearance.

Thirty-nine percent of the public, including those who aren't following the case closely, say Rove should step down, the Pew poll found. At this point, Americans' interest in the Rove story is comparable to past Washington scandals, such as the ethics questions that dogged former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, according to Doherty.

Following the Story

Forty-eight percent said they are paying either ``very close'' or ``fairly close'' attention to the story, the poll found. By comparison, only 29 percent of Americans said they were paying close attention to reports earlier this year that current House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had violated ethics rules by accepting travel from a lobbyist.

``The public isn't fully engaged on this yet,'' Doherty said. ``Eventually, the issue will play out. The grand jury will finish its business.'' Pew interviewed 1,502 adults July 13-17 for the poll.

Purposely and knowingly unmasking a covert operative is a crime under a 1982 federal law. Eleven former intelligence officers wrote a letter to congressional leaders on July 18 saying the ``tone and substance'' of the debate over the leak is harmful to U.S. undercover operatives.

`Unambiguous Message'

``We believe it is appropriate for the president to move proactively to dismiss from office or administratively punish any official who participated in any way in revealing Valerie Plame's status,'' they wrote. ``Such an act by the president would send an unambiguous message that leaks of this nature will not be tolerated.''

Fitzpatrick's investigation was prompted by a request from the CIA after a July 14, 2003, article by syndicated columnist Robert Novak first reported that Plame recommended her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for a 2002 mission to check into reports Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.

A week before, Wilson wrote an opinion article published in the New York Times questioning whether the Bush administration ``twisted'' some of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons to justify the war.

Novak discussed Wilson and his wife with Rove on July 8, 2003, according to the New York Times. The Times quoted an attorney familiar with Fitzgerald's probe of the identity leak as saying that when Novak mentioned that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, Rove said, ``Yeah, I've heard that too.''

Cooper, in the July 25 edition of Time, wrote that Rove told him on July 11, 2003, that Wilson's wife works at the ``agency,'' which he took to mean the CIA.



To contact the reporter on this story:
Kristin Jensen in Washington at Kjensen@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: July 20, 2005 00:04 EDT

Why “White House v. Wilson/Plame” Matters

by Ray McGovern

07/20/05 - - The key issue in the affair has little directly to do with former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson; or his wife, Valerie Plame; or Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; or even President George W. Bush's alter ego, Karl Rove. White House v. Wilson/Plame is about Iraq, where our sons and daughters—and many others—are daily meeting violent death in an unwinnable war.

And it's about manipulation.

It's about how our elected representatives were deceived into voting for an unprovoked war and what happened when one man stood up and called the administration's bluff. And it's about the perfect storm now gathering, as:

~ more lies are exposed (whether in journalists' e-mails or in the minutes of high-level meetings at 10 Downing Street),

~ the guerrilla war escalates in Iraq, and

~ more and more Americans find themselves agreeing with Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., that administration leaders seem to be "making it up as they go along."

It wasn't envisaged this way by the naïve "neoconservative" ideologues that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. Actually they still seem to believe that all will be well if the Iraqi people can only get it into their heads that we are liberators, not occupiers.

So much smoke is being blown over White House v. Wilson/Plame that it is becoming almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. Bewildered houseguests from outside the Beltway throw up their hands: "It's all just politics...and character assassination." And that may well be precisely the impression the media wish to leave with us. Otherwise, left to our own devices, we might conclude they served us poorly with the indiscriminate, hyper-patriotic cheerleading that helped slide us into the worst foreign policy debacle in our nation's history.

Our weekend guests had a hard time trying to understand why the White House two years ago blew the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Sure, Wilson had caught and exposed the Bush administration in a very serious lie. But almost immediately, top officials conceded that Ambassador Wilson was essentially correct in dismissing the flimsy report that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Africa.

Betrayal of Trust

So why the neuralgic reaction? Why go to such lengths to impugn Wilson's credibility; and what purpose would be served by harming his wife as well? At first blush, it does seem awfully petty. But dig a little deeper and you'll get a glimpse of what lies beneath the White House campaign against the Wilsons.

Revenge? There was certainly a strong desire to retaliate. And Karl Rove did tell NBC's Chris Matthews at the time that wives were "fair game." Angry at White House dissembling, Wilson had doffed his ambassadorial hat and thrown down the gauntlet when he told the press that the Iraq-Niger caper "begs the question about what else they are lying about." And, indeed, how many more untruths have been uncovered over the past two years?

Was the relentless White House campaign to vilify the Wilsons aimed primarily at serving notice that a similar fate awaits any whose conscience might prompt them to expose still more of the lies used to "justify" the attack on Iraq? That, too, was surely part of it. And, sad to say, it has worked—at least until now. Yes, we have learned about the misdiagnosed aluminum tubes, the "Curveball" deception on Iraqi biological warfare, and the "unpiloted aerial vehicles" (UAVs) that Congress was told could threaten our coastal cities. But it was basic physics that held administration arguments up to eventual ridicule.

None of the exposés came from the mouths of people like Joe Wilson, who simply could not abide crass deception in matters of war and peace.

The main motivation of the White House character assassins had more to do with the particular lie that Joseph Wilson exposed and the essential role it played in the administration's plans. For a nuclear-armed Iraq was the most compelling threat that could be peddled to our elected representatives and senators to deceive them into approving a war launched for reasons unrelated to any putative Iraqi WMD program.

The Big Lie

The Bush administration needed to assert that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Taking that line posed a huge challenge. On the one hand, a new threat had to be created/hyped out of thin air; and, on the other, the pundits had to be too lazy to refresh their memories on what senior U.S. officials had said about Iraq's military capability before 9/11.

"Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." (Colin Powell, Feb. 24, 2001)

"We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." (Condoleezza Rice, July 29, 2001)

These statements went quickly down the memory hole. Immediately after 9/11, administration officials, with Vice President Dick Cheney in the lead, began to warn that Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" were just over the horizon. On August 26, 2002, a month after senior U.S. officials had explained to their British counterparts that intelligence was being "fixed" around a policy of war, Vice President Dick Cheney was the first to use that fabricated and twisted intelligence to deceive Americans at large. In a major speech he claimed:

"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors—including Saddam's own son-in-law."

In fact, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, had told us just the opposite: "All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed," he told his debriefers in 1995. Everything else he told them was true. And so was that. Kamel had been in charge of those programs; the weaponry was destroyed at his command.

But no matter. Cheney's speech, and the subsequent National Intelligence Estimate cooked to his recipe, allowed the president to raise the specter of mushroom clouds over U.S. cities, to force a yes vote in Congress for war and, not incidentally, to win back the Senate the following month.

The Iraq-Niger lie was thus both the cornerstone of the Bush agenda for war and the key to unraveling how the "fixing" worked. Rove, master of the administration's strategy yet only two years out of Texas, joined by Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby spread red herrings to divert reporters off the scent and wound up triggering the eventual appointment of a special prosecutor and the convening of a grand jury.

So it was the president’s and vice president’s own men who brought the skunk to the picnic—Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. He shows no inclination to join in the fun and games, and still less to speak prematurely, or to speak at all. Rather, Fitzgerald appears to be a real pro, and as long has he can avoid being fired, he could potentially take all the fun out of things. “Neo-conservative” pundit William Kristol was clearly reflecting growing uneasiness when he commented recently that Fitzpatrick is "the problem for the White House; we have no idea what he knows."

Ray McGovern works at Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He had a 27-year career as an analyst at CIA and is on the Steering Committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Memo Gets Attention in Probe of CIA Leak

By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer
Tue Jul 19,10:59 PM ET



A State Department memo that has caught the attention of prosecutors describes a CIA officer's role in sending her husband to Africa and disputes administration claims that Iraq was shopping for uranium, a retired department official said Tuesday.

The classified memo was sent to Air Force One just after former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson went public with his assertions that the Bush administration overstated the evidence that Iraq was interested in obtaining uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

The memo has become a key piece of evidence in the CIA leak investigation because it could have been the way someone in the White House learned — and then leaked — the information that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and played a role in sending him on the mission.

The document was prepared in June 2003 at the direction of Carl W. Ford Jr., then head of the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research, for Marc Grossman, the retired official said. Grossman was the Undersecretary of State who was in charge of the department while Secretary Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were traveling. Grossman needed the memo because he was dealing with other issues and was not familiar with the subject, the former official said.

"It wasn't a Wilson-Wilson wife memo," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way. "It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our disagreement" with the White House.

Armitage called Ford after Wilson's op-ed piece in The New York Times and his TV appearance on July 6, 2003 in which he challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Armitage asked that Powell, who was traveling to Africa with Bush, be given an account of the Wilson trip, said the former official.

The original June 2003 memo was readdressed to Powell and included a short summary prepared by an analyst who was at a 2002 CIA meeting where Wilson's trip was arranged and was sent in one piece to Powell on Air Force One the next day.

The memo said Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and suggested her husband go to Niger because he had contacts there and had served as an American diplomat in Africa. However, the official said the memo did not say she worked undercover for the spy agency nor did it identify her as Valerie Plame, which was her maiden name and cover name at the CIA.

Her identity as Plame was disclosed first by columnist Robert Novak and then by Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. The leak investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is looking into who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's identity to reporters and whether any laws were broken.

A 1982 law prohibits the deliberate exposure of the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

Wilson believes the Bush administration leaked the name as retribution for his criticism.

President Bush said Monday he would fire any member of his staff who "committed a crime," a change from his previous vow to fire anyone involved in the leak.

The past two weeks have brought revelations that top presidential aide Karl Rove was involved in leaking the identity of Plame to Novak and to Cooper.

The former State Department official stressed the memo focused on Wilson's trip and the State Department intelligence bureau's disagreement with the White House's claim about Iraq trying to get nuclear material. He said the fact that the CIA officer and Wilson were husband and wife was largely an incidental reference.

The June 2003 memo had not gone higher than Grossman until Wilson's op-ed column for The New York Times headlined "What I Didn't Find In Africa" and his TV appearance to dispute the administration. Wilson's article asked the question: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion?"

___

On the Net:

State Department: http://www.state.gov

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov



Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press.

Poll: Public views Bush as less trustworthy

Doubts grow on president’s honesty, effectiveness; Rove may be a factor

The Associated Press
Updated: 5:08 p.m. ET July 19, 2005


WASHINGTON - Americans have growing doubts about President Bush’s honesty and his effectiveness, according to a poll taken at a time people are uneasy with the war in Iraq, uncertain about the economy and nervous about the terrorist threat.

Half of those in the poll taken by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent, said they believe the president is trustworthy, while almost as many, 46 percent said he is not. Bush was at 62 percent on this measure in a September 2003 Pew poll and at 56 percent in a Gallup poll in April. One of Bush’s strong suits throughout his presidency has been the perception by a majority of people that he is honest.

The slide in trust in Bush comes at a time the White House is answering questions about top aide Karl Rove’s involvement in the public leak of the identity of a CIA operative.

“If the economy were doing better, the Iraq war wasn’t as tenuous and people weren’t as uneasy about terrorism, then they might be willing to cut Bush some slack on the Rove issue,” said Robert Shapiro, who specializes in public opinion at Columbia University. “And it’s all tied back to how the war was justified, so it raises all those issues as well.”

Only half the public is closely following the allegations that Rove leaked the identity of a CIA operative, according to Pew. Democrats are predictably more inclined to say Rove should resign than Republicans.

The Rove factor
But GOP support for Rove is lukewarm. About four in 10 Republicans said Rove shouldn’t resign; about the same number said they were not sure.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said an analysis of the survey suggests the Rove controversy is contributing to the president’s credibility problem. The belief that Rove has committed a serious offense is having an impact on Bush’s ratings on believability, he said.

Only a fourth of people in an ABC News poll out this week said they believe the White House has been cooperating fully with the investigation of the CIA leak.

About half, 49 percent, in the Pew poll said they approve of the job being done by Bush on terrorism — as low as he’s been on that issue since Sept. 11, 2001. Many independents have abandoned support for Bush in this area.

Bush’s job approval in the Pew poll was 44 percent, with 48 percent disapproving.

The poll of 1,502 adults was taken Wednesday through Sunday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
© 2005 MSNBC.com

Gerlach's fund-raiser with Rove draws protest

By Kimberly Hefling

Associated Press


WASHINGTON - Protesters carrying American flags and toilet plungers yelled "Fire Karl Rove" and "Stop the leaks" outside a fund-raiser for U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.) where Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, was the guest of honor.

"There seems to be no accountability. This is an example where the President shows his poor ethics," said Rachael Kennedy, an obesity-prevention specialist from Richmond, Va. About 60 people took part in the protest, including members of the liberal group MoveOn.org.

Rove, the architect behind President Bush's election victories, is at the center of a federal investigation into a 2003 news leak that exposed the identity of a CIA officer. Some Democrats have called for his resignation.

Gerlach, who represents parts of Berks, Chester, Lehigh and Montgomery Counties, barely defeated Democrat Lois Murphy, a Lower Merion lawyer, in 2004 to win his second term in the district. He won by 2 percentage points, despite raising $2.3 million and spending $2.1 million on the race.

John Brabender, a campaign adviser to Gerlach, said Democrats were just frustrated about Murphy's loss to Gerlach.

Murphy, who has filed to run again against Gerlach in 2006, released a statement calling on Gerlach to cancel the fund-raiser.

Brabender said Gerlach did not consider canceling Rove's visit.

"In this country we respect people's rights and until a time that some court or somebody proves that somebody has done something wrong, that we treat people with respect," Brabender said.

Don't Fire Karl Rove

By Dick Morris
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 20, 2005

The “gotcha” game is in full swing in Washington as the vultures circle slowly over the White House, hoping for Karl Rove’s scalp.

The ritualized homicide/suicide is well-programmed. A White House insider is accused of doing something, the news media hype the story and, finally, without proof or presumption of innocence, the staffer resigns so as not to become a “distraction” from the president’s agenda.

But maybe this time the cycle can be stopped before it runs its bloody course.

Karl Rove did nothing wrong. The statute he allegedly violated has a number of very specific triggers. The person who reveals the identity of a covert CIA operative has to intend to uncover her identity, know she is a covert operative and know that he is blowing her cover.

The law is designed to stop the likes of Philip Agee, whose 1975 book Inside the Company revealed secret CIA information to sell books. Rove’s actions are a far stretch from those the statute was designed to cover.

Rove did not call Time magazine’s Matt Cooper. Cooper called him. He did not mention Valerie Plame’s name. He may not have even known it. He had no intent to reveal her identity. The context of the conversation was that Rove was trying to disabuse Cooper of the impression that CIA Director George Tenet had been the moving force in choosing former Ambassador Joe Wilson to investigate the nuclear dealings reported to be going on in Niger.

Rove said that it was not Tenet who pushed the appointment but that it likely stemmed from the fact that Wilson’s wife “apparently works” at the CIA.

To call that conversation a deliberate revelation of an agent’s identity designed to blow her cover is a far, far stretch of the statute’s wording and intent.

But just as Rove did not intend to blow Plame’s cover, so the Democrats demanding his head are not very interested in upholding the statute in question. Their motives are totally political. They want revenge against Rove for his successful role in piloting the Bush election and re-election campaigns, and they want to be sure that Bush does not have access to Karl’s advice in the remaining years of his second term.

Washington is a mean town where human sacrifice has been raised to an art form. But Karl Rove does not deserve this fate. He has served loyally and well, resisting enormous opportunities to leave midway and reap a bonanza of income in the private sector. He has shown himself to be a man of uncommon integrity and selflessness in serving this administration and this country. He should not be tossed to the partisan wolves.

Bush, having appointed a special prosecutor and pledged to fire anyone who was responsible for revealing Plame’s identity, cannot just sweep the matter under the rug. But he should allow Rove to clear his name through the normal process of investigation and testimony.

He should keep Karl onboard, stipulating only that he fully answer all questions from a grand jury — as he has done already? — should the prosecutor need him to appear again.

If Rove is indicted or even named as a target, Bush will have to let him go. But that’s not going to happen based on the current fact pattern, and Bush should not let himself be pushed ahead of the process by firing Rove.

Indeed, there is some question that the reporters who took Rove’s lead, looked up Plame’s name and published it may themselves be more likely to have violated the statute than is Rove himself. Whoever took the information Rove provided and ousted Plame was, in fact, deliberately outing a CIA operative and may be a better fit for the statute’s intent than Karl Rove.

Bush should not fire Rove. He should stick by him until or unless the criminal investigation makes it evident that he may have violated the statute. Otherwise, he should stay on the job.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dick Morris is a former adviser to President Clinton.

An Unlikely Story

Karl Rove's alibi would be easier to believe if he hadn't hidden it from FBI investigators in 2003.
By Murray Waas / American Prospect
Web Exclusive: 07.19.05



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.

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.

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.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has said that Rove never knew that Plame was a covert officer when he discussed her CIA employment with reporters, and that he only first learned of her clandestine status when he read about it in the newspaper. Luskin did not return a telephone call today seeking comment for this story.

If recently disclosed press accounts of conversations that Rove had with reporters are correct, Novak and Rove first spoke about Plame on July 8, 2003. It was three days later, on July 11, that Rove also spoke about Plame to Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper. Three days after that, on July 14, Novak's column appeared in which he identified Plame as an "agency operative." According to Novak's account, it was he, not Rove, who first broached the issue of Plame's employment with the CIA, and that Rove at most simply said that he, too, had heard much the same information.

Novak's column came during a period of time when senior White House officials were attempting to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was then asserting that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq. Wilson had only recently led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was covertly attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back that the claims were most likely the result of a hoax. But President Bush had still cited them during a State of the Union address as evidence that Hussein had an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

In the column, Novak called Plame an "agency operative," thus identifying her as a covert CIA agent. But Novak has since claimed that his use of the phrase "agency operative" was a formulation of his own, and that he did not know, or mean to tell his readers, that she had a covert status with the agency.

Rove, too, has told federal investigators he did not know that Plame had a covert status with the CIA when he spoke with Novak, and Cooper, about Plame.

The distinction as to whether Rove specifically knew Plame’s status has been central to the investigation of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; under the law, a government official can only be prosecuted if he or she knew of a person's covert status and "that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent."

But investigators were also skeptical of Novak's claim that his use of the term "operative" was a journalistic miscue because it appeared to provide legal protection for whoever his source or sources were. And although Novak's and Rove's accounts of their conversations regarding Plame were largely consistent, they appeared to be self-serving.

It has been, in large part, for all of these reasons that Fitzgerald so zealously sought the testimony of reporters Cooper and Judith Miller of The New York Times, according to sources sympathetic to Fitzgerald. Cooper testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury last week, after earlier having been found in civil contempt for refusing to do so. In contrast, Miller has refused to testify, and is currently serving a sentence in an Alexandria, Virginia, jail.

Finally, also driving Fitzgerald's investigation has been Rove's assertions that he only found out about Plame's status with the CIA from a journalist -- and one whose name he does not recall. But as The New York Times first disclosed on July 16, senior Bush administration officials first learned that Plame worked for the CIA from a classified briefing paper on July 7, 2003, exactly a week before Novak's column naming Plame appeared and at the time that senior Bush administration officials were devising a strategy to discredit Wilson.

The classified memorandum, dated June 10, 2003, was written by Marc Grossman, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs, and reportedly made claims similar to those made by Wilson: that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Hussein to make the case to go to war with Iraq. The report was circulated to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and a slew of other senior administration officials who were then traveling with President Bush to Africa.

Fitzgerald has focused on whether Rove might have learned of Plame's identity from one of the many senior White House officials who read the memo, according to the Times account and attorneys whose clients have testified before the federal grand jury.

Murray Waas is an investigative reporter. He will be reporting further about the Plame grand jury on his blog, Whatever Already.

Bush says will deal with CIA leak after probe

By Tabassum Zakaria



President Bush on Tuesday sidestepped a question about whether his top adviser, Karl Rove, offered to resign over the leaking of a covert CIA operative's identity and said he would deal with the issue when an investigation into the case was over.

As controversy over the matter heated up in recent weeks, the White House has refused to answer questions about Rove, who is credited with being the architect of the president's election victories.

Bush and his spokesmen cited the investigation into who told reporters about Valerie Plame two years ago after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, criticized the Bush administration's justification for going to war in Iraq.

"My answer really hasn't changed from 24 hours ago. It's the same answer," Bush said at a news conference with Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

"I'll be glad to repeat what I said yesterday which is there is an ongoing investigation and people shouldn't, you know, jump to conclusions in the press until the investigation is over," Bush said. "Once the investigation is over I'll deal with it."

About 30 protesters near the White House waved signs "Stop the Leak" and "Fire Karl" as they chanted "hey hey, ho ho, Karl Rove has got to go."

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper told a federal grand jury that Rove was the first person to tell him that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, but that he did not disclose her name. Cooper has also said he discussed Wilson and his wife with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

Democrats have pounced on the revelations, with some calling for Bush to fire Rove.

"How many more times will Karl Rove make President Bush eat his words and shred his credibility before Karl Rove does the honorable thing and leaves the White House?" Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who ran against Bush for the White House in 2004, said in a letter to supporters.

Plame in 2003 worked at the CIA undercover when her name was published by columnist Robert Novak. A special federal prosecutor has been investigating who leaked her name and whether any laws were broken. Intentionally making public the identity of a covert operative is a crime.

Bush said on Monday that if anyone had committed a crime they would no longer work for the administration, which was viewed by critics as backing away from previous statements that leaking would be grounds for dismissal.

"I'm very disappointed in the president changing the rules in the middle of the ball game," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said. "The rules that he set said that if there was anyone involved in this in his White House, they would be gone. And yesterday, his rules were changed in the middle of the game."

Kerry said he would call this week for congressional hearings.




Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited

Memo Gets Attention in Probe of CIA Leak

By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer

A State Department memo that has caught the attention of prosecutors describes a CIA officer's role in sending her husband to Africa and disputes administration claims that Iraq was shopping for uranium, a retired department official said Tuesday.

The classified memo was sent to Air Force One just after former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson went public with his assertions that the Bush administration overstated the evidence that Iraq was interested in obtaining uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

The memo has become a key piece of evidence in the CIA leak investigation because it could have been the way someone in the White House learned — and then leaked — the information that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and played a role in sending him on the mission.

The document was prepared in June 2003 at the direction of Carl W. Ford Jr., then head of the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research, for Marc Grossman, the retired official said. Grossman was the Undersecretary of State who was in charge of the department while Secretary Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were traveling. Grossman needed the memo because he was dealing with other issues and was not familiar with the subject, the former official said.

"It wasn't a Wilson-Wilson wife memo," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way. "It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our disagreement" with the White House.

Armitage called Ford after Wilson's op-ed piece in The New York Times and his TV appearance on July 6, 2003 in which he challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Armitage asked that Powell, who was traveling to Africa with Bush, be given an account of the Wilson trip, said the former official.

The original June 2003 memo was readdressed to Powell and included a short summary prepared by an analyst who was at a 2002 CIA meeting where Wilson's trip was arranged and was sent in one piece to Powell on Air Force One the next day.

The memo said Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and suggested her husband go to Niger because he had contacts there and had served as an American diplomat in Africa. However, the official said the memo did not say she worked undercover for the spy agency nor did it identify her as Valerie Plame, which was her maiden name and cover name at the CIA.

Her identity as Plame was disclosed first by columnist Robert Novak and then by Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. The leak investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is looking into who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's identity to reporters and whether any laws were broken.

A 1982 law prohibits the deliberate exposure of the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

Wilson believes the Bush administration leaked the name as retribution for his criticism.

President Bush said Monday he would fire any member of his staff who "committed a crime," a change from his previous vow to fire anyone involved in the leak.

The past two weeks have brought revelations that top presidential aide Karl Rove was involved in leaking the identity of Plame to Novak and to Cooper.

The former State Department official stressed the memo focused on Wilson's trip and the State Department intelligence bureau's disagreement with the White House's claim about Iraq trying to get nuclear material. He said the fact that the CIA officer and Wilson were husband and wife was largely an incidental reference.

The June 2003 memo had not gone higher than Grossman until Wilson's op-ed column for The New York Times headlined "What I Didn't Find In Africa" and his TV appearance to dispute the administration. Wilson's article asked the question: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion?"

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