Crossing the Cabal - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey
Newsweek
Updated: 6:28 p.m. ET Oct. 19, 2005


Oct. 19, 2005 - No question about it. Like all good government scandals, the Valerie Plame affair is complicated and arcane. It’s hard to know who did what and when, or even why it’s important. That’s certainly the most hopeful view inside the White House, where the president’s aides believe the voting public cares far more about gas prices than a leak about a CIA officer.

In practical terms, little has changed at the White House even as the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald seems to be nearing the end of his work. That’s not because staffers are avoiding all thoughts about what might happen to the pivotal figures of Karl Rove (the president’s master tactician) or Lewis (Scooter) Libby (the vice president’s chief of staff and foreign-policy adviser). It’s because there’s too much other stuff happening: from Harriet Miers’s Supreme Court nomination to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and, oh, yes, the unfinished business of Iraq. “These things are out of our control,” said one senior White House official. “There are going to be prosecutions and indictments and investigations. These things we can’t control the nature of or the duration of. What we can control is our agenda.”

In other words, this isn’t the Clinton White House under Ken Starr’s watch. As chief of staff Andy Card told C-Span last week, “It is something that is there, but it is something that we don’t talk about because it would be inappropriate. We all have a job to do.”

That’s fine if Fitzgerald narrowly defines his work to mean the naming of the CIA officer in question. But there’s every sign—at least from the range of witnesses he’s called to the grand jury—that this is a far broader investigation. That suggests it’s not just a matter of law, it’s a matter of motive. One of the most perplexing pieces of the Plame puzzle is the question of why? Why did certain officials feel so passionately about former ambassador Joe Wilson’s comments about uranium in Niger that they would seek to discredit him by targeting his wife?

The answer to that may come from the only real source of dissent inside the administration in this period: Colin Powell’s State Department. It was Powell’s intelligence office that wrote the critical (and classified) memo that detailed why Wilson was sent to Niger and the minor role of his wife in that mission. That report was circulating on Air Force One in the days after Wilson’s op-ed appeared in The New York Times.

For Powell and his staff, the searing experience of the run-up to war and its chaotic aftermath was not about conflict in Baghdad, but conflict in Washington. It was intense, personal and emotional. Their enemy: the vice president’s office and the Pentagon. It was clear at the time how dismal relations were between the State and Defense departments. After all, the Pentagon trashed State’s planning for the postwar period and they openly feuded in their assessments of whether to trust Iraqi exiles or not.


But now, thanks to Powell’s former chief of staff, it’s clear that the problems weren’t just between two warring departments. Larry Wilkerson claims there was “a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, and the Defense secretary of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld, that made decisions that the bureaucracy didn’t know were being made.” Chief among those decisions: to go to war in Iraq. “You have a president who isn’t versed in international affairs and not too much interested in them either,” Wilkerson told an audience at the New America Foundation on Wednesday. “So it’s not too difficult to make decisions in this Oval Office cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you thought were made in the formal process.”

Wilkerson argues that the reason leaders need to be open and honest with their own bureaucracy is because in times of war you need all the help, advice and teamwork you can lay your hands on. Dissent should be welcomed because the dissenters then form part of your team. He also argues that the entire national-security process needs to be overhauled to stop the kind of secrecy and concentration of power that led to the decision to invade Iraq.

But his observations are also directly relevant to the Plame affair. Joe Wilson’s mistake was that he crossed the so-called cabal by saying the administration knew there was nothing to the Niger story even before President George W. Bush cited it in his State of the Union Message in early 2003. Just like Powell’s dissent in the run-up to war, the response inside the administration was personally critical and had a chilling effect on internal debate.

Whether or not you agree with the war, and whether or not Fitzgerald indicts anyone, it’s worth remembering why Joe Wilson was at all important to the White House and the vice president’s office in particular. As the president said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a president can make.” The Plame game gets to the heart of how that decision was made—and whether anyone could offer an alternative view and survive with their reputation intact.

Those Plunging Polls
According to the latest Gallup poll, President Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to 39 percent—a 6 point decline over the last month, and a 13 point slide since his Inauguration just 10 months ago. That’s the same number Bill Clinton scored in September 1994, just before his party was kicked out of power in Congress (and George W. Bush swept into the governor’s mansion in Austin.)

Is that just a coincidence or is the mood really similar to 1994? Again according to Gallup, 68 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States. In October 1994, that number was 66 percent (and when the president’s father lost in 1992, it was 68.)

Before Democrats start to chill their champagne, it’s useful to remember what happened last year. Those so-called wrong-track numbers were running at 62 percent after the Abu Ghraib scandal in May; by the time of the presidential election in November, they recovered again to 54 percent.

But even if the numbers say little reliable about what will happen in next year’s midterm congressional elections, they speak volumes about the present political woes of the White House. Bush’s approval ratings have declined so sharply this year that he has lost most of his support among independents (who give him an approval rating of just 32 percent), even as he has held on to the vast majority of Republicans.

If the GOP is going to recover over the next year, its target must be those disillusioned independents. That’s a tough challenge given the state of gas prices. It’s even harder at a time when the White House is focused on rallying its conservative base to rescue Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court.


© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Poetic Justice - Newsweek Politics - MSNBC.com

George W. Bush rose to power on the strength of a disciplined, aggressive, leak-proof spin-machine. Now that machine may have run amok.

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Howard Fineman
Newsweek
Updated: 1:19 p.m. ET Oct. 19, 2005


Oct. 19, 2005 - Live by spin, die by spin.

That will be the lesson if Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicts anyone in the Valerie Plame leak case. Poetic justice is a concept as old as drama, but it applies time and again in the theater of presidential politics. Traits and tactics that lead to power lead to overreach, and ruin. In our day, justice is administered (and balance restored) by law, not by gods. Still, the idea is the same.

You don’t have to reach far back to find examples. Richard Nixon’s rise was made possible by his calculating, outsider’s mind. He knew how to use fear in the service of power because he was so full of fear himself. But this perfect instrument for Cold War and diplomatic realpolitik metastasized into Oval Office paranoia, CREEP and Watergate.

Bill Clinton’s gift was his rogue charm and ability to convey a sense of empathy. But his personal story—“The Comeback Kid” who still believed in a town called Hope—became all too personal when Monica Lewinsky walked through the door. Winsome became tawdry, charm became mendacity—and Clinton nearly was booted out of office.

George W. Bush rose to power on the strength of a disciplined, aggressive, tightly-focused, leak-proof spin-machine—one that took issue positions and stuck to them, divided the world (including the media) into friends and enemies, and steamrollered the opposition with ruthless skill while the candidate remained smilingly above the fray. Sure of his social skills but not of his speaking ability (let alone his ability to speak extemporaneously), Bush (and Karl Rove) learned to stick to their bullet-item talking points, to operate through surrogates, all the while steering the initial course they had set for themselves.

But the machine they built may have run amok—at least that seems to be what Fitzgerald is examining, as he looks at the leaking of Plame’s identity and of other classified information.

In essence, the Bush-Rove campaign machine was redeployed in the service of selling of the Iraq war and, later, in defense of that sale. Did they go over the line in doing so? We’re about to find out.

In the meantime (and in another twist on the poetic justice them), the very discipline of the machine itself—its short internal supply lines, the consistently-followed talking points, the focus on feeding friends and obliterating enemies—could be helping Fitzgerald. Tightly-knit groups rise together, but they fall together. If the inner circle is small, it takes only one insider “flip” to endanger the rest.

The campaign sales structure for the political run up to the war was clear from the start. White House Chief of Staff Andy Card talked openly about new-car style “rollouts” in the fall of 2002; it soon became well-known that, among those in the so called “White House Iraq Group”—WHIG for short—were campaign honchos such as Rove, Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer and Mary Matalin.

People have long since gotten used to the idea of Rove in the White House. But, the fact is, in 2001, his presence was something novel. He was the first modern-era consultant with an office in the West Wing.

And there he was in the WHIG, along with several of the heaviest hitters of substantive foreign policy, including Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then-National Security Advisor Condi Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley.

What, if any, classified information was floating around at WHIG meetings? What, if any, of it was “put out,” as they say, or used in other ways? What, if any, info might some of the more enthusiastic WHIG members have tried to cadge on the side, perhaps for their own somewhat freelance use? Who leaked what to whom among the Judy Miller types in the national media?

These questions were not asked for the most part at the time, either by the media or the Democrats who now oppose the war. But in American politics we tend to replay every cataclysmic political issue in the courts: Nixon’s reelection in 1972 in Watergate, Clinton’s in 1996 in Monica Madness.

Now comes—again—the war in Iraq and, by extension, the reelection of the self-described “war president.”

Will Fitzgerald indict anyone? Well-placed insiders, including two I’ve talked to in the last two days, think that he will. And then the gods, or rather the law, will begin to speak.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

AP: Rove, Libby Discussed Reporter Info

By JOHN SOLOMON
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; 8:16 PM



WASHINGTON -- Top White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby discussed their contacts with reporters about an undercover CIA officer in the days before her identity was published, the first known intersection between two central figures in the criminal leak investigation.

Rove told grand jurors it was possible he first heard in the White House that Valerie Plame, wife of Bush administration Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA from Libby's recounting of a conversation with a journalist, according to people familiar with his testimony.

They said Rove testified that his discussions with Libby before Plame's CIA cover was blown were limited to information reporters had passed to them. Some evidence prosecutors have gathered conflicts with Libby's account.

Rove is deputy White House chief of staff and President Bush's closest political adviser. Libby is Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald must determine whether the contacts between the two men concerning Plame's CIA work were part of an effort to undercut her husband's criticism of the Iraq war or simply the trading of information and rumors that typically occurs inside the White House.

The prosecutor also is examining whether any witnesses gave false testimony or withheld information from the investigation. His spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment Wednesday.

The Rove-Libby contacts were confirmed to The Associated Press by people directly familiar with testimony the two witnesses gave before the grand jury. All spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the proceedings.

Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, did not return repeated phone calls this week seeking comment.

Rove and Libby have emerged as central figures in Fitzgerald's investigation because both had contacts with reporters who ultimately disclosed Plame's work for the CIA. Federal law prohibits government officials from knowingly disclosing the identity if intelligence operatives.

Those familiar with the testimony and evidence said that:

During one of his grand jury appearances, Rove was shown testimony from Libby suggesting the two had discussed with each other information they had gotten about Wilson's wife from reporters in early July 2003.

Rove responded that Libby's testimony was consistent with his general recollection that he had first learned Wilson's wife worked for the CIA from reporters or government officials who had talked with reporters.

Rove testified that he never intended any of his comments to reporters about Wilson's wife to serve as confirmation of Plame's identity. Rove "has always clearly left open that he first heard this information from Libby," said one person directly familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony.

That person said Rove testified he believes he heard general information about Wilson's wife on two occasions before he talked with reporters in July 2003 and then learned her name from syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

Rove testified he probably first heard of Wilson's wife in a casual social setting outside the White House in the spring of 2003 but could not remember who provided the information.

On July 9, 2003, Novak told him he was writing a column that would report that Plame worked for the CIA, and Rove told the columnist he had heard similar information, according to his testimony.

Novak published a column the next week that said Plame worked for the CIA and suggested her agency send Wilson, a former ambassador, on a mission that raised questions about prewar intelligence the Bush administration used to justify invading Iraq.

Rove testified he told Libby about his contact with Novak about two days after it happened.

In testimony shown to Rove, Libby stated that numerous journalists appeared to have learned about Plame's identity in the period before her name was published and that he and Rove talked to each other about their contacts with reporters.

Libby's testimony stated that Rove had told him about his contact with Novak and that Libby had told Rove about information he had gotten about Wilson's wife from NBC's Tim Russert, according to a person familiar with the information shown to Rove.

Prosecutors, however, have a different account from Russert. The network has said Russert told authorities did not know about Wilson's wife's identity until it was published and therefore could not have told Libby about it.

Prosecutors also have evidence that Libby initiated the call with Russert and had initiated similar contact with another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, several weeks earlier. Miller was jailed for 85 days before agreeing to testify before the grand jury.

Even if Rove, Libby or other White House aides did not knowingly reveal Plame's covert identity, the prosecutor could consider other charges such as the mishandling of classified information, false statements and obstruction of justice, lawyers have said.

Rove was pressed by prosecutors on several matters, including why he failed to mention during the first of his four grand jury appearances that he also had discussed the Plame matter with a second reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine.

Rove testified during the first appearance about his contacts with Novak in the days before Novak wrote a column outing Plame's identity. When asked generally if he had conversations with other reporters in that session, he answered "no."

Rove and his lawyer subsequently discovered an e-mail Rove had sent top national security aide Steve Hadley referring to a brief phone interview he had with Cooper.

The e-mail jogged Rove's memory and during a subsequent grand jury appearance, he volunteered his recollections about his conversation with Cooper, and his lawyer provided the e-mail to prosecutors. Cooper also wrote a story about Plame.

© 2005 The Associated Press

Democrats question Bush-Rove meeting on CIA leak | Reuters.com

Wed Oct 19, 2005 7:11 PM ET



By Adam Entous

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats asked the White House on Wednesday for details of President George W. Bush's private conversations in 2003 with top political adviser Karl Rove after conflicting reports about whether Bush was aware of any role by Rove in the outing of a covert CIA operative.

Rove and Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, are at the center of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, challenged the administration's prewar intelligence on Iraq.

A government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said no charges in the nearly two-year leak investigation were expected this week. But Fitzgerald was still expected to wrap up the case before the grand jury expires on October 28.

Bracing for possible indictments, White House officials have been discussing what to do if Rove were forced to step down. Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, a former campaign adviser to Bush, is one of the names being floated in Republican circles as Rove's possible successor.

Bush and Cheney were interviewed last year by Fitzgerald and White House spokesman Scott McClellan said earlier this week that the prosecutor has not asked to question either the president or vice president a second time.

In a letter to Bush on Wednesday, Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, asked for details about the president's conversations with Rove after The New York Daily News reported that the president was initially furious with Rove when Rove conceded in 2003 that he had talked to the press about Wilson's wife.

The Daily News account appeared to contradict assertions earlier this month by sources close to the case that Rove had kept his role from Bush, assuring him in a brief conversation in the fall of 2003 that he was not involved in any effort to punish Wilson by disclosing his wife's identity.

The Daily News said those earlier reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the president.

"I urge you to immediately and publicly clear up the record," Schumer wrote.

"When was the president told?" asked the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.

One Republican strategist with ties to the White House said officials were jockeying for position. "There are a lot of knives out," the strategist said in explaining the conflicting accounts about what Bush knew about Rove's role in the leak.

NEWS ACCOUNT CHALLENGED

McClellan has refused to provide details about Bush's private conversation with Rove, though he has referred to it publicly. Around that time McClellan also flatly denied that Rove and Libby had any involvement in the leak, but reporters have since identified them as sources.

McClellan on Wednesday broke with his usual practice of refusing to comment on the leak case, saying of the Daily News report: "I would challenge the overall accuracy of that news account."

When reporters pressed him on which facts he was challenging, though, McClellan refused to say.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller and other witnesses have been questioned by investigators about whether Cheney was aware or authorized Libby to talk to reporters about Wilson.

Two legal sources involved in the case said investigators also asked witnesses what Bush knew about the leak.

Wilson says White House officials outed his wife, damaging her ability to work undercover, to discredit him for accusing the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war in a New York Times opinion piece on July 6, 2003.

After initially promising to fire anyone found to have leaked information about Plame, Bush offered a more qualified pledge in July, saying, "If someone committed a crime they will no longer work in my administration."

(Additional reporting by Jim Vicini, Caren Bohan and Steve Holland)

Jailed reporter seeks law to protect sources | Reuters.com

Wed Oct 19, 2005 4:13 PM ET



By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New York Times reporter Judith Miller, jailed 85 days for refusing to testify in a federal probe that now threatens the White House, urged Congress on Wednesday to protect journalists from having to reveal confidential sources.

"I hope you will agree that an uncoerced, uncoercible press, though at times irritating, is vital to the perpetuation of the freedom and democracy we so often take for granted," Miller told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Proposed legislation, opposed by the Bush administration, would allow reporters to shield sources in most cases. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have such shield laws, and efforts to obtain a federal one have gained traction largely because of Miller's case.

Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said at the close of the hearing, "I believe we need a statute."

But Chuck Rosenberg, U.S. attorney in Texas, said the bill before the panel "would create serious impediments to the (Justice) Department's ability to enforce the law, fight terrorism and protect national security."

Miller spent nearly three months in jail before obtaining additional assurances from her source, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, that she could testify about their conversations before a federal grand jury examining the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Miller was jailed even though she never wrote a story about Plame. She testified twice before the grand jury after her release.

The leak investigation has ensnarled White House political adviser Karl Rove as well as Libby. The White House had long maintained the two had nothing to do with the leak but reporters have since named them as sources.

Plame's diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, has charged that the administration had leaked her name to get back at him for criticizing President George W. Bush's Iraq policy.

Miller, who was jailed at the Alexandria Detention Facility in Virginia, told the Senate panel: "Journalists are increasingly being subjected to federal subpoenas" since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"More than two dozen reporters have been subpoenaed in the past two years and are in danger of going to jail," Miller said. "If the current trend prevails, the Alexandria Detention Facility may have to open an entire new wing to house reporters."

Report: Bush rebuked Rove

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush reportedly was angry with top aide Karl Rove two years ago over Rove's alleged role in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

The New York Daily News reports Bush rebuked Rove -- who has made a number of grand jury appearances in the case and could face charges stemming from the revelation of Plame's name in the press.

Citing sources, the newspaper said Bush was furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked with reporters about the Plame leak.

"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has until Oct. 28 to either file a report on the case, file charges or let the matter drop.

Plame is the wife of diplomat Joseph Wilson. Revelation of her name came after Wilson criticized the White House's Iraq policy

New York Daily News - World & National Report - Prez Iraq team fought to squelch war critics

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK and KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - It was called the White House Iraq Group and its job was to make the case that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons.
So determined was the ring of top officials to win its argument that it morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims, sources told the Daily News.

One of those critics was ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa. His punishment was the media outing of his wife, CIA spy Valerie Plame, an affair that became a "side show" for the White House Iraq Group, the sources said.

The Plame leak is now the subject of a criminal probe that has seen presidential political guru Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, hauled before a grand jury.

Both men were members of the group, also known as WHIG. From late 2002 through mid 2003, it was locked in a feud with officials inside the CIA and State Department over claims Saddam tried to buy "yellow cake" uranium in Niger to build nukes, a former Bush administration and intelligence sources told The News.

"There were a number of occasions when White House officials or Vice President [Cheney's] staffers, or others, wanted to push the envelope on things," an ex-intelligence official said. "The agency would say, 'We just don't have the intelligence to substantiate that.'" When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries.

"People in the Iraq group then got very frustrated. It was a side show," said a source familiar with WHIG.

Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.

"They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said.

Originally published on October 19, 2005

Top News Article | Reuters.com | Democrats question Bush-Rove meeting on CIA leak

By Adam Entous

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats asked the White House on Wednesday for details of President George W. Bush's private conversations in 2003 with top political adviser Karl Rove after conflicting reports about whether Bush was aware of any role by Rove in the outing of a covert CIA operative.

Rove and Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, are at the center of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, challenged the administration's prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Fitzgerald is wrapping up the nearly two-year investigation but a government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said no charges in the CIA leak investigation were expected this week.

White House officials have been discussing what to do if Rove is indicted and is forced to step down.

Bush and Cheney were interviewed last year by Fitzgerald and White House spokesman Scott McClellan said earlier this week that the prosecutor has not asked to question either the president or vice president a second time.

In a letter to Bush on Wednesday, Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, asked for details about the president's conversations with Rove after The New York Daily News reported that the president was initially furious with when Rove conceded in 2003 that he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

The Daily News account appeared to contradict assertions earlier this month by sources close to the case that Rove had kept his role from Bush, assuring him in a brief conversation in the fall of 2003 that he was not involved in any effort to punish Wilson by disclosing his wife's identity.

The Daily News said those earlier reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the president.

"I urge you to immediately and publicly clear up the record," Schumer wrote.

"When was the president told?" asked the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.

NEWS ACCOUNT CHALLENGED

McClellan has refused to provide details about Bush's private conversation with Rove, though he has referred to it publicly. Around that time McClellan also flatly denied that Rove and Libby had any involvement in the leak, but reporters have since identified them as sources.

McClellan on Wednesday broke with his usual practice of refusing to comment on the leak case, saying of the Daily News report: "I would challenge the overall accuracy of that news account."

When reporters pressed him on which facts he was challenging, though, McClellan refused to say.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller and other witnesses have been questioned by investigators about whether Cheney was aware or authorized Libby to talk to reporters about Wilson.

Two legal sources involved in the case said investigators also asked witnesses what Bush knew about the leak.

Wilson says White House officials outed his wife, damaging her ability to work undercover, to discredit him for accusing the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war in a New York Times opinion piece on July 6, 2003.

After initially promising to fire anyone found to have leaked information about Plame, Bush offered a more qualified pledge in July, saying, "If someone committed a crime they will no longer work in my administration."

(Additional reporting by Jim Vicini, Caren Bohan and Steve Holland)

Bush whacked Rove on CIA leak | NY Daily News

BY THOMAS M. DeFRANK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
Wednesday, October 19th, 2005

WASHINGTON - An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.
"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."

Bush has nevertheless remained doggedly loyal to Rove, who friends and even political adversaries acknowledge is the architect of the President's rise from baseball owner to leader of the free world.

As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald nears a decision, perhaps as early as today, on whether to issue indictments in his two-year probe, Bush has already circled the wagons around Rove, whose departure would be a grievous blow to an already shell-shocked White House staff and a President in deep political trouble.

Asked if he believed indictments were forthcoming, a key Bush official said he did not know, then added: "I'm very concerned it could go very, very badly."

"Karl is fighting for his life," the official added, "but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The President knows that and appreciates that."

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.

But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.

A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.

"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.

None of these sources offered additional specifics of what Bush and Rove discussed in conversations beginning shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched into the leak of CIA agent Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.

A White House spokesman declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of Fitzgerald's investigation.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: CIA Leak Prosecutor Focuses On Libby (10/18/05)

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005

As federal prosecutors in the CIA leak investigation reach the critical stage of deciding whether to bring criminal charges, they are zeroing in on contradictions between the testimony of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, and that of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, according to sources close to the investigation and attorneys for individuals enmeshed in the probe.

The prosecutors and the federal grand jury are also scrutinizing whether Libby, or his attorney, tried to discourage Miller from giving testimony to the grand jury, or tried to improperly influence what Miller would say if she testified, according to the same sources.

The grand jury has heard testimony from Miller and other witnesses that is at odds with Libby's testimony, according to the same sources. One crucial contradiction between Miller and Libby, the sources say, involves a July 8, 2003, breakfast meeting during which the two discussed Valerie Plame, the covert CIA operative whose identity was revealed a week later in a newspaper column and whose husband, Joe Wilson, was a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

According to attorneys familiar with his testimony, Libby told the grand jury that at the meeting, he told Miller that Plame had something to do with Wilson's being sent on a controversial CIA-sponsored mission to Africa, but that he did not know that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA or anything else about her.

However, Miller testified and turned over notes from the July 8 conversation to the grand jury that showed that Libby had told her that Plame worked for the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control office.

Evidence indicating that Libby or his attorney may have tried to discourage or influence Miller's testimony is significant for two reasons, outside legal experts say. First, attempting to influence a witness's testimony might in and of itself constitute obstruction of justice or witness-tampering, said the experts.

More important, evidence that Libby might have tried to discourage Miller's testimony has put Libby's testimony in a worse light, according to government officials briefed on the matter. Potentially misleading and incomplete answers by Libby to federal investigators are less likely to be explained away as the result of his faulty memory or inadvertent mistakes, the sources said.

According to a Justice Department official not directly involved with the Plame case, "Both intent and frame of mind are often essential to bringing the type of charges Fitzgerald is apparently considering. And not wanting a key witness to testify goes straight to showing that there were indeed bad intentions."

Miller's testimony -- and her recent first-person account in The Times -- as well as other evidence have become public just as Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald appears to be nearing final decisions on whether to bring charges against Libby, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, or others.

The grand jury has also heard new evidence suggesting that long-standing tensions between Vice President Cheney's office and the CIA over pre-war intelligence that the Bush administration cited as reason to go to war with Iraq led to the unmasking of Plame.

Federal investigators apparently learned for the first time from press accounts in late August that Libby and his attorney, Joseph Tate, might have tried to discourage Miller from giving testimony, according to documents and sources. At the time, Miller was serving a jail sentence for refusing to testify in the Plame investigation. But shortly after learning that Miller might have felt pressure not to testify, Fitzgerald personally intervened, strongly encouraging attorneys for Miller and Libby to negotiate an agreement by which Miller would give grand jury testimony.

Because Fitzgerald did not want to nix any possible deal for Miller's testimony, and because he was almost completely in the dark as to what she might say, the prosecutor did not aggressively pursue the possibility that Libby or Tate had been trying to influence or discourage Miller's testimony, according to sources.

On September 29 -- after Miller had agreed to testify, was released from jail, and was about to appear before the grand jury -- one of her attorneys, Floyd Abrams, wrote to Tate alleging that Tate had repeatedly made comments to him that had discouraged Miller from testifying. At issue was whether a general waiver, required of White House employees, that Libby had signed early in the investigation in late 2003 was coerced.

Miller has since said that she spent 85 days in jail -- for civil contempt of court for refusing to testify about her conversations with Libby -- because Tate had indeed indicated to her, through Abrams, that Libby's general waiver was not given freely. Miller has said she finally agreed to testify only after she got a personal waiver from Libby in September.

In his letter to Tate, Abrams said Tate had repeatedly told him that the general waiver was "by its nature coerced and had been required as a condition for Mr. Libby's continued employment at the White House."

Tate in turn has said that Abrams's claims are "outrageous" and "factually incorrect," and that neither he nor Libby had said or done anything to discourage Miller from testifying or to influence any testimony she might give.

According to sources close to the investigation, attorneys whose clients have co-operated with prosecutors, and Miller's personal account in the Times, the new issues the grand jury is likely to scrutinize:

A June 23, 2003, Miller-Libby meeting in the Old Executive Office Building during which they first discussed Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger for the purpose of looking into an allegation that Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium from the African nation in order to build a bomb.
As National Journal reported on October 11, Libby did not disclose the June 23 meeting in two appearances before the grand jury, or, earlier, in interviews with FBI agents working on the investigation, according to sources.

Miller testified to the grand jury that it was during this June 23 meeting that she and Libby first discussed Plame's CIA employment. Miller's notes of that meeting contained the notation, regarding Wilson, "Wife works in bureau?"

In her account in The Times on her grand jury testimony, Miller wrote: "I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I believed this was the first time I had been told that Mr. Wilson's wife might work for the C.I.A. The prosecutor asked me whether the word 'bureau' might not mean the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, I told him, normally. But Mr. Libby had been discussing the C.I.A., and therefore my impression was that he had been speaking about a particular bureau within the agency that dealt with the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. As to the question mark, I said I wasn't sure what it meant … Maybe Mr. Libby was not certain whether Mr. Wilson's wife actually worked there."


Libby and Miller's two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 8. Libby has told federal investigators, according to legal sources familiar with his testimony, that he told Miller at the meeting that he had heard that Wilson's wife had played a role in Wilson's being selected for the Niger assignment. But Libby also testified that he never named Plame nor told Miller that she worked for the CIA, because either he did not know that at the time, or, if he had heard that Plame was a CIA employee, he did not know whether it was true.
Miller's grand jury testimony as well her notes on the July 8 meeting contradict Libby's version. Miller's notes indicate that Libby did indeed tell her that Plame worked for the CIA. Her notes said, according to Miller: "Wife works at Winpac." Asked for an explanation by the grand jury, Miller has said she testified she knew that Winpac meant Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control. That was a CIA unit tracking chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons proliferation.

In her Times story on her testimony, Miller asserted: "I said I couldn't be certain whether I had known Ms. Plame's identity before this meeting, and I had no clear memory of the context of our conversation that resulted in this notation. But I told the grand jury that I believed that this was the first time I had heard that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for Winpac. In fact, I told the grand jury that when Mr. Libby indicated that Ms. Plame worked for Winpac, I assumed that she worked as an analyst, not as an undercover operative."


A third area of interest to Fitzgerald is conversations between Miller's attorney Abrams and Libby's attorney Tate, in which, according to Abrams, Tate strongly discouraged Miller's co-operation with Fitzgerald's office in giving grand jury testimony.
Miller was first subpoenaed in the CIA leak probe in August 2004. In response, The Times hired Abrams, a prominent First Amendment attorney. Abrams began a series of discussions with Tate in September 2004 to see if there was some manner by which Miller could testify.

Abrams said in an interview with National Journal that Tate passed along extensive details of Libby's grand jury testimony. Abrams also said that during those conversations, Tate inquired as to what Miller would testify to the grand jury, and whether her testimony might be potentially damaging to his client. Abrams said he responded by telling Tate he was new to the case and did not know. When pressed during a second conversation, Abrams said that he simply did not answer Tate and changed the subject.

Abrams said that Tate told him that Libby testified to the grand jury that he had never disclosed Plame's name to Miller and that he never told Miller that Plame had worked undercover at the CIA.

But Miller has told the grand jury that she had several references in her notes to Plame, although she misspelled the CIA officer's name as "Valerie Flame." Miller also told the grand jury that there was a possibility that another person, whom she could not remember, was the source of the disclosure, not Libby.

Miller wrote in her Times account that Abrams also told her: "[Tate] was pressing about what you would say. When I wouldn't give him an assurance that you would exonerate Libby, if you were to cooperate, he then immediately gave this, 'Don't go there, or we don't want you there.' "

However, two individuals who are familiar with accounts that Abrams provided to as many as 10 others at The New York Times -- including the newspaper's in-house attorneys, executives, and senior editorial staffers -- about his discussions with Tate, say that Miller might have misconstrued or misinterpreted what took place between Tate and Abrams.

These sources confirmed that Abrams told them that Tate said Libby's waiver was coerced, that Tate provided Abrams with details of Libby's grand jury testimony, and that Tate appeared concerned that Miller's testimony might damage his client. But the sources said that Abrams explained that Tate was simply nonresponsive when Abrams declined to say whether Miller's testimony would exonerate Libby.

"Floyd never said that Tate said anything like 'Don't go there,' or 'We don't want you there,' " said one person who attended legal strategy meetings involving Abrams, The Times' in-house legal counsel, and senior editorial staff as to how Miller might avoid jail. "Perhaps Judy extrapolated that, or misunderstood what happened."

In an October 16 staff-written piece in The Times -- separate from Miller's personal account published the same day -- the newspaper reported that based on what Miller was hearing from Abrams about Tate, Miller believed that "Mr. Tate was sending her a message that Mr. Libby did not want her to testify."

Tate has adamantly denied Abrams's account that Tate ever said or did anything to discourage Miller's cooperation with Fitzgerald's office or the grand jury. Tate has also denied Abrams's other contentions that Tate attempted to pass along to Miller what Libby told the grand jury, or that he attempted to learn from Abrams what Miller's testimony might be.


A fourth area of interest to Fitzgerald is Abrams's September 29, 2005, letter to Tate in which Abrams wrote: "In our [various] conversations … you did not say that Mr. Libby's waiver was uncoerced. In fact, you said quite the opposite. You told me that the signed waiver was by its nature coerced and had been required as a condition for Mr. Libby's continued employment at the White House.
"You compared the coercion to that inherent in the effective bar imposed upon the White House employees asserting the Fifth Amendment. A failure by your client to sign the written waiver, you explained, like any assertion of your client of the Fifth Amendment, would result in his dismissal. You persuasively mocked the notion that any waiver signed under such circumstances could be deemed voluntary."

Again, Tate has adamantly denied Abrams's allegations. In a letter to Fitzgerald, Tate told the prosecutor: "I am dismayed that you had the impression that I had not spoken to counsel for Ms. Miller or that we did not want her to testify."


Fitzgerald is also interested in the September 15 letter Libby sent to Miller in jail that encouraged her to finally testify in the case. Fitzgerald questioned Miller at length about the letter when she testified to the grand jury on September 30.
In his letter, Libby wrote to Miller: "Your reporting, and you, are missed. Like many Americans, I admire your principled stand. But like many friends and readers, I would welcome you back among the rest of us, doing what you do best -- reporting." He added: "I admire your principled fight with the Government.… But for my part, this is the rare case where this 'source' would be better off if you testified."

But it is a later passage in the letter that is especially important to Fitzgerald, sources say. "Because, as I am sure will not be news to you," Libby wrote to Miller, "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call."

In her Times account, Miller wrote: "The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job."

Bob Bennett, an attorney for Miller, said in an interview that when he first read Libby's personal letter, he knew that it was going to "be trouble" for his client. "I know that the letter bothered [Judy] and it bothered me," Bennett said. "She might be soon testifying, and a prosecutor might construe that as an attempt to influence her testimony. It was more probably just sort of a dumb thing to put in a letter."

Bennett adds: "I think it is important that Judy was protecting a source in terms of source confidentiality and the journalistic privilege. She was not protecting a source to prevent someone from going to jail. The letter just didn't help matters."


Finally, on September 29, the night before Miller was scheduled to testify before the grand jury, a source sympathetic to Libby spoke to journalists for at least three news organizations to leak word as to what Libby himself had said during his own testimony.
Journalists at two news organizations declined to publish stories. Among their concerns was that they had only a single source for the story and that that source had such a strong bias on behalf of Libby that the account of his grand jury testimony might possibly be incomplete or misleading in some way.

But more important were concerns that a leak of an account of Libby's grand jury testimony, on the eve of Miller's own testimony, might be an effort -- using the media -- to let Miller know what Libby had said, if she wanted to give testimony beneficial to him, or similar to his. (There is no evidence that Miller did not testify truthfully to the grand jury.)

On the night before Miller's testimony, The Washington Post did post an account on its Web site of Libby's testimony. The story said: "According to a source familiar with Libby's account of his conversations with Miller in July 2003, the subject of Wilson's wife came up on two occasions. In the first, on July 8, Miller met with Libby to interview him about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the source said.

"At that time, she asked him why Wilson had been chosen to investigate questions Cheney had posed about whether Iraq tried to buy uranium in the African nation of Niger. Libby, the source familiar with his account said, told her that the White House was working with the CIA to find out more about Wilson's trip and how he was selected.

"Libby told Miller he heard that Wilson's wife had something to do with sending him but he did not know who she was or where she worked, the source said."

Miller has since contradicted that account, testifying to the grand jury and turning over contemporaneous notes of her July 8 meeting with Libby indicating that Libby told her that Plame worked for the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control office.

Four former federal prosecutors said in interviews that if Libby did anything to discourage Miller from testifying in the case, it might be construed as possible obstruction of justice or witness-tampering, and that a thorough prosecutor, such as Fitzgerald, would logically make an extensive inquiry as to what occurred.
Dan Richman, a professor at Fordham Law School and a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, said in an interview that while he could not speak specifically about what occurred between Tate and Abrams, an "attorney encouraging a witness to withhold information from a grand jury when the witness had no right to withhold is engaging in obstructive behavior."

Richman further noted that since current case law does not recognize the reporter-source privilege, "even if someone under investigation or their attorney were to contact a reporter simply to say that they expect that reporter's promise of confidentiality to the source to be kept, anyone who made such a request could possibly have engaged in an obstruction of justice or witness-tampering."

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based journalist. His previous articles, focusing on Rove's role in the case and Libby's grand jury testimony, also appeared on NationalJournal.com

No Final Report Seen in Inquiry on C.I.A. Leak - New York Times

By DAVID JOHNSTON and RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - The special counsel in the C.I.A. leak case has told associates he has no plans to issue a final report about the results of the investigation, heightening the expectation that he intends to bring indictments, lawyers in the case and law enforcement officials said yesterday.

The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is not expected to take any action in the case this week, government officials said. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, Randall Samborn, declined to comment.

A final report had long been considered an option for Mr. Fitzgerald if he decided not to accuse anyone of wrongdoing, although Justice Department officials have been dubious about his legal authority to issue such a report.

By signaling that he had no plans to issue the grand jury's findings in such detail, Mr. Fitzgerald appeared to narrow his options either to indictments or closing his investigation with no public disclosure of his findings, a choice that would set off a political firestorm.

With the term of the grand jury expiring Oct. 28, lawyers in the case said they assumed Mr. Fitzgerald was in the final stages of his inquiry.

The focus of Mr. Fitzgerald's inquiry has remained fixed on two senior White House aides, Karl Rove, who is President Bush's senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., who is Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Both had conversations with reporters about a C.I.A. officer whose name was later publicly disclosed.

It is not clear whether Mr. Fitzgerald has learned who first identified the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, to the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak in July 2003.

Some of the lawyers in the case say Mr. Fitzgerald seems to be wrestling with decisions about how to proceed, leaning toward indictments but continuing to weigh thousands of pages of documents and testimony he has compiled during the nearly two-year inquiry.

In recent days, Mr. Fitzgerald has repeatedly told lawyers in the case that he has not made up his mind about criminal charges.

Mr. Fitzgerald has been investigating whether administration officials deliberately disclosed Ms. Wilson's identity - she is also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame - in response to criticism by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, of the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs before the invasion.

Some lawyers in the case had expressed hope that a final report would provide Mr. Fitzgerald with a vehicle to disclose his investigative findings even if he absolved everyone of wrongdoing. Democrats in Congress had also expressed a desire for such a report, apparently hoping it would offer fresh details about the administration's actions.

Any decision will be announced in Washington and not in Chicago, where Mr. Fitzgerald is the United States attorney, Justice Department officials said.

In his daily news briefing, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that a successful completion to the inquiry would be one in which Mr. Fitzgerald would "determine the facts and then outline those facts for the American people."

Asked if that meant the White House would favor a public report if there were no indictments, Mr. McClellan said that the decision was Mr. Fitzgerald's, but that "we would all like to know what the facts are."

Such a report could not only show where evidence failed to result in criminal charges, but also make recommendations for changes in law, disciplinary actions or criticize the conduct of public officials whose actions did not rise to the level of criminal behavior.

Given the political ramifications attached to Mr. Fitzgerald's decisions, officials at the White House have begun discussing what would happen if Mr. Rove was indicted.

Among the names being discussed to take some of Mr. Rove's responsibilities should he have to step aside, an outside adviser to the White House said, are Dan Bartlett, currently Mr. Bush's counselor; Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee; and Robert M. Kimmitt, the deputy Treasury secretary.

Under Justice Department regulations, it is not clear whether Mr. Fitzgerald has the authority to issue a final report, even if he wanted to, although he has operated under a broad delegation of authority, issued in a pair of letters by James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general. Those directives gave Mr. Fitzgerald virtually the same power as the attorney general to conduct criminal inquiries.

But even the attorney general is restricted in what information he can release publicly or present to Congress when it has been obtained, as Mr. Fitzgerald has gathered it, through extensive use of a grand jury, whose proceedings are secret. Even so, some lawyers have argued that Mr. Fitzgerald could issue such a report and have said there is general authority to report his findings if they are requested by Congress.

Without a report, it seems likely that questions about the case may remain unanswered and that a complete account of the administration's activities may never be known, including the details of testimony by the scores of administration officials who were interviewed in the inquiry.

The likelihood that crucial details might be kept secret would be increased if Mr. Fitzgerald brought charges that were narrowly focused on perjury, false statement or obstruction of justice counts involving misstatements by officials in their testimony. But he has also examined broader potential violations, among them whether there was an illegal effort, directed by senior officials, to disclose Ms. Wilson's identity.

Officials who testified or were questioned by investigators also included John Hannah, Mr. Cheney's principal deputy national security adviser.