PlameGame

Libby Wasn't Ordered to Leak Name, Papers Say

2006-04-13T10:50:00.000-04:00

In grand jury testimony two years ago, former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby did not assert that President Bush or Vice President Cheney instructed him to disclose the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters as part of an effort to rebut criticism of the Iraq war, Libby's lawyers said in a court filing late yesterday.

A court filing last week by the special federal prosecutor investigating the disclosure of Plame's identity had highlighted the fact that Bush and Cheney ordered Libby to disclose details of a previously classified intelligence report as part of an effort to rebut criticism by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. This disclosure provoked speculation that Bush or Cheney had instructed Libby to disclose Plame's identity.

But the lawyers asserted that White House documents outlining what Libby was to say in conversations with reporters did not mention Plame's name. They said this supports Libby's contention that he did not participate in a campaign to damage Wilson by disclosing Plame's CIA employment or in a coverup of the episode.

The statement that Libby did not link Bush and Cheney to the disclosure of Plame's name during his 2004 grand jury testimony is meant to bolster Libby's contention that no conspiracy existed to make selective disclosures to undermine a key administration critic, as some in Washington have charged.

Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, was indicted last year for allegedly lying to the FBI and a grand jury when he said he had not known, that the CIA employed Plame and had not told reporters that. Wilson had traveled to Niger at the CIA's behest to look into allegations that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear weapons materials there.

After Wilson's return, he wrote a newspaper article in July 2003 disputing those claims and accusing the administration of twisting intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

The article set off an intense effort by the Bush administration to rebut the criticism by documenting its anxieties about Iraqi intentions, partly by leaking -- at the instruction of Bush and Cheney -- details from a classified, October 2002 intelligence estimate about Iraq.

Libby was a key player in the effort, and met privately with a few reporters who later were subpoenaed by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was assigned in December 2003 with finding out who leaked Plame's name. Several of the reporters told Fitzgerald that Libby not only discussed the intelligence estimate but also mentioned Plame's employment.

According to the indictment, Libby told several reporters that Wilson's trip was requested by Plame. Fitzgerald, in his court filing last week, said the motive for leaking this information was to undermine Wilson's credibility by making it seem as if he "received the assignment [to visit Niger] on account of nepotism."

Libby's court filing yesterday was the latest salvo in his battle to gain access to a wide range of information held by the administration and by government investigators about Wilson's trip to Niger, and about other officials' statements to reporters regarding Wilson and Plame.

Libby has said he needs these documents partly to prepare for expected testimony at his trial by current and former senior administration officials, who Libby says were also aware of Plame's employment. Yesterday's filing also noted Libby's suspicion that one of those, former CIA director George J. Tenet -- who directed the agency when it lodged a formal complaint to the Justice Department over the leak of Plame's name -- had a "bias against Mr. Libby." The suspicion appears to stem in part from past disagreements between the CIA and Cheney's office over the credibility of the White House's alarm about Iraq.

Libby has said the documents will show that Plame's employment was a peripheral matter in his conversations with others, and that thus he had good reason to forget precisely what he said to reporters about it. "He testified to the grand jury unequivocally that he did not understand Ms. Wilson's employment by the CIA to be classified information," the new court filing states.

Libby's legal team complained that he had received less than 10 percent of Fitzgerald's investigative file, a document production it called "exceptionally meager." It also said the case is complex and described as "a fairy tale" the government's assertion that it involves only false statements by Libby.

In his April 5 filing, Fitzgerald urged the court to dismiss Libby's demand for information about leaks to reporters by other government officials, on the grounds that what really counts in the case against Libby are the actions taken by him and "the discrete number of persons with and for whom he worked." Anything occurring outside those White House offices, Fitzgerald said, is "a irrelevant distraction from the issues of the case."

Although he pointedly said he was not accusing Libby of involvement in a White House conspiracy against Wilson and Plame, Fitzgerald said the evidence he had accumulated demonstrated that "multiple people" there wanted to repudiate Wilson's criticisms.

In light of the grand jury testimony, Fitzgerald said, "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

Prosecutor in CIA Leak Case Corrects Part of Court Filing

2006-04-12T00:32:00.000-04:00

The federal prosecutor overseeing the indictment of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, yesterday corrected an assertion in an earlier court filing that Libby had misrepresented the significance placed by the CIA on allegations that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger.

Last week, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald wrote that, in conversation with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Libby described the uranium story as a "key judgment" of the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a term of art indicating there was consensus within the intelligence community on that issue. In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments and was listed further back in the 96-page, classified document.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, Fitzgerald wrote yesterday that he wanted to "correct" the sentence that dealt with the issue in a filing he submitted last Wednesday. That sentence said Libby "was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Instead, the sentence should have conveyed that Libby was to tell Miller some of the key judgments of the NIE "and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Libby is not charged with misportraying or leaking classified information. He was indicted last year for allegedly lying to the FBI and a grand jury about what he said to reporters. The indictment came as part of Fitzgerald's investigation into who leaked to the media the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose husband became a public critic of the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war

With One Filing, Prosecutor Puts Bush in Spotlight - New York Times

2006-04-11T11:46:00.000-04:00

By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, April 10 — From the early days of the C.I.A. leak investigation in 2003, the Bush White House has insisted there was no effort to discredit Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man who emerged as the most damaging critic of the administration's case that Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons.

But now White House officials, and specifically President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, have been pitched back into the center of the nearly three-year controversy, this time because of a prosecutor's court filing in the case that asserts there was "a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House," to undermine Mr. Wilson.

The new assertions by the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, have put administration officials on the spot in a way they have not been for months, as attention in the leak case seems to be shifting away from the White House to the pretrial procedural skirmishing in the perjury and obstruction charges against Mr. Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr.

Mr. Fitzgerald's filing talks not of an effort to level with Americans but of "a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson." It concludes, "It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish Wilson.' "

With more filings expected from Mr. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor's work has the potential to keep the focus on Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney at a time when the president is struggling with his lowest approval ratings since he took office.

Even on Monday, Mr. Bush found himself in an uncomfortable spot during an appearance at a Johns Hopkins University campus in Washington, when a student asked him to address Mr. Fitzgerald's assertion that the White House was seeking to retaliate against Mr. Wilson.

Mr. Bush stumbled as he began his response before settling on an answer that sidestepped the question. He said he had ordered the formal declassification of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in July 2003 because "it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches" about Iraq's efforts to reconstitute its weapons program.

Mr. Bush said nothing about the earlier, informal authorization that Mr. Fitzgerald's court filing revealed. The prosecutor described testimony from Mr. Libby, who said Mr. Bush had told Mr. Cheney that it was permissible to reveal some information from the intelligence estimate, which described Mr. Hussein's efforts to acquire uranium.

But on Monday, Mr. Bush was not talking about that. "You're just going to have to let Mr. Fitzgerald complete his case, and I hope you understand that," Mr. Bush said. "It's a serious legal matter that we've got to be careful in making public statements about it."

Every prosecutor strives not just to prove a case, but also to tell a compelling story. It is now clear that Mr. Fitzgerald's account of what was happening in the White House in the summer of 2003 is very different from the Bush administration's narrative, which suggested that Mr. Wilson was seen as a minor figure whose criticisms could be answered by disclosing the underlying intelligence upon which Mr. Bush relied.

It turned out that much of the information about Mr. Hussein's search for uranium was questionable at best, and that it became the subject of dispute almost as soon as it was included in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

The answer to the question of whose recounting of events is correct — Mr. Bush's or Mr. Fitzgerald's — may not be known for months or years, if ever. But it seems there will be more clues, including some about the conversations between Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Fitzgerald said he was preparing to turn over to Mr. Libby 1,400 pages of handwritten notes — some presumably in Mr. Libby's own hand — that could shed light on two very different efforts at getting out the White House story.

One effort — the July 18 declassification of the major conclusions of the intelligence estimate — was taking place in public, while another, Mr. Fitzgerald argues, was happening in secret, with only Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby involved.

Last week's court filing has already led the White House to acknowledge, over the weekend, that Mr. Bush ordered the selective disclosure of parts of the intelligence estimate sometime in late June or early July. But administration officials insist that Mr. Bush played a somewhat passive role and did so without selecting Mr. Libby, or anyone else, to tell the story piecemeal to a small number of reporters.

But in one of those odd twists in the unpredictable world of news leaks, neither of the reporters Mr. Libby met, Bob Woodward of The Washington Post or Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, reported a word of it under their own bylines. In fact, other reporters working on the story were talking to senior officials who were warning that the uranium information in the intelligence estimate was dubious at best.

Mr. Fitzgerald did not identify who took part in the White House effort to argue otherwise, but the evidence he has cited so far shows that Mr. Cheney's office was the epicenter of concern about Mr. Wilson, the former ambassador sent to Niger by the C.I.A. to determine what deal, if any, Mr. Hussein had struck there.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald concluded, the former ambassador had become an irritant to the administration, raising doubts about the truthfulness of assertions — made publicly by Mr. Bush in his State of the Union address in January of that year — that Iraq might have sought uranium in Africa to further its nuclear ambitions.

Mr. Wilson's criticisms culminated in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed article in The Times in which he voiced the same doubts for the first time on the record. He cited as his evidence his 2002 trip to Niger, instigated, he said, because of questions raised by Mr. Cheney's office.

Mr. Wilson's article, Mr. Fitzgerald said in the filing, "was viewed in the Office of the Vice President as a direct attack on the credibility of the vice president (and the president) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq."

Mr. Fitzgerald suggested that the White House effort was a "plan" to undermine Mr. Wilson.

"Disclosing the belief that Mr. Wilson's wife sent him on the Niger trip was one way for defendant to contradict the assertion that the vice president had done so, while at the same time undercutting Mr. Wilson's credibility if Mr. Wilson were perceived to have received the assignment on account of nepotism," Mr. Fitzgerald's filing said.

Libby case damages Bush administration

2006-04-10T09:30:00.000-04:00

By Caroline Danielin Washington
Published: April 10 2006 03:00 | Last updated: April 10 2006 03:00

Usually historians wait decades to get the inside accounts of what happens at the heart of the US government, but the legal skirmishes between lawyers representing Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice-president's former chief-of-staff, and Patrick Fitzgerald, special prosecutor, are proving unusually revealing and damaging to the administration.

Last week, attention focused on a claim in one of the legal filings that President George W. Bush had authorised Mr Libby to leak parts of the national intelligence estimates (NIE), to build the case for war in Iraq. Although Mr Bush has the legal power to declassify documents, the revelation made his own assault on leaks look like hypocrisy.

The issue shows no sign of going away, with one prominent Republican, Senator Arlen Specter, yesterday calling on Mr Bush and Dick Cheney, vice-president, to "tell the American people exactly what happened".

Mr Fitzgerald's legal response on Thursday to Mr Libby's effort to obtain thousands of government documents also provided further evidence of the internecine battles within the administration and confirmed there was a wider White House effort to discredit Joe Wilson, the diplomat who investigated whether Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger.

Mr Libby has been charged with obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements to federal investigators in connection with the inquiry into the leaking of information about Valerie Plame, a CIA agent and Mr Wilson's wife. Mr Libby's lawyers have sought to broaden the case to suggest that the leaking of Ms Plame's name was a "peripheral issue" in the context of the broader debate about the Iraq war.

On several occasions the filing confirms that other administration officials remain under scrutiny. Although Mr Fitzgerald said he did not intend to call Karl Rove, Mr Bush's chief political strategist, to give testimony in Mr Libby's trial, he remains under investigation alongside other aides.

Combating Mr Libby's demand for documents that he claimed prove he was not part of a wider White House effort, Mr Fitzgerald notes: "As a practical matter, there are no documents showing the absence of a plot, and it is unclear how any document custodian would set out to find documents showing an 'absence of a plot'."

The filing also exposes the secretive world inside the administration, with the vice-president's office keeping secrets from Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser.

One surreal appendix refers to Mr Libby's leaking of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. "[The] defendant fails to mention that he consciously decided not to make Mr Hadley aware of the fact that the defendant himself had already been disseminating the NIE by leaking it to reporters while Mr Hadley sought to get it formally declassified."

Disagreements between the vice-president's office and the State Department are also echoed in the filing. Mr Libby's lawyers suggest that testimony from Marc Grossman, former undersecretary, may be biased by "his concern for the institutional interests of the State Department".

Senator Asks Bush, Cheney for Explanation - Forbes.com

2006-04-09T11:35:00.000-04:00

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should speak publicly about their involvement in the CIA leak case so people can understand what happened, a leading Republican senator said Sunday.

"We ought to get to the bottom of it so it can be evaluated by the American people," said Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In a federal court filing last week, the prosecutor in the case said Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, testified before a grand jury that he was authorized by Bush, through Cheney, to leak information from a classified document that detailed intelligence agencies' conclusions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

A lawyer knowledgeable about the case said Saturday that Bush declassified sensitive intelligence in 2003 and authorized its public disclosure to rebut Iraq war critics, but he did not specifically direct that Libby be the one to disseminate the information.

"I think it is necessary for the president and vice president to tell the American people exactly what happened," Specter told "Fox News Sunday."

"There's been enough of a showing that the president of the United States owes a specific explanation to the American people ... about exactly what he did," Specter said.

Libby faces trial, likely in January, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to the grand jury and investigators about what he told reporters about CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald did not say in the filing that Cheney authorized Libby to leak Plame's identity, and Bush is not accused of doing anything illegal.

The investigation is looking into whether Plame's identify was disclosed to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an Iraq war critic. Wilson had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Wilson said Sunday that Bush and Cheney should release transcripts of their interviews with Fitzgerald.

"It seems to me that first and foremost, the White House needs to come clean on this matter," Wilson said on ABC's "This Week." "My own view of this is that the White House owes the American people and particularly our service people who have been sent into war, an apology for having misrepresented the facts."

The lawyer knowledgeable about the case said Bush instructed Cheney to "get it out" and left the details about disseminating the intelligence to him. The lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case for the White House, said Cheney chose Libby and communicated the president's wishes to his then-top aide.

It is not known when the conversation between Bush and Cheney took place. The White House has declined to provide the date when the president used his authority to declassify the portions of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

"There has to be a detailed explanation as to precisely what Vice President Cheney did, what the president said to him and an explanation by the president as to what he said," Specter said.

Disclosures Are Called Unrelated To Plame Case

2006-04-08T09:18:00.000-04:00

The revelation of former White House official I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's involvement in authorized disclosures of sensitive intelligence information does not undermine Libby's contention that he innocently forgot about conversations he may have had with reporters regarding covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, Libby's attorney said yesterday.

The lawyer, William Jeffress, was responding to allegations by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald in a court filing Wednesday that President Bush authorized Libby to disclose classified intelligence information on Iraq to a reporter. That was done, Fitzgerald alleged, because an angry White House was seeking to discredit Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who claimed in a July 2003 newspaper article that the administration had deliberately distorted intelligence about Iraq.

Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, was indicted last October on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to a grand jury and investigators about his conversations with reporters that mentioned Plame's name. Jeffress argued that the information in Fitzgerald's filing is irrelevant to Libby's defense: that he forgot about those conversations as he dealt with crucial national security issues.

Jeffress said Fitzgerald's revelation about Libby's disclosure of information from a CIA National Intelligence Estimate "is a complete sidelight" to his accusation that Libby deliberately lied. "It's got nothing to do with Wilson's wife," Jeffress said in a brief interview, adding that Libby continues to expect to be exonerated at trial.

Fitzgerald said in Wednesday's court papers that Libby secretly divulged sensitive information to reporters drawn from the previously classified NIE about Iraq -- and that Cheney told him Bush had declassified the information and authorized the effort.

Fitzgerald's filing was meant specifically to undermine Libby's claim that the issue of the CIA's employment of Plame was of "peripheral" interest to Libby at the time. He said in the filing that leaks regarding Plame were meant to embarrass Wilson by suggesting his wife had organized a CIA-sponsored trip by Wilson to probe Iraq's alleged purchase of nuclear material -- in short, to suggest his trip resulted from nepotism.

Fitzgerald argued, in essence, that the White House effort to rebut Wilson's criticism was so intense, and so preoccupying, that Libby could not have forgotten what he said about Plame. Fitzgerald also noted that Plame's employment was specifically raised as a relevant matter by Cheney, who had directed Libby to disclose information from the NIE.

Lawyers who have been closely following the case offered contrasting views of the impact Fitzgerald's allegations would have on Libby's defense.

Republican lawyer and former federal prosecutor Joseph E. diGenova said "it is not material in any way to what he charged, which is perjury." But Richard A. Sauber, a lawyer who represents Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, one of the reporters who wrote about Plame after talking to Libby, said "the whole thing undercuts Libby's defense that he was too busy on other things" to recall the Plame matter.

"You cannot say that it is unimportant and something you forgot" when the president and vice president were directly involved in a related issue, Sauber said.

The filing also posed challenges yesterday for White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who struggled to reconcile conflicting statements he made about whether and when the government had declassified the sensitive intelligence information at issue.

According to Fitzgerald, Libby testified before a grand jury that President Bush and Cheney authorized the release of that information shortly before Libby's meeting with New York Times reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003. The information was drawn from the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the CIA about Iraq's interest in weapons of mass destruction.

But 10 days later, McClellan told reporters at the White House that the estimate had been "officially declassified today" -- July 18, 2003 -- making no mention of the earlier declassification that Libby described in his sworn testimony. If that statement was correct, reporters pointed out, then the material was still classified at the time Libby disclosed it.

McClellan yesterday declined to give a detailed explanation for the contradiction, explaining that the White House never comments on pending investigations. But he also tried to clarify his 2003 remarks to reporters, stating that what he meant on July 18 of that year when he said the material had been declassified that day was that it was "officially released" that day.

"I think that's what I was referring to at the time," he said.

McClellan said he would not comment directly on the report that Bush declassified intelligence data to rebut a war critic, but he insisted the president has the constitutional right to do so. He also said the White House draws a distinction between leaking classified information that jeopardizes U.S. sources, methods and lives and disclosing sensitive information "when it is in the public interest."

One former administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing political strategy, said rebutting Wilson and other critics was an obsession of Cheney, Libby and many others then inside the Bush White House. Other officials said there were frequent discussions about declassifying information to buttress the Bush argument for war. In several cases, this resulted in release of such information, but only after it went through the usual declassification process.

The declassification divulged by Fitzgerald was unusual, the prosecutor said. Libby testified that he understood that only three officials -- Bush, Cheney and Libby -- knew about it. No one outside the White House was consulted.

Libby also leaked information from the National Intelligence Estimate to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post prior to the date that the White House said it was officially declassified. In sworn testimony, Woodward told Fitzgerald that on June 27, 2003 -- 11 days before the Libby-Miller conversation -- Libby told him about the CIA estimate and an Iraqi effort to obtain "yellowcake" uranium in Africa, according to a statement Woodward released on Nov. 14, 2005.

In an interview, Woodward said his notes, which were not released publicly but were shown to Fitzgerald, included Libby using the word "vigorous" to describe the Iraqi effort. Libby used similar language when he provided the NIE information Bush declassified to Miller at their July 8, 2003, meeting, according to Fitzgerald's filing.

The precise status of the information at the time Libby provided it to Woodward is unclear because of conflicting accounts of the declassification process provided by Libby and McClellan. Fitzgerald's court filing does not provide the date when Bush and Cheney -- who have both been interviewed by the special prosecutor -- said they authorized Libby's disclosures.

Experts: Tactic Would Be Legal but Unusual

2006-04-07T14:22:00.000-04:00

By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 7, 2006; A08

Legal experts say that President Bush had the unquestionable authority to approve the disclosure of secret CIA information to reporters, but they add that the leak was highly unusual and amounted to using sensitive intelligence data for political gain.

"It is a question of whether the classified National Intelligence Estimate was used for domestic political purposes," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a Washington lawyer who formerly served as general counsel for the CIA.

In court papers filed Wednesday, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald said I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, has testified that Cheney told him that Bush had authorized the leak of secret information from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in the summer of 2003. Fitzgerald's court filing portrays the leak as part of an effort to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who contended in a newspaper column that intelligence about Iraq's nuclear weapons program was distorted in the run-up to the U.S. invasion.

The court filing says that Libby, who is fighting perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges in connection with the leak investigation, was concerned about the legality of sharing classified information with reporters. But he was assured by David S. Addington, who then served as counsel to Cheney, that presidential authorization to disclose the information amounted to declassification.

Experts said the power to classify and declassify documents in the federal government flows from the president and is often delegated down the chain of command. In March 2003, Bush signed an executive order delegating declassification authority to Cheney.

Libby understood that only he, Bush and Cheney knew of the declassification when Libby held his first conversation with a reporter in July 2003, the court papers show.

In one telling footnote in the filing, Fitzgerald notes that even after Bush authorized the dissemination of the intelligence data, then-White House deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley was "active in discussions about the need to declassify and disseminate" the information.

"There is an institutional interest and ultimately a public interest in having these decisions documented," said Ronald D. Lee, a Washington lawyer and former general counsel to the super-secret National Security Agency. "You can't have a government where everything is sort of done in people's heads."

Wave of Criticism Engulfs Bush Over Leak Case - April 7, 2006 - The New York Sun - NY News

2006-04-07T10:11:00.000-04:00

BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 7, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/30575

The claim that President Bush authorized the release to a reporter of portions of a highly sensitive intelligence summary on Iraq triggered a wave of criticism yesterday from Democrats, who accused Mr. Bush of hypocrisy for publicly denouncing leaks of classified information despite his own alleged involvement in selectively disclosing pre-war intelligence.

In a court filing first reported yesterday on the Web site of The New York Sun, a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, said the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, told a grand jury that in July 2003 Mr. Cheney advised that Mr. Bush had given permission for the disclosure to a New York Times reporter of findings from a national intelligence estimate about Iraq.

Mr. Fitzgerald's inquiry focused, at least initially, on allegations that White House officials retaliated against a former ambassador critical of the administration, Joseph Wilson, by telling reporters that Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA and played a role in sending him on an official Iraq-related fact-finding trip to Africa.

According to prosecutors, Ms. Plame's status at the CIA was classified and her exposure could have violated the law.

The new prosecution brief does not suggest that Messrs. Bush or Cheney instructed anyone to disclose Ms. Plame's name, and no one has been charged criminally for that leak. However, the filing made clear that the actions of the president and vice president are likely to be key issues at the trial of Mr. Libby, who resigned last year after being indicted on charges he obstructed Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation.

Prosecutors contend Mr. Libby disclosed Ms. Plame's identity to Judith Miller of the New York Times at the same July 8, 2003, meeting that Mr. Libby said he passed on the Iraq-related intelligence Mr. Bush is said to have approved releasing.

Mr. Cheney told Fox News earlier this year that he "may well be called as a witness" at the trial of Mr. Libby, set for January 2007.

Legal analysts said yesterday that the new information makes it more likely that either the defense or the prosecution could seek Mr. Bush's testimony for the trial.

Such a request could lead to a high profile legal showdown between the judiciary and the executive branch at about the same time as the midterm election this fall.

Even if Mr. Bush is not called, one defense strategy for Mr. Libby could be to argue that any inaccurate statements he made to investigators were the result of faulty memory brought on by the exhaustive efforts he was making at the time to carry out a presidentially directed campaign to rebut Mr. Wilson's criticism. That approach could also draw Mr. Bush further into the case.

As he returned to Washington from an appearance in Charlotte, N.C., yesterday, the president did not respond to a reporter's shouted question about the new reports of his role in Mr. Libby's contacts with the press.

White House officials also turned aside questions about the matter, declining to comment due to the ongoing investigation.

At a previously scheduled oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, two Democratic congressmen from New York, Jerrold Nadler and Anthony Weiner, interrogated Attorney General Gonzales about Mr. Bush's authority to order the release of classified information.

"Is the president covered under the same law that you and I are?" Mr.Weiner asked.

"No, he's not," Mr. Gonzales replied. "I think the president has the inherent authority to decide who, in fact, should have classified information. And if the president decided that a person needed the information, that he could have that information shared."

"Can he do it for political reasons?" Mr. Nadler asked.

"The president has the constitutional authority to make the decision as to what is in the national interest of the country," Mr. Gonzales answered.

Mr. Weiner said the defense reminded him of President Nixon's explanations of his conduct during Watergate. "Your answer seems to be when the president does it, that means it is not illegal. That is exactly what President Richard Nixon said," the congressman said.

A Republican lawmaker from California, Darrell Issa, said the comparison was unfair because Mr. Bush and his staff have cooperated with Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation. "That sort of leadership is very non-Nixonian," Mr. Issa said.

Senator Schumer told reporters he was directing a series of pointed questions about the episode to the White House, although he acknowledged he has no way of compelling Mr. Bush to answer them.

"This administration has been very, very strong against leaks. Now, if the president leaked, for whatever purpose, we ought to know that and then we ought to know what distinguishes his leaking information from all the others who leaked information and were condemned by the president," Mr. Schumer said at a press conference on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Bush's Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Senator Kerry, also entered the fray, scheduling a series of interviews to denounce Mr. Bush's alleged involvement in the intelligence disclosure to Ms. Miller.

"He said he'd fire whoever leaked classified information, and now we know the President himself authorized it," Mr. Kerry said in a written statement.

"Now we know that the president's search for the leaker needs to go no further than a mirror," he said.

A Republican attorney and former prosecutor, Joseph DiGenova, blasted Democrats and the press for describing Mr. Bush's alleged actions as an instruction to "leak."

"This was not a leak. This was an authorized disclosure," the ex-prosecutor said.

Mr. DiGenova said the fact that Mr. Fitzgerald has not brought any charge in connection with the release of the intelligence estimate shows Mr. Bush and his subordinates acted legally.

"If Pat Fitzgerald, a guy who gloms onto every illegal and unethical thing he can, thought he could sink his teeth into this, he would have," Mr. DiGenova said.

Still, the former prosecutor said the White House made a "tactical error" by providing the information to Ms. Miller at a hotel.

"I never understood why they didn't bring the best possible person to the podium at the White House and just rip Joe Wilson to shreds," Mr. DiGenova said.

An attorney for Mr. Wilson, Christopher Wolf, said his client was "quite distressed" to hear of Mr. Bush's alleged role.

"It certainly sounds like there was collaboration within the White House on the leaking of Valerie Wilson's identity," Mr. Wolf said.

Whatever the ethics or the legality of the alleged intervention by Messrs. Bush, Cheney, and Libby to rebut Mr. Wilson by planting intelligence findings in the press, the effort seems to have been wildly unsuccessful.

Ms. Miller, the hand-picked recipient of the intelligence data, did not write a story about the information Mr. Libby provided. Nor did she ever write about Mr. Libby's alleged disclosure that Ms. Plame worked at the CIA, a fact that emerged six days later in a syndicated column by Robert Novak.

Ms. Miller did not return a call seeking comment on the episode.

Ten days after Mr. Libby relayed the intelligence conclusions to Ms. Plame, similar information was officially released publicly by the White House, which also conducted a background press briefing on the subject.

Mr. Libby told the grand jury that the intelligence officials involved in the formal declassification of the estimate were entirely unaware that Mr. Bush had already authorized disclosure of parts of the document to Ms. Miller.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Libby Says Bush Authorized Leaks (04/06/2006)

2006-04-06T15:29:00.000-04:00

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, April 6, 2006

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff has testified that President Bush authorized him to disclose the contents of a highly classified intelligence assessment to the media to defend the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq, according to papers filed in federal court on Wednesday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby testified to a federal grand jury that he had received "approval from the President through the Vice President" to divulge portions of a National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to the court papers. Libby was said to have testified that such presidential authorization to disclose classified information was "unique in his recollection," the court papers further said.

Libby also testified that an administration lawyer told him that Bush, by authorizing the disclosure of classified information, had in effect declassified the information. Legal experts disagree on whether the president has the authority to declassify information on his own.

The White House had no immediate reaction to the court filing.

Although not reflected in the court papers, two senior government officials said in interviews with National Journal in recent days that Libby has also asserted that Cheney authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists during the run-up to war with Iraq. In some instances, the information leaked was directly discussed with the Vice President, while in other instances Libby believed he had broad authority to release information that would make the case to go to war.

In yet another instance, Libby had claimed that President Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward for "Plan of Attack," a book written by Woodward about the run-up to the Iraqi war.

Bush and Cheney authorized the release of the information regarding the NIE in the summer of 2003, according to court documents, as part of a damage-control effort undertaken only days after former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV alleged in an op-ed in The New York Times that claims by Bush that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger were most likely a hoax.

According to the court papers, "At some point after the publication of the July 6 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice President Cheney, [Libby's] immediate supervisor, expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA officer at the time, and Cheney, Libby, and other Bush administration officials believed that Wilson's allegations could be discredited if it could be shown that Plame had suggested that her husband be sent on the CIA-sponsored mission to Niger.

Two days after Wilson's op-ed, Libby met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and not only disclosed portions of the NIE, but also Plame's CIA employment and potential role in her husband's trip.

Regarding that meeting, Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized in advance... to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller" because Vice President Cheney believed it to be "very important" to do so, the court papers filed Wednesday said. The New York Sun reported the court filing on its Web site early Thursday.

Libby "further testified that he at first advised the Vice President that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller because of the classified nature of the NIE," the court papers said. Libby "testified that the Vice President had advised [Libby] that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose relevant portions of the NIE."

Additionally, Libby "testified that he also spoke to David Addington, then counsel to the Vice President, whom [Libby] considered to be an expert in national security law, and Mr. Addington opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document."

Addington succeeded Libby as Cheney's chief of staff after Libby was indicted by a federal grand jury on Oct. 28, 2005 on five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice in attempting to conceal his role in outing Plame as an undercover CIA operative.

Four days after the meeting with Miller, on July 12, 2003, Libby spoke again to Miller, and also for the first time with Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper, during which Libby spoke to both journalists about Plame's CIA employment and her possible role in sending her husband to Niger.

Regarding those conversations, Libby understood that the Vice President specifically selected him to "speak to the press in place of Cathie Martin (then the communications person for the Vice President) regarding the NIE and Wilson," the court papers said. Libby also testified, Fitzgerald asserted in the court papers, that "at the time of his conversations with Miller and Cooper, he understood that only three people -- the President, the Vice President and [Libby] -- knew that the key judgments of the NIE had been declassified.

"[Libby] testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials-including Cabinet level officials-were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson's trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003." It is unclear from the court papers what the January 24, 2003 document might be.

During those very same conversations with the press that day Libby "discussed Ms. Wilson's CIA employment with both Matthew Cooper (for the first time) and Judith Miller (for the third time)," the court papers further said.

Although the special prosecutor's grand jury investigation has not uncovered any evidence that the Vice President encouraged Libby to release information about Plame's covert CIA status, the court papers said that Cheney had "expressed concerns to [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

Cheney told investigators that he had learned of Plame's employment by the CIA and her potential role in her husband being sent to Niger by then-CIA director George Tenet, according to people familiar with Cheney's interviews with the special prosecutor.

Tenet has told investigators that he had no specific recollection of discussing Plame or her role in her husband's trip with Cheney, according to people with familiar with his statement to investigators.

Two senior government officials said that Tenet did recall, however, that he made inquiries regarding the veracity of the Niger intelligence information as a result of inquires from both Cheney and Libby. As a result of those inquiries, Tenet then had the CIA conduct a new review of its Niger intelligence, and concluded that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had in fact attempted to purchase uranium from Niger or other African nations. Tenet and other CIA officials then informed Cheney, other administration officials, and the congressional intelligence committees of the new findings, the sources said.

Six days after Libby's conversation with Cooper and Miller regarding Plame, on July 18, 2003, the Bush administration formally declassified portions of the NIE on Iraqi weapons programs in an effort to further blunt the damage of Wilson's allegations that the Bush administration misused the faulty Niger intelligence information to make the case to go to war. It is unclear whether the information that Bush and Cheney were said to authorize Libby to disclose was the same information that was formally declassified.

One former senior government official said that both the president and Cheney, in directing Libby to disclose classified information to defend the administration's case to go to war with Iraq and in formally declassifying portions of the NIE later, were misusing the classification process for political reasons.

The official said that while the administration declassified portions of the NIE that would appear exculpatory to the White House, it insisted that a one-page summary of the NIE which would have suggested that the President mischaracterized other intelligence information to go to war remain classified.

As National Journal recently disclosed, the one-page summary of the NIE told Bush that although "most agencies judge" that an Iraqi procurement of aluminum tubes was "related to a uranium enrichment effort", the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Despite receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

The former senior official said in an interview that he believed that the attempt to conceal the contents of the one-page summary were intertwined with the efforts to declassify portions of the NIE and to leak information to the media regarding Plame: "It was part and parcel of the same effort, but people don't see it in that context yet."

Although the court papers filed Wednesday revealed that Libby had testified that Bush and Cheney had authorized him to disclose details of the NIE, two other senior government officials said in interviews that Libby had asserted that Cheney had more broadly authorized him to leak classified information to a number of journalists during the run-up to war with Iraq as part of an administration effort to make the case to go to war.

In another instance, Libby had claimed that Bush authorized Libby to speak to and provide classified information to Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward for "Plan of Attack."

Other former senior government officials said that Bush directed people to assist Woodward in the book's preparation: "There were people on the Seventh Floor [of the CIA] who were told by Tenet to cooperate because the President wanted it done. There were calls to people to by [White House communication director] Dan Bartlett that the President wanted it done, if you were not co-operating. And sometimes the President himself told people that they should co-operate," said one former government official.

It is unclear whether Libby will argue during his upcoming trial that these other authorizations by both the President and Vice President show that he did not engage in misconduct by disclosing Plame's CIA status to reporters, or that he considered these other authorizations giving him broad authority to make other disclosures.

Fitzgerald has apparently avoided questioning Libby, other government officials, and journalists about other potential leaks of classified information to the media, according to attorneys who have represented witnesses to the special prosecutor's probe. Outside legal experts said this might be due to the fact that other authorized leaks might aid Libby's defense, and because Fitzgerald did not want to question reporters about other contacts with Libby because of First Amendment concerns.

In a Feb. 17, 2006 letter to John D. Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., wrote that he believed that disclosures in Woodward's book damaged national security. "According to [Woodward's} account, he was provided information related to sources and methods, extremely sensitive covert actions, and foreign intelligence liaison services."

Woodward's book contains, for example, a detailed account of a January 25, 2003 briefing that Libby provided to senior White House staff to make the case that Saddam Hussein had aggressive programs underway to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

Two former government officials said in interviews that the account provided sensitive intelligence information that had not been cleared for release. The book referred to intercepts by the National Security Agency of Iraqi officials that purportedly showed that Iraq was engaging in weapons of mass destruction program.

Much of the information presented by Libby at the senior White House staff meeting was later discarded by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and then-CIA Director George Tenet as unreliable, and would not have either otherwise been made public.

One former senior official said: "They [the leakers] might have tipped people to our eavesdropping capacities, and other serious sources and methods issues. But to what end? The information was never presented to the public because it was bunk in the first place."

In the letter to Negroponte, Sen. Rockefeller complained: "I [previously] wrote both former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet and Acting DCI John McLaughlin seeking to determine what steps were being taken to address the appalling disclosures in [Woodward's book]. The only response that I received was to indicate that the leaks had been authorized by the Administration."

Bush Authorized Leak to Times, Libby Told Grand Jury - April 6, 2006 - The New York Sun - NY News

2006-04-06T15:28:00.000-04:00

New York Sun Web Exclusive

By JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 6, 2006 updated 9:02 am EDT

A former White House aide under indictment for obstructing a leak probe, I. Lewis Libby, testified to a grand jury that he gave information from a closely-guarded "National Intelligence Estimate" on Iraq to a New York Times reporter in 2003 with the specific permission of President Bush, according to a new court filing from the special prosecutor in the case.

The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule. However, the new disclosure could be awkward for the president because it places him, for the first time, directly in a chain of events that led to a meeting where prosecutors contend the identity of a CIA employee, Valerie Plame, was provided to a reporter.

Mr. Fitzgerald's inquiry initially focused on the alleged leak, which occurred after a former ambassador who is Ms. Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times questioning the accuracy of statements Mr. Bush made about Iraq's nuclear procurement efforts in Africa.

No criminal charges have been brought for the leak itself, but Mr. Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, was indicted in October on charges that he obstructed the investigation, perjured himself in front of the grand jury, and lied to FBI agents who interviewed him. Mr. Libby, who resigned from the White House and pleaded not guilty, is scheduled to go on trial in January 2007.

In a court filing late Wednesday responding to requests from Mr. Libby's attorneys for government records that might aid his defense, Mr. Fitzgerald shed new light on Mr. Libby's claims that he was authorized to provide sensitive information to the Times reporter, Judith Miller, at a meeting on July 8, 2003.

"Defendant testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion because it was thought that the NIE was Ôpretty definitive' against what Ambassador Wilson had said and that the vice president thought that it was Ôvery important' for the key judgments of the NIE to come out," Mr. Fitzgerald wrote.

Mr. Libby is said to have testified that "at first" he rebuffed Mr. Cheney's suggestion to release the information because the estimate was classified. However, according to the vice presidential aide, Mr. Cheney subsequently said he got permission for the release directly from Mr. Bush. "Defendant testified that the vice president later advised him that the president had authorized defendant to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE," the prosecution filing said.

Mr. Libby told the grand jury that he also sought the advice of the legal counsel to the vice president, David Addington, who indicated that Mr. Bush's permission to disclose the estimate "amounted to a declassification of the document," according to the new court papers.

One of the facts Mr. Libby said he planned to disclose to Ms. Miller was that the estimate, produced in October 2002, concluded that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium." This contention was sharply at odds with Mr. Wilson's op-ed piece which argued there was no evidence of such a procurement effort, at least on a trip he took to Africa at the CIA's request.

Mr. Bush's alleged instruction to release the conclusions of the intelligence estimate appears to have been squarely within his authority and Mr. Fitzgerald makes no argument that it was illegal. While Mr. Libby said he gave that information "exclusively" to the Times reporter at their breakfast meeting at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, many of the findings of the estimate were formally declassified and discussed at a White House press briefing ten days later, on July 18, 2003.

The court papers filed by Mr. Fitzgerald do not make clear whether Mr. Bush knew the disclosure was destined for Ms. Miller, though they indicate Mr. Cheney knew that fact. Mr. Libby is also said to have testified that five days late Mr. Cheney authorized the release to the press of information about a cable about Mr. Wilson's strip.

Messrs. Bush and Cheney have been interviewed by Mr. Fitzgerald and his staff, but it is not known how their accounts of the events compared to that of Mr. Libby.

In an interview with Fox News in February, Mr. Cheney, who has a reputation for secrecy, acknowledged that he has sometimes pressed for the official release of classified records.

"I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions," he said.

Asked if he had ever "unilaterally" declassified material, Mr. Cheney replied, "I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president."

While prosecutors initially said Mr. Libby was the first government official to disclose Ms. Plame's identity, it subsequently emerged that a Washington Post reporter, Bob Woodward, learned earlier about her CIA employment from another government official. Neither Mr. Woodward nor Ms. Miller wrote about Ms. Plame at the time. Another journalist, Robert Novak, first disclosed the employment of Mr. Wilson's wife in a syndicated column released on July 14, 2003. The columnist based his story on interviews with Mr. Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, and another official who has not been officially identified.

Prosecutors argued that Mr. Libby covered up his role in the disclosures because "he knew the White House had publicly staked its credibility on there being no White House involvement in the leaking of information about Ms. Wilson." They also noted that Mr. Bush publicly declared he would fire anyone found to have leaked classified information.

The new court filing quotes from handwritten suggestions Mr. Libby gave to the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, urging the spokesman to proclaim the vice presidential aide's innocence with the same vigor that the press secretary previously denounced as "ridiculous" suggestions that Mr. Rove might have had a hand in leaking Ms. Plame's identity.

Mr. Libby's note, as typed up by the prosecution, reads like a stanza of verse:

"People have made too much of the difference in
How I described Karl and Libby
I've talked to Libby.
I said it was ridiculous about Karl
And it is ridiculous about Libby.
Libby was not the source of the Novak story.
And he did not leak classified information."

Mr. McClellan did not adopt the talking points verbatim, but did tell reporters later that Messrs. Rove and Libby "assured me that they were not involved in this."

Mr. Rove has not been charged with a crime, but remains under investigation by Mr. Fitzgerald's office.

Fitzgerald Knew Identity of Leaker From Start

2006-04-03T14:29:00.000-04:00

The special counsel appointed in late December 2003 to investigate the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson found out the identity of the Bush administration official who disclosed her undercover status to syndicated columnist Robert Novak just two months after the probe began.

But in early February 2004, a month after he started the investigation, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald shifted gears and started to build a perjury and obstruction of justice case against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby according to several attorneys close to the investigation.

That month, Justice Department investigators working on the leak case approached a senior official in the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney who had been identified by witnesses as having played a major role in the Plame Wilson leak.

The Bush administration official was given an ultimatum: either cooperate with the special counsel's probe or face criminal charges for his involvement in the leak, attorneys close to the case said.

The senior official decided to cooperate with the investigation and told Fitzgerald that Libby and Rove spoke to reporters about Plame Wilson, the attorneys said.

The official has been identified by attorneys and four current and former White House officials as John Hannah, a senior national security aide on loan to Vice President Dick Cheney from then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton.

Hannah worked with Libby on the issue of weapons of mass destruction as part of an informal team known as the "White House Iraq Group." Hannah told friends last year that he was worried he might be implicated by the investigation, according to a report in the Washington Post.

Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators related to his role in the leak. Hannah was named Cheney's national security adviser the day Libby was indicted.

Hannah's cooperation early on in the leak investigation ultimately helped Fitzgerald and his staff discover the identity of the Bush administration official who leaked information about Plame Wilson's work with the CIA to Novak, these sources said.

The identity of the individual is still unknown. No one in the White House was aware that Hannah was cooperating with the special counsel, the sources said, adding that information Hannah provided to Fitzgerald was instrumental in securing a perjury indictment against Libby. Hannah's attorney did not return numerous calls for comment.

The disclosure of Plame Wilson's identity and CIA status was an attempt by White House officials to discredit Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the administration's pr-war Iraq intelligence.

Wilson wrote an editorial in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, accusing President Bush of knowingly "twisting" Iraq intelligence by citing bogus claims in his January 2003 State of the Union address about Iraq's attempt to acquire yellow-cake uranium from Niger. Wilson revealed that he had personally traveled to Niger a year earlier on behalf of the CIA to check out the uranium allegations and had reported back that it was untrue.

A week after Wilson's editorial was published, Novak printed the identity of Wilson's wife and said she worked at the CIA. He said two White House officials told him the trip was a boondoggle because Plame Wilson had recommended her husband to check out the Niger claims.

Fitzgerald was tapped by the Department of Justice in December 2003 to investigate whether White House officials violated a 1982 federal law making it a felony to knowingly disclose the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

A month or so after obtaining testimony from Hannah and more than a dozen other senior White House officials who may have been involved in the leak, Fitzgerald sent a letter to his boss, then-acting Attorney General James Comey, seeking confirmation that he had the authority to investigate and prosecute individuals for additional crimes that may have been committed during the probe.

Comey responded to Fitzgerald in writing on February 6, 2004, confirming that the special prosecutor had the authority to prosecute "perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses."

It was the conflicting testimony Fitzgerald obtained from I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Karl Rove that prompted Fitzgerald to send a letter to Comey, attorneys and current and former administration officials close to the probe said.

From the moment Fitzgerald received Comey's response, the investigation changed course and moved to an obstruction of justice and perjury probe against Rove and Libby, the sources close to the investigation said.

Rove was questioned by FBI investigators at least five times between October 2003 and February 2004. Libby was questioned by investigators at least twice during that time, according to attorneys familiar with Rove and Libby's interviews with investigators.

Libby and Rove said in interviews with FBI investigators that they found out about Plame Wilson's identity from reporters. Rove testified that he couldn't recall who in the media told him that Plame Wilson worked for the CIA and was married to the former ambassador.

Rove told FBI investigators on five occasions and testified twice before a grand jury that he distributed damaging information about Plame to the Republican National Committee, outside political consultants and the media after Novak had disclosed her identity, according to the attorneys who are familiar with Rove's testimony.

However, Rove was actually a source for Novak and another reporter who wrote about Plame Wilson but failed to disclose that fact in nearly a dozen times he was questioned about his role in the leak.

Sources said that Fitzgerald is now preparing the paperwork to present to a grand jury outlining the charges against Rove in hopes of securing an indictment.

The attorneys close to the case said that in order to build a rock-solid perjury and obstruction case against Libby, Fitzgerald needed to secure the testimony of the journalists Libby spoke to about Plame Wilson.

The investigation surely would have ended in 2004, the attorneys said, but journalists Fitzgerald subpoenaed went to court to fight the subpoena and the legal challenge delayed the case for nearly a year.

In the end, the testimony of Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller - both of whom identified Libby as their source of information on Plame Wilson - convinced the grand jury that Libby lied about his role in the leak.

In the interest of fairness, any person identified in this story who believes he has been portrayed unfairly or that the information about him is untrue will have the opportunity to respond in this space.

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.

Libby Says Prosecutor Trying to Keep Post

2006-03-31T22:18:00.000-05:00

By PETE YOST
The Associated Press
Friday, March 31, 2006; 7:47 PM

WASHINGTON -- Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is narrowing the description of his powers in an effort to counter calls for dismissal of the criminal case he brought against Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, defense lawyers said Friday.

In a 24-page filing in federal court, the legal team for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby said Fitzgerald and the former Justice Department official who appointed him, James Comey, are changing the broad mandate the prosecutor was handed to probe the leak in the Valerie Plame affair.

Libby is under indictment on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of Plame's CIA identity and what he told reporters about her. Plame's CIA status was exposed on July 14, 2003, by conservative columnist Robert Novak, eight days after Plame's husband accused the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

The defense attorneys say assignment of unsupervised and undirected power to Fitzgerald requires that he be relieved of his duties in the investigation and that all actions he has taken be voided.

Fitzgerald's appointment violates federal law, the defense attorneys say, because his investigation was not supervised by the attorney general. They say only Congress can approve such an arrangement.

"The government attempts to salvage the appointment by submitting two affidavits recently prepared by Mr. Comey and Mr. Fitzgerald, claiming that their previously undisclosed, subjective understanding of the appointment was narrower," Libby's lawyers wrote. "Mr. Comey now asserts that `it was my intention that the special counsel would follow substantive department policies' in exercising that authority."

"Similarly, despite the fact that as recently as August 2004 Mr. Fitzgerald characterized himself as `the functional equivalent of the attorney general in this matter,' he now insists in response to Mr. Libby's challenge that he always `understood' he had no authority to expand his jurisdiction and that he was required to follow certain substantive department policies," the court papers added.

© 2006 The Associated Press

Frontal Assault on Freedom of the Press

2006-03-29T23:38:00.000-05:00

The Bush administration is the first in history to launch a direct assault on journalists for violating the Espionage Act by releasing or publishing leaks of classified information. Although Congress originally passed the Espionage Act to prosecute government employees who divulge classified information to a foreign nation, it is now extended to reporters for doing their job — informing the public of our government wrongdoing, including breaking the law.

In times of war or anticipated war, our nation’s leaders supported by much of the populace have been too willing to surrender the First Amendment — our fundamental rights at the heart of democracy — for the illusion of greater security. Our civil liberties have been most endangered precisely when they should have been most protected to prevent our leaders from persecuting ordinary citizens.

In 1798, Congress passed the first federal Sedition Act to prosecute members of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party who challenged President John Adams’ Federalist policies. In World War I, the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act were enacted to silence opposing views from political dissenters, pacifists, and labor radicals. Not one single traitor was found in more than 2,000 cases. In World War II, about 112,000 to 120,000 West Coast Japanese-Americans were relocated and confined to internment camps. The U.S. government eventually issued a public apology and doled out financial retribution to survivors and their descendents. In the early 1950s, congressional McCarthyism fueled the “red scare” — myth of communist governmental infiltration — by conducting “witch-hunts” for communist sympathizers.

Before 9/11 attacks, immigrants working and residing in America enjoyed the protection of the Bill of Rights as much as American citizens. However, under the 2001 USA Patriot Act, the government arrested and detained Arab and Muslim non-citizens, deporting or incarcerating hundreds of people on immigration violations and arresting more than a dozen “material witnesses” without charge of any crime. According to American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the U.S. government is violating the Constitution and federal law by whisking away 1,000 people as detainees without releasing their names or their locations. Congress has just renewed the Patriot Act in March 2006 to continue the battle of the illusory “war on terror.”

The erosion of Bill of Rights has now emboldened the Bush administration to attack press freedom. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, as emphasized in the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights: “the freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.”

The media’s sole obligation lies squarely with the public’s right to know. The utmost duty of a journalist should be to pursue the truth. Reporters who use their professional status for self-serving purposes at the expense of those whom they serve violate a trust. As carriers of public information, the media acts as a conduit for the whistleblower to alert the public of government wrongdoing.

Such reports as uranium purchase forgery that drove U.S. to Iraq war, prisoner tortures, secret CIA prisons, warrantless surveillance, and other topics have prompted the Bush administration to plug the leaks at the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies. The aggressive efforts to suppress leaks on federal employees include FBI probes, polygraph tests and warning letters from the Justice Department prohibiting discussion of classified issues. For George Bush to claim that leaks have endangered the nation during a time of war doesn’t conceal the fact that he and his minions have consistently violated our constitutional laws in conducting his war.

In the New York Times, the CIA director Porter Goss asserts that the “Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA) was enacted to ensure that current or former employees could petition Congress, after raising concerns within their respective agency, consistent with the need to protect classified information." However, to submit a petition to Congress requires an approval from an agency’s head that might not want Congress to hear the allegations of wrongdoing. Another obstacle lies in neither the House nor Senate Intelligence Committees are “cleared enough” to hear closed testimony of NSA’s classified information.

Worse still, a report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on December 30, 2005 concluded that national security whistleblowers are unprotected. Cases in point: Russell Tice, a former intelligence officer at the NSA, charged that “illegalities and unconstitutional activity” operated in the ‘special-access programs’ (domestic eavesdropping without warrants); Mike German, a former FBI agent, reported records were falsified to cover-up mishandling of a major counterterrorism case in 2002; and Richard Levernier, a retired senior Department of Energy nuclear security specialist, testified that America’s nuclear weapons sites showed a 50 percent failure rate to defend against a terrorist attack. Those courageous employees who had spoken out and followed the chain of command for reporting wrongdoing suffered retaliation for disclosing the truth.

It’s no wonder that federal employees would rather leak vital government wrongdoing to the media than face ruin careers. More importantly, acting as whistleblowers, they are patriots serving the American people by informing the public of our government malfeasance.

The irony of it all, Special Council Patrick Fitzgerald is now investigating the same issue on the Bush administration — leaking sensitive classified information on a former CIA agent, Valerie Plame. In October 2005, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he became aware of Plame's CIA status and what he told the reporters.

In his defense for outing a CIA agent, Libby testified to a federal grand jury that Cheney and his "superiors" had authorized him to leak classified information, before and after the start of Iraq war in making the case for the U.S. invasion. Lawyers for Libby have subpoenaed several news reporters to testify again on how much they knew about the Plame’s undercover CIA status before her identity was publicly exposed. Libby’s trial will be held in January 2007.

Even if Libby could clear himself from being the first one to leak Plame’s identity, he has, nevertheless, committed a series of criminal offenses — obstruction of justice, lying to a federal grand jury, and more significantly, leaking classified information to drive U.S. to war with Iraq.

The Plamegate case was quite clear: a serious crime was committed — the law was broken to expose an undercover CIA agent, jeopardizing our national security. The New York Times former reporter, Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days to protect her sources. Miller’s protection of a government source that was suspected of committing a national security crime is definitely not the same as a journalist's obligation to protect a federal whistleblower revealing government wrongdoing. Like any journalist, Miller is bound to serve the public welfare. Any sound journalist could see that Miller was abetting a national security crime by withholding pertinent information to a criminal investigation. Fitzgerald understood that difference well enough to throw her in jail.

The Justice Department now applies the Espionage Act against journalists and their possible government sources, not to silence dissension like in the past — but to hide the criminal activities of the Bush administration. In reality, this administration wants to continue breaking the laws and violate our constitutional rights. By smothering freedom of the press, the Neocons would be one step closer to turning the United States into a dictatorship.

Fitzgerald Will Seek New White House Indictments | BaltimoreChronicle.com

2006-03-28T17:07:00.000-05:00

It may seem as though it's been moving along at a snail's pace, but the second part of the federal investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is nearly complete, with attorneys and government officials who have remained close to the probe saying that a grand jury will likely return an indictment against one or two senior Bush administration officials.

These sources work or worked at the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council. Some of these sources are attorneys close to the case. They requested anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the details of the investigation.

In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Although the situation remains fluid, it's possible, these sources said, that Fitzgerald may seek to indict both Rove and Hadley, charging them with perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy related to their roles in the leak of Plame Wilson's identity and their effort to cover up their involvement following a Justice Department investigation.

The sources said late Monday that it may take more than a month before Fitzgerald presents the paperwork outlining the government's case against one or both of the officials and asks the grand jury to return an indictment, because he is currently juggling quite a few high-profile criminal cases and will need to carve out time to write up the indictment and prepare the evidence.

In addition to responding to discovery requests from Libby's defense team and appearing in court with his attorneys, who are trying to obtain additional evidence, such as top-secret documents, from Fitzgerald's probe, the special prosecutor is also prosecuting Lord Conrad Black, the newspaper magnate, has recently charged numerous individuals in a child pornography ring, and is wrestling with other lawsuits in his home city of Chicago.

Details about the latest stage of the investigation began to take shape a few weeks ago when the lead FBI investigator on the leak case, John C. Eckenrode, retired from the agency and indicated to several colleagues that the investigation is about to wrap up with indictments handed up by the grand jury against Rove or Hadley or both officials, the sources said.

The Philadelphia-based Eckenrode is finished with his work on the case; however, he is expected to testify as a witness for the prosecution next year against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in October on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators regarding his role in the leak.

Hadley and Rove remain under intense scrutiny, but sources said Fitzgerald has not yet decided whether to seek charges against one or both of them.

Libby and other officials in Cheney's office used the information they obtained about Plame Wilson to undermine the credibility of her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson was an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. He had alleged that President Bush misspoke when he said, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to acquire yellow-cake uranium, the key component used to build a nuclear bomb, from Niger.

The uranium claim was the silver bullet in getting Congress to support military action two months later. To date, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and the country barely had a functional weapons program, according to a report from the Iraq Survey Group.

Wilson had traveled to Niger more than a year earlier to investigate the yellow-cake claims and reported back to the CIA that intelligence reports saying Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Niger were false.

On Monday, though, attorneys close to the leak case confirmed that Fitzgerald had met with the grand jury half a dozen times since January and recently told the jurors that he planned to present them with the government's case against Rove or Hadley, which stems from an email Rove had sent to Hadley in July of 2003 indicating that he had a conversation about Plame Wilson with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.

Neither Hadley nor Rove disclosed the existence of the email when they were questioned by FBI investigators or when they testified before a grand jury, the sources said, adding that Rove testified he found out about Plame Wilson from reporters and Hadley testified that he recalled learning about Plame Wilson when her name was published in a newspaper column.

Rove testified before the grand jury four times. He did not disclose the existence of the email during the three previous times he testified, claiming he simply forgot about it because he was enmeshed with the 2004 Presidential election, traveling around the country attending fundraisers and meetings, working more than 15 hours a day on the campaign, and just forgot that he spoke with Cooper three months earlier, sources familiar with his testimony said.

But Rove and Libby had been the subject of dozens of news stories about the possibility that they played a role in the leak, and had faced dozens of questions as early as August 2003—one month after Plame Wilson was outed—about whether they were the administration officials responsible for leaking her identity.

The story Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, provided to Fitzgerald in order to explain why Rove did not disclose the existence of the email is "less than satisfactory and entirely unconvincing to the special counsel," one of the attorneys close to the case said.

Luskin did not return numerous calls for comment. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council said she could not comment on an ongoing investigation and has vehemently denied that Hadley was involved in the leak "because Mr. Hadley told us he wasn't involved."

In December, Luskin made a desperate attempt to keep his client out of Fitzgerald's crosshairs.

Luskin had revealed to Fitzgerald that Viveca Novak—a reporter working for Time magazine who wrote several stories about the Plame Wilson case—inadvertently tipped him off in early 2004 that her colleague at the magazine, Matt Cooper, would be forced to testify that Rove was his source who told him about Plame Wilson's CIA status.

Novak—who bears no relation to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, the journalist who first published Plame Wilson's name and CIA status in a July 14, 2003, column —met Luskin in Washington DC in the summer of 2004, and over drinks, the two discussed Fitzgerald's investigation into the Plame Wilson leak.

Luskin had assured Novak that Rove learned Plame Wilson's name and CIA status after it was published in news accounts and that only then did he phone other journalists to draw their attention to it. But Novak told Luskin that everyone in the Time newsroom knew Rove was Cooper's source and that he would testify to that in an upcoming grand jury appearance, these sources said.

According to Luskin's account, after he met with Viveca Novak he contacted Rove and told him about his conversation with her. The two of them then began an exhaustive search through White House phone logs and emails for any evidence that proved that Rove had spoken with Cooper. Luskin said that during this search an email was found that Rove had sent to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley immediately after Rove's conversation with Cooper, and it was subsequently turned over to Fitzgerald.

"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the email to Hadley immediately following his conversation with Cooper on July 11, 2003. "Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming. When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."

Luskin wound up becoming a witness in the case and testified about his conversation with Viveca Novak that Luskin said would prove his client didn't knowingly lie to FBI investigators when he was questioned about the leak in October 2003, just three months after Rove told Cooper that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

The email Rove sent to Hadley, which Luskin said he found, helped Rove recall his conversation with Cooper a year earlier. Rove then returned to the grand jury to clarify his previous testimonies in which he did not disclose that he spoke with journalists.

Still, Rove's account of his conversation with Cooper went nothing like he had described in his email to Hadley, according to an email Cooper sent to his editor at Time magazine following his conversation with Rove in July 2003.

"It was, KR said, [former Ambassador Joseph] Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized [Wilson's] trip," Cooper's July 11, 2003, email to his editor said. "Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The email characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger... "

It is unclear whether Rove was misleading Hadley about his conversation with Cooper, perhaps, because White House officials told their staff not to engage reporters in any questions posed about Wilson's Niger claims.

But Fitzgerald's investigation has turned up additional evidence over the past few months that convinced him that Luskin's eleventh-hour revelation about the chain of events that led to the discovery of the email is not credible. Fitzgerald believes that Rove changed his story once it became clear that Cooper would be compelled to testify about the source—Rove—who revealed Plame Wilson's CIA status to him, sources close to the case said.

If any of the people named in this story believe they have been unfairly portrayed or that what was written in this story is untrue, they will have an opportunity to respond in this space.

Libby Trial May Be Embarrassment for Bush

2006-03-18T18:20:00.000-05:00

By PETE YOST Associated Press Writer
AP Photo/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Lawyers for Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide are signaling they may delve deeply at his criminal trial into infighting among the White House, the CIA and the State Department over pre-Iraq war intelligence failures.
In a prelude to a possible defense, the lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby also are suggesting that the State Department - not Libby - may be to blame for leaking the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media.
Court papers filed late Friday raise the possibility a trial could become politically embarrassing for the Bush administration by focusing on the debate about whether the White House manipulated intelligence to justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The defense team stated that in June and July 2003, Plame's CIA status was at most a peripheral issue to "the finger-pointing that went on within the executive branch about who was to blame" for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"If the jury learns this background information" about finger-pointing "and also understands Mr. Libby's additional focus on urgent national security matters, the jury will more easily appreciate how Mr. Libby may have forgotten or misremembered ... snippets of conversation" about Plame's CIA status, the lawyers said.
Cheney's former chief of staff was indicted Oct. 28 on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of Plame's CIA employment and what he told reporters about her.
Libby's lawyers are asking U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton for access to government documents about a 2002 trip that Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, made to the African nation of Niger at the CIA's behest and about "his wife's involvement" with that mission.
The documents relate to what prospective witnesses - including then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove - probably would say at Libby's trial.

Noting press reports last week, the court papers say there has been speculation that Armitage told The Washington Post's Bob Woodward that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, and speculation that Woodward's source and the primary source for conservative columnist Robert Novak are the same person.
Novak disclosed Plame's identity on July 14, 2003, eight days after Wilson contended in a New York Times op-ed column that the administration twisted prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from a nuclear weapons program.
"If the facts ultimately show that Mr. Armitage or someone else from the State Department was also Mr. Novak's primary source, then the State Department and certainly not Mr. Libby bears responsibility for the 'leak' that led to the public disclosure" of Plame's CIA identity, Libby's lawyers said.
The court filing also focused on Marc Grossman, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs who allegedly told Libby a month before Plame's identity was disclosed that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA.
"If Mr. Armitage or another State Department official was in fact the primary source for Mr. Novak's article, Mr. Grossman's testimony may be colored by either his personal relationship with Mr. Armitage or his concern for the institutional concerns of the state Department," Libby's lawyers wrote.
Rove - a source for Novak and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper - is under investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the probe of the leak of Plame's CIA identity.
Libby's lawyers say that "either the government or the defense may call Mr. Rove as a witness at trial" and note that "the grand jury's investigation may be continuing with respect to Mr. Rove or other witnesses."
The defense says the documents it seeks will help demonstrate that the White House did not launch a concerted effort to punish Wilson by leaking his wife's identity, as administration critics have alleged.
Libby also is asking for notes from a September 2003 meeting in the White House Situation Room where Colin Powell, who was secretary of state, is reported to have said that everyone knows Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and that it was Wilson's wife who suggested the CIA sent her husband to Niger.
"The media conflagration ignited by the failure to find WMD in Iraq and in part by Mr. Wilson's criticism of the administration, led officials within the White House, the State Department and the CIA to blame each other, publicly and in private, for faulty prewar intelligence about Iraq's WMD capabilities," the court papers state.
"The government's version of events blows out of proportion the minor role Ms. Wilson actually played and in doing so creates an impression that is highly prejudicial to Mr. Libby," they say.
Wilson's accusations stemmed from President Bush's assertion in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003, that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Based on his 2002 trip, Wilson said he had found it highly doubtful the nation of Niger had agreed to sell uranium yellowcake to Iraq, as alleged in intelligence provided to the CIA.

Armitage may come under scrutiny in CIA leak trial

2006-03-18T18:19:00.000-05:00

By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former top State Department official suspected of being the first person to discuss the identity of a CIA official with reporters is expected to testify in the perjury trial of ex-vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a court motion says.
The filing by Libby's defense team late on Friday asks Judge Reggie Walton to force prosecutors to turn over material they have about likely witnesses including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
Others who are expected to testify include White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, former CIA director George Tenet and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the document says.
It suggests Libby's team may try to pin blame on the State Department for the leak of Valerie Plame's identity to the public after her husband criticized the Bush administration's Iraq policy.
Former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee told Vanity Fair magazine this week that it is reasonable to assume that Armitage told Post reporter Bob Woodward about Plame's identity before other Bush administration officials mentioned her name to reporters.
Knowingly disclosing the identity of a covert CIA agent is against the law. But so far no officials have been charged with leaking Plame's identity to the news media in 2003.
Libby, set to go on trial in January 2007, faces charges of lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury during the investigation. Rove remains under investigation for making false statements.
Libby's lawyers noted that there has been speculation that Armitage might also have told syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who was the first to make Plame's identity public in a July 14, 2003, column.
"If the facts ultimately show that Mr. Armitage or someone else from the State Department was also Mr. Novak's primary source, then the State Department (and certainly not Mr. Libby) bears responsibility for the 'leak' that led to the public disclosure of Ms. Wilson's CIA identity," Libby's defense team wrote, referring to Plame by her married name.
Libby's lawyers hope to demonstrate that he was too preoccupied with national security matters to accurately remember his conversations with reporters about Plame, and have sought access to reporters' notes and top-secret security briefings to bolster their case.

Libby's Lawyers Subpoena Times, Reporters - Yahoo! News

2006-03-17T15:15:00.001-05:00

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
Thu Mar 16, 9:34 PM ET

The CIA leak case of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby may be heading for a new battle between the news media and the courts, the second such confrontation triggered by the Valerie Plame affair.

Lawyers for Libby are casting a wide net for information from news organizations for his upcoming criminal trial, subpoenaing documents from The New York Times, Time magazine and three reporters, including NBC correspondent Tim Russert.

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff is entitled to find out what the news media knew about the CIA status of undercover officer Plame before her identity was publicly exposed, Libby's lawyers have said in court papers.

Conservative columnist Robert Novak named her in a column in July 2003, eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, alleged the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Wilson has said he believes his wife's identity was disclosed to undermine his credibility.

Libby, the former White House aide, was indicted Oct. 28 on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he became aware of Plame's CIA status and what he said about her to reporters.

Libby told investigators he'd heard about her CIA employment from reporters. The criminal charges say he learned of it from Cheney, the State Department and the CIA.

In a court filing in January, Libby's lawyers said prosecutors were refusing to give Libby evidence about what reporters learned from sources other than Libby about where Plame worked.

"There can be no information more material to the defense of a perjury case than information tending to show that the alleged false statements are, in fact, true or that they could be the result of mistake or confusion," Libby's legal team argued.

They said it is material to Libby's defense to determine the identity of all reporters who knew about Plame's job, when they learned of it and from whom and whether they disclosed it further after learning it.

The subpoenaed reporters and news organizations have until April 7 to turn over the material or challenge the subpoenas before U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, who will preside at Libby's trial scheduled for next January.

Time Inc. lawyer Robin Bierstedt confirmed that the magazine and reporter Matt Cooper were each subpoenaed by Libby's attorneys. The Times confirmed subpoenas to the newspaper and former reporter Judy Miller. NBC confirmed the subpoena to Russert.

The subpoena to Miller seeks her notes and other materials, including documents concerning Plame prepared by Miller and Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.

Kristof wrote the first account of the criticism that Plame's husband was leveling at the Bush administration. Referring to Plame's husband, though not by name, a May 6, 2003, Times column by Kristof raised the possibility the Bush administration might have disregarded prewar intelligence suggesting Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.

Three weeks after Kristof's column appeared, Libby started making inquiries at the State Department about the unnamed envoy in Kristof's column, according to the indictment.

The subpoena to the Times also calls for:

_Documents of contacts between any Times employee and any of eight people, including then-CIA Director George Tenet and then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, regarding Joe Wilson.

_Documents concerning a recent Vanity Fair article in which Miller said she talked to many people in the government about Plame.

_Drafts of a personal account by Miller, published in the Times, about her grand jury testimony.

_Documents regarding Miller's interactions with a Times editor in which Miller may have been told to pursue a story about Joe Wilson and a trip he made to Niger on behalf of the CIA.

Miller spent 85 days in jail after refusing to tell a grand jury about conversations she had with Libby about Wilson's wife.

The Times reporter later testified before the grand jury, saying Libby had given her permission to do so, and provided the panel with edited notes of her interviews with the former chief of staff.

She retired from the Times in November.

Magazine: Bradlee Knows Woodward's Source on Plame

2006-03-14T01:49:00.000-05:00

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A02

Vanity Fair is reporting that former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee says it is reasonable to assume former State Department official Richard L. Armitage is likely the source who revealed CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward.

In an article to be published in the magazine today, Bradlee is quoted as saying: "That Armitage is the likely source is a fair assumption." Armitage was deputy secretary of State in President Bush's first term.

In an interview yesterday, Bradlee said he does know the identity of Woodward's source but does not recall making that precise statement to a Vanity Fair reporter. He said he has no interest in unmasking the official who first told Woodward about Plame in June 2003.

"I don't think I said it," Bradlee said. "I know who his source is, and I don't want to get into it. . . . I have not told a soul who it is."

The identity of Woodward's source emerged as one of the big mysteries of the CIA case after he disclosed last year that a government official with no ax to grind had told him about Plame, an undercover operative, a month before her name was revealed by columnist Robert D. Novak. Since then, guessing Woodward's source has been a Washington parlor game.

Plame is at the center of an investigation by a special prosecutor into whether White House officials knowingly disclosed her name to the media to discredit allegations made by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the administration twisted intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war. The probe has resulted in charges of perjury, making false statements and obstructing justice against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff.

Beth Kseniak, spokeswoman for Vanity Fair, said the reporter who wrote the story, Marie Brenner, was traveling in India and was unavailable for comment.

Bradlee, currently Post vice president at large, said he learned the source's name from someone other than Woodward. Woodward said he did not reveal the source to his friend and former boss.

"He is not in the management loop on this," Woodward said. "Maybe he was alerted from somebody else, if he in fact did learn" the source's name.

Woodward and Bradlee refused to disclose the source's name. Armitage did not return phone calls requesting comment.

Bradlee's brief comments about the source are included in a lengthy article about the Plame case. Bradlee is the longtime Post editor who rose to prominence when his reporting team of Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story. Woodward and Bradlee refused for many years to reveal the identity of Deep Throat, a key source.

Bradlee defended Woodward after thejournalist disclosed in November that a senior Bush administration official had told him about Plame and her CIA ties a month before her identity was revealed.

At the time, Woodward was criticized by Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor, and others for not telling the newspaper about his knowledge of Plame until after Libby was indicted.

In the course of writing a book on Bush, Woodward said, he had discovered mention of Plame in his notes just as the grand jury in the leak case was expiring last October. Woodward contacted prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald and later testified under oath about his conversations with the source, whom he has refused to name publicly.

Woodward's testimony changed key elements in the chronology Fitzgerald laid out in his investigation and announced when indicting Libby. It made Woodward's source -- not Libby -- the first known government official to disclose Plame's CIA employment to a reporter. Woodward has said he does not recall ever discussing Plame with Libby.

It also apparently made Woodward the first reporter to learn about Plame from a government source. Libby's legal team has cited Woodward's testimony as evidence that there are holes in Fitzgerald's version of events and hinted it might call the reporter to testify at the trial.

The identity of Woodward's source is one of several mysteries that remain in the leak case. Lawyers involved in the case have suggested Woodward's source and Novak's source are the same person. Novak has refused to discuss the sources for his column but suggested in a speech in December that he and Woodward shared the source. Novak and his lawyer declined to comment yesterday.

Fitzgerald has not concluded his investigation, but people involved in the case said he has not shown interest in Woodward or his source since Woodward testified last year.

Fitzgerald has not closed the investigation of whether White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove provided false statements about his role in the disclosure of Plame's identity, according to lawyers in the case.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

KRT Wire | 03/11/2006 | Plame's identity, if truly a secret, was thinly veiled

2006-03-12T14:19:00.000-05:00

BY JOHN CREWDSON
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - The question of whether Valerie Plame's employment by the Central Intelligence Agency was a secret is the key issue in the two-year investigation to determine if someone broke the law by leaking her CIA affiliation to the news media.

Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald contends that Plame's friends "had no idea she had another life." But Plame's secret life could be easily penetrated with the right computer sleuthing and an understanding of how the CIA's covert employees work.

When the Chicago Tribune searched for Plame on an Internet service that sells public information about private individuals to its subscribers, it got a report of more than 7,600 words. Included was the fact that in the early 1990s her address was "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255."

A former senior American diplomat in Athens, who remembers Plame as "pleasant, very well-read, bright," said he had been aware that Plame, who was posing as a junior consular officer, really worked for the CIA.

According to CIA veterans, U.S. intelligence officers working in American embassies under "diplomatic cover" are almost invariably known to friendly and opposition intelligence services alike.

"If you were in an embassy," said a former CIA officer who posed as a U.S. diplomat in several countries, "you could count 100 percent on the Soviets knowing."

Plame's true function likely would have been known to friendly intelligence agencies as well. The former senior diplomat recalled, for example, that she served as one of the "control officers" coordinating the visit of President George H.W. Bush to Greece and Turkey in July 1991.

After the completion of her Athens tour, the CIA reportedly sent Plame to study in Europe. According to her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame was living in Brussels when the couple first met in 1997.

Two years later, when Plame made a $1,000 contribution to Vice President Al Gore, she listed her employer as Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a Boston company apparently set up by the CIA to provide "commercial cover" for some of its operatives.

Brewster-Jennings was not a terribly convincing cover. According to Dun & Bradstreet, the company, created in 1994, is a "legal services office" grossing $60,000 a year and headed by a chief executive named Victor Brewster. Commercial databases accessible by the Tribune contain no indication that such a person exists.

Another sign of Brewster-Jennings' link to the CIA came from the online resume of a Washington attorney, who until last week claimed to have been employed by Brewster-Jennings as an "engineering consultant" from 1985 to 1989 and to have served from 1989 to 1995 as a CIA "case officer," the agency's term for field operatives who collect information from paid informants.

On Wednesday the Tribune left a voice mail and two e-mail messages asking about the juxtaposition of the attorney's career with Brewster-Jennings and the CIA. On Thursday, the Brewster-Jennings and CIA entries had disappeared from the online resume. The attorney never returned any of the messages left by the Tribune.

After Plame left her diplomatic post and joined Brewster-Jennings, she became what is known in CIA parlance as an "NOC," shorthand for an intelligence officer working under "non-official cover." But several CIA veterans questioned how someone with an embassy background could have successfully passed herself off as a private-sector consultant with no government connections.

Genuine NOCs, a CIA veteran said, "never use an official address. If she had (a diplomatic) address, her whole cover's completely phony. I used to run NOCs. I was in an embassy. I'd go out and meet them, clandestine meetings. I'd pay them cash to run assets or take trips. I'd give them a big bundle of cash. But they could never use an embassy address, ever."

Another CIA veteran with 20 years of service agreed that "the key is the (embassy) address. That is completely unacceptable for an NOC. She wasn't an NOC, period."

After Plame was transferred back to CIA headquarters in the mid-1990s, she continued to pass herself off as a private energy consultant. But the first CIA veteran noted: "You never let a true NOC go into an official facility. You don't drive into headquarters with your car, ever."

A senior U.S. intelligence official, who like the others quoted in this article spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that Plame "may not be alone in that category, so I don't want to suggest she was the only one. But it would be a fair assumption that a true-blue NOC is not someone who has a headquarters job at any point or an embassy job at any point."

According to Fitzgerald, the chief federal prosecutor in Chicago who was tapped to head the Plame investigation, Plame's "cover was blown" in July 2003, when columnist Robert Novak disclosed that Plame "is an agency (CIA) operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Two senior Bush administration officials, Novak said, had told him that Plame suggested sending her husband, former ambassador Wilson, to Africa to look into reports that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from the nation of Niger.

Novak's column followed by eight days an op-ed article by Wilson in The New York Times recounting his failure to find any evidence of such a purchase during his visit to Niger.

Wilson was responding to President Bush's assertion in his 2003 State of the Union address, on the eve of the war with Iraq, that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Knowingly disclosing the identity of a covert CIA operative is a violation of the federal Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Although prosecutor Fitzgerald has yet to accuse anyone of violating that law, he won a grand jury indictment charging former vice presidential chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby with perjury and obstructing justice for allegedly making false statements under oath about how and when he learned of Plame's CIA employment, and when he told reporters.

Libby's lawyers, who now question whether Plame's CIA employment really was secret at the time Novak's column appeared, have asked a federal judge to provide them with documents that bear on that issue.

If Plame's employment was not a legitimate secret, and if the national security was not harmed by its disclosure, Libby's lawyers argue, their client would have had no motive to lie about his conversations with reporters.

Fitzgerald has told the court he does not intend to introduce evidence showing that Plame's career, the CIA's operations or the national security were harmed by the disclosure of her CIA affiliation.

Plame's lawyer, Christopher Wolf, said his client would have no comment on any aspect of her CIA career. The CIA also declined comment on any aspect of the Plame case.

CNN.com - Judge orders CIA to turn over intelligence briefings to Libby - Mar 10, 2006

2006-03-10T17:00:00.000-05:00

Spy agency fought release of presidential-level documents

WASHINGTON(AP) -- A federal judge ordered the CIA on Friday to turn over highly classified intelligence briefings to Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide to use in the aide's defense against perjury charges.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton rejected CIA warnings that the nation's security would be imperiled if the presidential-level documents were disclosed to lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff.

The judge said the CIA can either delete highly classified information from the briefing material and provide copies of what Libby received six days a week, often with Cheney. Or, Walton said, the CIA can produce "topic overviews" of the matters covered in the briefings.

The judge also ordered the CIA to give Libby an index of the topics covered in follow-up questions that the former White House aide asked intelligence officers who conducted the briefings.

In seeking CIA input late last month, Walton appeared to have been trying to broker a compromise between defense attorneys and prosecutors to avoid a lengthy court battle with the Bush administration over the briefing material.

The judge's order indicates he is ready for such a fight. He set a schedule for the Bush administration to file any objections by March 24.

The charges against Libby -- perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to FBI agents -- grew out of an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Chron.com | CIA Fights Libby's Request for Information

2006-03-07T12:55:00.000-05:00

By TONI LOCY Associated Press Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The CIA signaled Tuesday it likely will fight the release of highly classified presidential intelligence briefings that Vice President Cheney's former top aide wants to use in his defense against perjury charges.

Gathering the materials sought by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, would take up to nine months, Marilyn Dorn, a CIA information review officer, said in a sworn statement filed in U.S. District Court.

Dorn said the CIA believes disclosure of the informaton would damage national security and wants a chance to be heard in court before any material is turned over to Libby, who is charged with lying in the investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

"The defense's requests clearly implicate highly classified, compartmentalized information and potential claims of executive privilege for presidential communications and the deliberative process," Dorn wrote.

Dorn's affidavit was filed last Friday but made public Tuesday.

Libby, 55, was indicted last year on charges that he lied to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame and when he subsequently told reporters.

Lawyers for Libby want access to nearly a year of the President's Daily Brief, a summary of intelligence about threats against the United States. Dorn estimated it would take nine months for the small staff responsible for producing the intelligence briefing to assemble the material.

But Dorn estimated it would take about three months to comply with a more streamlined request of about 40 days of the PDB that U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton suggested. That period would cover when Libby allegedly spoke to three reporters, along with two days before and after he was interviewed by FBI agents and testified before the grand jury.

Did Woodward tape CIA name leaker? - Politics - MSNBC.com

2006-03-04T09:43:00.000-05:00

‘Scooter’ Libby’s defense team argues tape will help his defense

By Joel Seidman
Producer
NBC News
Updated: 10:12 p.m. ET March 3, 2006

WASHINGTON - A snippet of a conversation between Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and an unnamed source in mid-June 2003 appears to be a major focus of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby's defense in the CIA leak case.

According to a newly released transcript of last week's motions hearing in U.S. District Court, William Jeffress, one of Libby's attorneys, is focusing on three words — “Everyone knows it.”

Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted last year on charges that he lied about how he learned that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA operative and when he told reporters.

Woodward revealed in November that a senior administration official — in addition to Libby — told him about Plame and her position at the CIA nearly a month before her identity was disclosed by syndicated newspaper columnist Robert Novak in July 2003.

A transcript and affidavit filed Thursday indicate that Woodward taped his conversation with his unnamed source.

Jeffress was given a redacted transcript of the conversation Woodward had with his unnamed source, according to an affidavit filed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald on Thursday. The Libby team wants the full transcript of the conversation in order to argue that the phrase “Everyone knows it,” uttered by Woodward's source in that 2003 conversation, means that Plame's job at the CIA was common knowledge among Washington journalists.

“Who did he mean by ‘Everyone knows it'?” Jeffress asked the judge.

According to Jeffress, the only inkling of the source's identity in the redacted document “is some person not in the White House.”

Fitzgerald writes in his affidavit that Libby is not entitled to know everything that the government investigation has learned about other leaks to reporters regarding Plame's employment at the CIA. He says that granting Libby’s request for more information, “would compromise 'innocent accused' in the investigation” and delve into irrelevant matters.

U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton sided with the prosecution and decided to continue to protect the anonymity of the confidential source.

In asking for access to the tape, Jeffress said, “We know of two reporters that 'official one' talked to. ... We do know that he did discuss Ms. Wilson with at least two reporters.”

The Libby defense said the information would help it investigate which other reporters knew and might have mentioned Plame's name. Jeffress also said he wants “to confront Mr. (Tim) Russert with what other reporters knew."

Tim Russert is NBC’s Washington bureau chief and host of "Meet the Press." Libby is said to have testified that Russert told him the name of the CIA agent. Russert has said he did not know Plame or that she worked at the CIA and "he did not provide that information to Libby."

(MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)

Libby's trial date has been set for January 2007.

Did Bob Woodward Record Key Plame Case Conversation?

2006-03-03T10:10:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK A filing Thursday at U.S. District Court in the Plame/ CIA leak case suggests that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward may have tape recorded his fateful conversaton with the so-called "second source"--besides Lewis "Scooter" Libby-- that is now a key part of the case.

Woodward suddenly revealed late last year that he had talked with Libby as well as another unnamed government official about CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joe Wilson. Earlier, columnist Robert Novak had also said he had an unnamed second source.

One paragraph in Thursday’s filing, NBC reported, indicates that the unnamed official spoke both with Woodward and Novak, and "Libby has been given a redacted transcript of the conversation between Woodward and [redacted] and Novak has published an account briefly describing the conversation with his first confidential source [redacted]."

Does "transcript of the conversation" mean that there is an audio recording of the conversation between Woodward, Novak and the unnamed source? Or merely a detailed set of notes?

"Last Friday, Judge Reggie Walton decided to continue to protect the anonymity of one administration official, whom Libby's attorneys described as a confidential source about Plame for two reporters, one of them apparently Woodward," NBC said.

Libby's lawyers said in court that the "official" is someone "outside the White House." Novak said last year that President Bush knew the identity of his confidential source, and also suggested that the official also was Woodward's source as well.

New York Daily News - World & National Report - Scooter notes ID'd CIA spy

2006-02-28T11:17:00.000-05:00

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - Handwritten notes taken by the CIA show Vice President Cheney's top aide knew the name of CIA spy Valerie Plame a month before her cover was blown.
It appears to be the first known document in the hands of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that directly contradicts Lewis (Scooter) Libby's claim he learned from reporters in July 2003 that Valerie Plame was a CIA employee.

Libby, who was Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted for perjury in the CIA leak investigation.

Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, was a Bush critic dispatched to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to see if Iraq had shopped for uranium. "A CIA employee assigned to provide daily intelligence briefs to the Vice President and Libby has handwritten notes indicating that Libby referred to 'Joe Wilson' and 'Valerie Wilson' by those names in conversation with the briefer on June 14, 2003," Fitzgerald wrote in a recently unsealed brief.

The filing suggests Cheney may have been present when Libby griped to his CIA briefer about agency officials slamming the veep in the press.

Seven officials have testified that Libby raised the CIA spy with them before columnist Robert Novak outed her. In the filing, Fitzgerald also revealed that his investigators also confiscated computers.

Meanwhile, a judge overseeing Libby's perjury trial ruled yesterday that Libby won't get any copies of the secret daily intelligence briefings for Cheney and President Bush.

Judge OKs subpoenas in Libby case - Politics - MSNBC.com

2006-02-27T21:24:00.000-05:00

Libby defense aims to show any false statements were result of confusion

NBC News and news services
Updated: 3:41 p.m. ET Feb. 27, 2006

WASHINGTON - The judge in the CIA leak case said Monday that lawyers on both sides in the perjury trial of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby will be allowed to subpoena journalists and news organizations.

The issue of calling reporters and news organizations to supply information or testify in the trial was raised at a hearing on Friday.

At the hearing, Libby, who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney, won the right to review his handwritten notes for a nine-month period surrounding the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name.

Judge Reggie Walton seemed skeptical about a second request by the defense that it also be given highly classified documents known as the President's Daily Brief for a similar period. The judge deferred a final ruling on that request, which Libby's defense team says is essential in demonstrating that he was busy with other national security matters at the time of the Plame leak.

Libby, 55, was indicted last year on charges that he lied about how he learned Plame’s identity and when he subsequently told reporters.

The CIA operative’s identity was published in July 2003 by syndicated columnist Robert Novak after Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq’s efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

A strategy to 'sabotage' case?
Defense lawyers have said that if Libby's statements to investigators were untrue, it was a case of innocent confusion or faulty memory because of his preoccupation with pressing national security matters at the time.

Walton said he is concerned that Libby’s request could “sabotage” the case because President Bush probably would invoke executive privilege and refuse to turn over the classified reports.

“The vice president — his boss — said these are the family jewels,” the judge said, referring to Cheney’s past description of the daily briefings. “If the executive branch says, 'This is too important to the welfare of the nation and we’re not going to comply,’ the criminal prosecution goes away.”

Ted Wells, one of Libby's lawyers, said the judge needs to take time to make sure Libby gets the evidence he needs to defend himself. “If it’s done in a quick and dirty way, he’s going to be convicted,” Wells said.

The court set an April 7 deadline for any reporters or news organizations to produce the requested items. Any motions to quash or modify the subpoenas must also be filed by that time.

A trial date has been set for January 2007.

The Associated Press and NBC News contributed to this report.

Former Aide to Cheney Gains Access to His Notes - New York Times

2006-02-25T19:49:00.000-05:00

By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 — I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who is charged with lying to investigators about his role in the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, won the right Friday to review his handwritten notes for a nine-month period surrounding the publication of the information.

But the federal judge hearing Mr. Libby's case seemed markedly skeptical to a second request that the defense also be given the highly classified documents known as the President's Daily Brief for a similar period. The judge, Reggie B. Walton, suggested that the requests for those documents by Mr. Libby's lawyers might "sabotage" the case against him.

Mr. Libby has been charged with lying to investigators about his role in the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's role as a Central Intelligence Agency operative.

In court on Friday, his chief defense lawyer, Theodore H. Wells Jr., argued that Mr. Libby needed the highly sensitive documents he was privy to as Mr. Cheney's top assistant and national security adviser to mount his defense. Defense lawyers have said that if Mr. Libby's statements to investigators were untrue, it was a case of innocent confusion or faulty memory because of his preoccupation with weightier national security matters at the time.

Mr. Wells said that even though the daily briefs were so valuable that they are often called the nation's "family jewels," he needed to show the jury the kinds of momentous issues with which Mr. Libby was involved.

But Judge Walton, who deferred a final ruling on the matter, said the briefs were so sensitive that "the White House will never agree" to release them, adding, "If I order this, it will sabotage the prosecution."

The judge also suggested that Mr. Libby's personal notes for that period, which he had just ordered to be turned over to the defense, could be sufficient to remind Mr. Libby of the issues he was involved in.

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel prosecuting Mr. Libby, told the judge that if he agreed to order the intelligence briefs made available to Mr. Libby, the result would be months of arguments over executive privilege and relevancy that "would derail the case."

Mr. Fitzgerald has said in court papers that the request for the briefs was an obvious effort at "graymail," a technique in which defense lawyers demand highly sensitive information from the government to force the prosecution to choose between providing the information or dropping the case. He noted that the disclosure of part of the Aug. 6, 2001, daily brief to the Sept. 11 commission was the sole instance of a daily brief's being publicly disclosed and that occurred only after much wrangling.

Judge Walton scheduled Mr. Libby's trial to begin Jan. 7, 2007, a long lead time to allow for expected pretrial battles over difficult issues like the presidential briefs and whether reporters will resist subpoenas to testify.

Mr. Fitzgerald said Friday that he would readily agree that Mr. Libby had an important job and dealt with weighty matters. But he said that the presidential briefs would provide far more detail than Mr. Libby needed to make that argument.

Further, he said, in July 2003 when Mr. Libby had conversations with three reporters, he was "deeply involved" in dealing with the issue of Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Mr. Wilson, a former ambassador, had provoked the anger of the Bush administration when he asserted that the White House had exaggerated and twisted intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to buy uranium in Africa in order to make the case for invading Iraq.

Mr. Wilson has said the White House blew his wife's cover to retaliate and to discredit his claims.

Judge Walton also rejected a request by Mr. Libby's lawyers to obtain information about an unnamed official who worked in the administration but not in the White House who discussed Ms. Wilson's identity with reporters.

Libby's Team Plans to Subpoena Media - Los Angeles Times

2006-02-25T14:15:00.000-05:00

Lawyers have said they intend to cast a wide net to raise doubts about testimony against him. Those called will have until April to respond.
By Richard B. Schmitt
Times Staff Writer

February 25, 2006

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby said Friday that they soon planned to subpoena reporters and news organizations, and a federal judge set the stage for a showdown in late April on whether the media would have to comply with the subpoenas in order to afford the former White House aide a fair trial.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton also said a special prosecutor would have to turn over hundreds of pages of notes compiled by Libby while he was chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. But Walton put off a defense request that the prosecutor turn over highly classified presidential daily briefs that Libby received while in the White House.

His lawyers have said the daily briefs were crucial to showing that Libby was immersed in matters of state and didn't intentionally mislead investigators and a grand jury, as the government has alleged.

Libby, 55, was indicted in October on perjury and obstruction charges. Prosecutors contend he lied to authorities about his role in the July 2003 unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Libby told authorities that he first learned the identity of Plame from a television journalist; the government contends that he in fact deliberately acquired and disseminated information about Plame and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former U.S. envoy who had criticized the Bush administration over the Iraq war.

Lawyers for Libby say they have reason to question the accuracy of statements that journalists have made about him to special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. They are also seeking to prove that information about Plame was widely known among reporters at the time, and that Libby therefore would have no incentive to lie about his knowledge of her.

Walton set an April 7 deadline for recipients of the subpoenas to respond to whether they intended to comply with them, and a date of April 21 for a hearing to consider objections.

"We want the issue to be joined as quickly as possible," Theodore V. Wells Jr., one of Libby's lawyers, said Friday at a hearing in federal court in Washington. He did not indicate how many reporters or news organizations would be subpoenaed, although he and the rest of the Libby legal team have indicated they would cast a wide net.

Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago who was appointed more than two years ago to investigate whether Plame's identity was disclosed in violation of a federal law protecting covert agents, previously subpoenaed reporters from news organizations including Time magazine and the New York Times.

Those moves triggered a 1st Amendment battle that went to the Supreme Court, and resulted in one journalist who initially refused to comply, former New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, spending 85 days in jail.

The subpoenas in Libby's case are also likely to touch off a legal battle over competing considerations — the rights of journalists to protect conversations with confidential sources, and the right of defendants to a fair trial. Depending on the scope of the subpoenas, lawyers for Libby might also seek information about individual reporters and their reputation for honesty and accuracy, some media experts have said.

The battles over journalists and classified information have left Walton struggling to keep Libby's trial on track for January 2007.

A major stumbling block, which Walton left unsettled Friday, was a request from Libby's lawyers to see dozens of presidential briefing papers that he received while working for Cheney and which are considered some of the most sensitive information in government. Cheney has called those documents "the family jewels" of the government.

Wells said those documents were essential to show the detail and level of immersion that Libby found himself in as a senior official. Wells also signaled that the defense might call an expert witness to testify about memory and recall, presumably to buttress claims that any lapses were not unusual for a person of his stature.

"The very heart of our defense is about the family jewels," Wells said. "We need the notes and the PDBs to put together a story to make the jury believe that his defense is not concocted."

Walton reserved judgment on the request but expressed concern because he said the Bush White House probably would invoke executive privilege and refuse to turn over the classified reports.

"Isn't this going to sabotage the ability of this case to go forward?" he asked. "If the executive branch says, 'this is too important to the welfare of the nation and we're not going to comply,' the criminal prosecution goes away."

Walton said he would decide the issue within a few weeks. He ordered Fitzgerald to have the CIA prepare a filing on how difficult it would be to find and collect the information.

Walton also said Fitzgerald could keep secret the identity of another government official who allegedly revealed the identity of Plame to journalists before Robert Novak first disclosed it July 14, 2003, in a syndicated column.

One government official who has acknowledged speaking with reporters around that time was White House political aide Karl Rove, who remains under investigation.

But Libby's lawyers apparently were targeting a third official who talked with reporters during that period, including Washington Post reporter and editor Bob Woodward. The identity of that official has not been revealed.

William Jeffress, another lawyer for Libby, said at the hearing that the defense needed the information to show that other reporters were discussing Plame. Jeffress indicated the official did not work in the White House but elsewhere in government.

Update 4: Identity of Official to Be Kept From Libby - Forbes.com

2006-02-25T14:13:00.000-05:00

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, charged with perjury in the CIA leak case, cannot be told the identity of another government official who is said to have divulged a CIA operative's identity to reporters, a federal judge ruled Friday.

At the same time, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said Libby could have copies of notes he took during an 11-month period in 2003 and 2004 while serving as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The judge also set the stage for a showdown in late April over the defense's plans to subpoena reporters and news organizations for notes and other documents in the leak of Valerie Plame's identity.

During a hearing Friday afternoon, Walton said Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald can keep secret the other government official's identity because that person has not been charged and has a right to privacy.

The judge put off deciding whether Libby can have access to highly classified presidential daily briefs, summaries of intelligence on threats against the United States that Libby and Cheney received six days a week from a CIA official.

Walton said he is concerned that Libby's request could "sabotage" the case because President Bush probably will invoke executive privilege and refuse to turn over the classified reports.

"The vice president - his boss - said these are the family jewels," the judge said, referring to Cheney's past description of the daily briefings. "If the executive branch says, 'This is too important to the welfare of the nation and we're not going to comply,' the criminal prosecution goes away."

Libby, 55, was indicted last year on charges that he lied about how he learned Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters. Libby's trial is set for January 2007.

The CIA operative's identity was published in July 2003 by syndicated columnist Robert Novak after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

Libby's lawyers and Fitzgerald disagreed over whether the unidentified government official - who does not work at the White House - was referring to Plame or her husband when he said, "Everyone knows," during a taped interview with investigators.

The defense said the official meant that most reporters knew that Plame worked at the CIA, as Libby testified before a federal grand jury. But Fitzgerald said the reference was to Wilson, who was not identified in initial media reports about the trip to Niger.

Ted Wells, another Libby lawyer, said the judge shouldn't worry about provoking the president, the CIA or the media and needs to take time to make sure Libby gets the evidence he needs to defend himself.

"If it's done in a quick and dirty way, he's going to be convicted," Wells said.

Walton denied a defense request to stop Fitzgerald from filing information that only the judge can review, such as strategy memos and classified information that he wants withheld from Libby's legal team. Walton said he needs to see what Fitzgerald is withholding from the defense to ensure the prosecutor is making the correct call.

The defense was told that the White House had recently located and turned over about 250 pages of e-mails from the vice president's office. Fitzgerald, in a letter last month to the defense, had cautioned Libby's lawyers that some e-mails might be missing because the White House's archiving system had failed.

The 2 1/2-hour hearing not only kicked off the battle over how much classified information a jury will hear when Libby's case goes to trial, but also showed how cumbersome it is to deal with such secret evidence.

When Wells tried to hand Walton a blue pouch - complete with a key - containing classified documents, a court security officer called the judge's clerk over and whispered instructions, presumably on its handling.

"I would not be a good safe-breaker," Walton joked as he fumbled with the pouch's lock before opening it.

Libby's lawyers ask to dismiss perjury case on Yahoo! News

2006-02-23T18:47:00.000-05:00

Lawyers for an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, who faces perjury charges, asked a judge on Thursday to throw out the case on the grounds that the prosecutor was appointed improperly.

Since both Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former Attorney General John Ashcroft removed themselves from the investigation because of their close ties to the White House, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald reports to David Margolis, a career Justice Department lawyer.

Lawyers for Lewis "Scooter" Libby argued that because Fitzgerald does not report to the attorney general, he should not have been appointed by a deputy at the Justice Department.

"Because he was not appointed to that office by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate, he holds that authority improperly," Libby's lawyers wrote.

Fitzgerald was picked by then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey in December 2003 to investigate who leaked the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to reporters after her husband accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons to justify the 2003 invasion.

Plame's career at the CIA effectively ended after her identity was made public.

Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury about his conversations with reporters about Plame. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial in January 2007.

In other filings Libby's lawyers have argued that any inconsistencies in his testimony come from a faulty memory.

Lawyers Say Libby Needs to Refresh Memory on Plame Talk

2006-02-23T00:05:00.000-05:00

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 23, 2006; A05

Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff was so consumed with pressing national security concerns in 2003 and 2004 that he undoubtedly forgot details of conversations he had about undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, his defense lawyers argue in new court filings.

Attorneys for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby insist they need hundreds of pages of classified daily briefings prepared for President Bush to show that Libby did not intentionally lie about discussing Plame with reporters, as prosecutors allege. They contend that he was preoccupied with more serious matters when the conversations took place and when investigators questioned him months later.

Libby, 55, faces charges of committing perjury, making false statements and obstructing justice in the investigation of whether administration officials broke the law by disclosing Plame's identity to the media.

"One of the central themes of Mr. Libby's defense at trial will be that any misstatements he made during his FBI interviews or grand jury testimony were not intentional, but rather the result of confusion, mistake or faulty memory," the lawyers wrote in a court document filed late Tuesday. "Given the urgent national security issues that commanded Mr. Libby's attention, it is understandable that he may have forgotten or misremembered relatively less significant events [such as] alleged snippets of conversations about Valerie Plame Wilson's employment status."

The filing also indicated that Libby, in his first grand jury appearance in early 2004, apologized, saying his memories could be inaccurate because he read 100 to 200 pages of material a day and usually worked from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

"I can't possibly recall all of the stuff that I think is important, let alone other stuff that I don't think is as important," he said.

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald argued in court filings last week that Libby's attorneys were attempting to derail the prosecution with a "breathtaking" request for nearly a year's worth of Presidential Daily Briefs, the closely guarded document that summarizes threats to the United States and is almost never released.

In announcing Libby's indictment last October, Fitzgerald accused Libby of displaying a detailed but selective memory with investigators. Libby told prosecutors he believed he learned that Plame worked at the CIA from NBC reporter Tim Russert in a telephone call in July 2003. But he forgot that Cheney had actually told him that information the previous month, and that three days before the Russert call, Libby passed it on to then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

Today, defense lawyers are also expected to file a motion asking U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who is presiding over the case, to dismiss all charges against Libby. On Friday, Fitzgerald and the defense attorneys are scheduled to argue at a court hearing whether Fitzgerald should have to provide Libby with classified material and information about reporters and administration officials questioned in the investigation.

Libby's trial is scheduled to start in January 2007, but many legal experts predict that legal battles over such questions could delay it.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

HoustonChronicle.com - Prosecutor Resists Libby's Request

2006-02-17T12:33:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON — A former White House aide charged in the investigation of the leaking of a CIA operative's identity is seeking access to information that would threaten national security, grand jury secrecy and presidential executive privilege, a prosecutor said in court papers.

ADVERTISEMENT
Lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, are asking a federal judge to force Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to turn over evidence ranging from communications between reporters and their sources to highly sensitive intelligence briefings provided to President Bush.

Libby, 55, was indicted last year on charges that he lied about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters.

In a 32-page response to Libby's requests filed with the court late Thursday, Fitzgerald said he has turned over more than 11,000 pages of classified and unclassified evidence to the defense _ more than he is required under law.

Fitzgerald said he has given defense attorneys everything he has gathered on Libby's conversations with reporters. But the prosecutor said he is not required to give the defense the statements and testimony of reporters who will be called as government witnesses at trial.

The prosecutor also said he gave the defense documents about reporters who obtained information about Plame from sources other than Libby. But Fitzgerald said he has withheld the specifics about the reporters' sources to protect grand jury secrecy in his ongoing investigation.

Plame's identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium "yellowcake" in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

Libby's trial is set for January 2007.

A key request by the defense is for access to every Presidential Daily Brief _ a summary of the threats against the United States and its interests worldwide _ from May 2003 to March 2004.

Fitzgerald said the request amounts to 277 intelligence reports and called it "nothing short of breathtaking."

The prosecutor quoted Cheney as describing the PDBs as the "family jewels" of government, and warned U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton that turning over such highly classified documents would provoke a lengthy legal battle with the president.

"The defendant's effort to make history ... is a transparent effort at 'greymail,'" Fitzgerald said, referring to past attempts by government officials charged with wrongdoing to derail their prosecutions by trying to expose national security secrets.

Libby also is seeking access to records about Plame kept by the CIA, including any assessments of damage to national security by the public disclosure of her identity.

Fitzgerald said he does not have to prove that the disclosure damaged national security to secure a conviction of Libby for perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice.

He also said he is not required to search every government agency's files for evidence that might help Libby's defense.

Cheney disclosure may be a defense for indicted aide | www.azstarnet.com �

2006-02-16T12:45:00.002-05:00

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney disclosed Wednesday that he has the power to declassify sensitive government information, authority that could set up a criminal defense for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Cheney's disclosure comes a week after reports that Libby testified under oath he was authorized by superiors in 2003 to disclose highly sensitive prewar information to reporters. The information, about Iraq and alleged weapons of mass destruction, was used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for invading Iraq.
At the time of Libby's contacts with reporters in June and July 2003, the administration including Cheney, who was among the war's most ardent proponents, faced growing criticism. No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and Bush supporters were anxious to show that the White House had relied on prewar intelligence projecting a strong threat from such weapons.
When Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed Libby's assertions to a grand jury that he had been authorized by his superiors to spread sensitive information, the prosecutor did not specify which superiors.
But in an interview on Fox News Channel, Cheney said there is an executive order that gives the vice president, along with the president, the authority to declassify information.
"I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said. Asked for details, he said, "I don't want to get into that. There's an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously it focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president."
Cheney added a ringing endorsement of Libby.
"Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence," said Cheney. "He is a great guy. I worked with him for a long time. I have tremendous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case, and it is therefore inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case."
Libby is not charged with leaking classified information, and Libby's lawyers said last week there was no truth to a published report that Libby's lawyers had advised the court or prosecutors that he will raise a defense based on authorization by superiors.
Former Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray said Libby could point to authorization from his superiors as part of his strategy at trial.
"If it turns out that Cheney was actively involved in decisions related to the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity and if the truth of it is that he was orchestrating the disclosure of information to the media, it seems to me that's a fundamentally different case than one centered around the activities of Libby," said Ray.

Cheney disclosure may be a defense for indicted aide | www.azstarnet.com �

2006-02-16T12:45:00.001-05:00

Print Story: Cheney Says He Can Declassify Secrets on Yahoo! News

2006-02-16T12:45:00.000-05:00

Vice President Dick Cheney says he has the power to declassify government secrets, raising the possibility that he authorized his former chief of staff to pass along sensitive prewar data on Iraq to reporters.

Cheney coupled his statement in a TV interview Wednesday with an endorsement of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his ex-aide. Libby is under indictment on charges of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about disclosing the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

"Scooter is entitled to the presumption of innocence," Cheney told Fox News Channel. "He is a great guy. I worked with him for a long time. I have tremendous regard for him. I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case, and it is therefore inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case."

In a recent court filing, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald revealed Libby's assertions to a grand jury that superiors had authorized him to spread sensitive information from a National Intelligence Estimate. The administration used the NIE assessment on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction as part of its justification for going to war.

At the time of Libby's contacts with reporters in June and July 2003, the administration, including Cheney, who was among the war's most ardent proponents, faced growing criticism.

No weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and Bush supporters were anxious to show that the White House had relied on prewar intelligence projecting a strong threat from such weapons.

Fitzgerald did not specify which superiors Libby may have been referring to when he testified that higher-ups had authorized him to spread sensitive information.

But in the interview, Cheney said an executive order gives him, and President Bush, power to declassify information.

"I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said. Asked for details, he said, "I don't want to get into that. There's an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously it focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president."

Libby is not charged with leaking classified information, and his lawyers said last week that there was no truth to a published report that they had advised the court or prosecutors that Libby will raise a defense based on authorization by superiors.

A legal expert said Cheney's comments could nonetheless foreshadow a Libby defense.

Former Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray said, "If the focus is off the defendant and on to somebody else, generally for the defense that's a good day. If it turns out that Cheney was actively involved in decisions related to the disclosure of a CIA officer's identity and if the truth of it is that he was orchestrating the disclosure of information to the media, it seems to me that's a fundamentally different case than one centered around the activities of Libby."

The indictment against Libby says Cheney advised his chief of staff on June 12, 2003, that the wife of Bush administration critic and former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson worked at the CIA in the counterproliferation division.

Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the CIA, according to the indictment, which says Libby also learned of Wilson's wife's identity from the CIA and the State Department.

On July 14, 2003, the CIA identity of Valerie Plame — the maiden name of Wilson's wife — was published by columnist Robert Novak. Eight days earlier, Wilson had accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. Wilson concluded it was highly doubtful that a purported sale of uranium yellowcake by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s had ever taken place.

Libby was indicted last October on five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of Plame's identity and what he told reporters about it.

A defense that Libby was authorized to leak sensitive data about Iraq would not appear to provide any defense against the charge of making false statements regarding Plame.

But some lawyers pointed out that setting up defenses before a jury involve more than simply constructing legal arguments.

An authorization defense in the CIA leak case would mean that "much of what Libby was trying to do was aid and protect his boss Cheney," Ray suggested. The downside to employing such an approach is that it "almost comes with a defense that I did it."

Cheney Says He Can't Discuss CIA Leak Case - Yahoo! News

2006-02-15T19:07:00.001-05:00

Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday he would not discuss whether he had told a top aide to give secret information to reporters to help justify the invasion of Iraq.

"It's nothing I can talk about," Cheney said in an interview with Fox News Channel. "I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case."

Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, testified to a grand jury that he was authorized to disclose in July 2003 the contents of a classified national intelligence estimate "by his superiors," according to court documents, which did not identify the superiors. Democrats have demanded to know whether Cheney was one of those superiors, noting that there was no higher ranking aide to the vice president than Libby, who reported directly to Cheney.

Cheney said there is an executive order that gives the vice president, along with the president, the authority to declassify information. But he said, "I don't want to get into" whether he has ever done it on his own.

"I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions," Cheney said.

Libby was indicted last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he told reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information.

Plame's identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about whether Iraq sought to buy uranium in Niger.

Cheney says he may be witness in CIA leak case - Yahoo! News

2006-02-15T19:07:00.000-05:00

Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday he may be called as a witness in the case of his former aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who faces perjury and other charges in the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Cheney refused to comment on reports that he directed Libby to use classified material to discredit a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq war effort, saying: "It's nothing I can talk about."

"I've cooperated fully, including being interviewed, as well, by a special prosecutor," Cheney said in an interview on the Fox News Channel. "I may well be called as a witness at some point in the case and it's, therefore, inappropriate for me to comment on any facet of the case."

Court papers released last week show that Libby was authorized to disclose classified information to news reporters by "his superiors," in an effort to counteract diplomat Joe Wilson's charge that the Bush administration twisted intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons to justify the 2003 invasion.

The National Journal, a U.S. weekly magazine, citing attorneys familiar with the matter, reported that Cheney was among those superiors referred to in a letter from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to Libby's lawyers.

Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, has pleaded not guilty to five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice in the leak of the identity of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame, which effectively ended her career at the

CIA.

Cheney's name has surfaced in other court documents as well. According to an appeals court decision made public this month, "the vice president informed Libby 'in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion"' that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA one month before her identity was made public.

The Raw Story | Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say

2006-02-13T12:05:00.000-05:00

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.

While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan's nuclear "father," A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.

Plame declined to comment through her husband, Joseph Wilson.

Valerie Plame first became a household name when her identity was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. The column came only a week after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written an op-ed for the New York Times asserting that White House officials twisted pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Her outing was seen as political retaliation for Wilson's criticism of the Administration's claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapons program.

Her case has drawn international attention and resulted in the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is leading the probe, is still pursuing Deputy Chief of Staff and Special Advisor to President Bush, Karl Rove. His investigation remains open.

The damages

Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame's work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in "severe" damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA's ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.

Plame's team, they added, would have come in contact with A.Q. Khan's network in the course of her work on Iran.

While Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss has not submitted a formal damage assessment to Congressional oversight committees, the CIA's Directorate of Operations did conduct a serious and aggressive investigation, sources say.

Intelligence sources familiar with the damage assessment say that what is called a "counter intelligence assessment to agency operations" was conducted on the orders of the CIA's then-Deputy Director of the Directorate of Operations, James Pavitt.

Former CIA counterintelligence officer Larry Johnson believes that such an assessment would have had to be done for the CIA to have referred the case to the Justice Department.

"An exposure like that required an immediate operational and counter intelligence damage assessment," Johnson said. "That was done. The results were written up but not in a form for submission to anyone outside of CIA."

One former counterintelligence official described the CIA's reasons for not seeking Congressional assistance on the matter as follows: "[The CIA Leadership] made a conscious decision not to do a formal inquiry because they knew it might become public," the source said. "They referred it [to the Justice Department] instead because they believed a criminal investigation was needed."

The source described the findings of the assessment as showing "significant damage to operational equities."

Another counterintelligence official, also wishing to remain anonymous due to the nature of the subject matter, described "operational equities" as including both people and agency operations that involve the "cover mechanism," "front companies," and other CIA officers and assets.

Three intelligence officers confirmed that other CIA non-official cover officers were compromised, but did not indicate the number of people operating under non-official cover that were affected or the way in which these individuals were impaired. None of the sources would say whether there were American or foreign casualties as a result of the leak.

Several intelligence officials described the damage in terms of how long it would take for the agency to recover. According to their own assessment, the CIA would be impaired for up to "ten years" in its capacity to adequately monitor nuclear proliferation on the level of efficiency and accuracy it had prior to the White House leak of Plame Wilson's identity.

A.Q. Khan

While Plame's work did not specifically focus on the A.Q. Khan ring, named after Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the network and its impact on nuclear proliferation and the region should not be minimized, primarily because the Khan network was the major supplier of WMD technology for Iran.

Dr. Khan instituted the proliferation market during the 1980s and supplied many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere with uranium enrichment technology, including Libya, Iran and North Korea. Enriched uranium is used to make weaponized nuclear devices.

The United States forced the Pakistan government to dismiss Khan for his proliferation activities in March of 2001, but he remains largely free and acts as an adviser to the Pakistani government.

According to intelligence expert John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, U.S. officials were not aware of the extent of the proliferation until around the time of Khan's dismissal.

"It slowly dawned on them that the collaboration between Pakistan, North Korea and Iran was an ongoing and serious problem," Pike said. "It was starting to sink in on them that it was one program doing business in three locations and that anything one of these countries had they all had."

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan became the United States' chief regional ally in the war on terror.

The revelation that Iran was the focal point of Plame's work raises new questions as to possible other motivating factors in the White House's decision to reveal the identity of a CIA officer working on tracking a WMD supply network to Iran, particularly when the very topic of Iran's possible WMD capability is of such concern to the Administration.

WSJ.com - Cheney Role Risks Political Fallout

2006-02-12T17:23:00.001-05:00

CIA-Leak Case May Hand
War Critics Momentum,
But Legal Issues Are Slim
By ANNE MARIE SQUEO and JOHN D. MCKINNON
February 11, 2006; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- The disclosure that Vice President Dick Cheney may have authorized his former chief of staff to release classified information to justify the war in Iraq has political consequences for the White House, but the legal fallout may be muted.

Mr. Cheney, in his role as second-in-command of the country, has significant leeway, albeit not as much as the president, to declassify information. The information I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff, said he was authorized by his superiors to discuss with reporters was the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate titled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction."

The 90-page report, prepared by the National Intelligence Council for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was prepared in advance of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and became the subject of intense focus in mid-2003, after weapons inspectors failed to find evidence that Saddam Hussein had been building such weapons. Mr. Libby has been indicted on charges of lying and obstruction of justice related to a federal probe into whether administration officials intentionally blew the cover of a CIA official.

"The president can declassify anything," William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor and expert on national-security law, said. While the president would have to amend his own executive order governing secrets in order to declassify something on the fly, that can be accomplished very informally, even orally and in secret. "He could do it on a cocktail napkin," Mr. Banks said.

The vice president's authority to declassify is less clear. Some legal scholars believe that Mr. Cheney would share in the president's authority, as an elected official. Alternatively, the president could delegate his declassification authority to the vice president.

"The classification system is rooted for the most part not in statute but in executive order. ...In the case of the NIE, the White House was free to declassify it at a moment's notice," said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, which favors increased public access to government information.

On July 18, 2003, the administration, facing criticism for the intelligence used to justify the war, declassified an eight-page part of the NIE dubbed "key judgments" and conducted a lengthy background briefing with reporters to discuss it.

As such, the trial of Mr. Libby, scheduled to start early next year, is likely to resurrect a sensitive issue for the Bush administration going into November's midterm congressional elections: the rationale for the Iraq war and tactics used to quell criticism.

The implication from the disclosure that Mr. Libby had authority to discuss sensitive intelligence matters with the press "is that the White House -- the vice president -- has been using his declassification authority as a way to advance the administration's political agenda," said Mr. Aftergood. "In other words, information that supports the administration's position on Iraq or whatever is selectively declassified and other information is not. That's not a criminal offense, but it's kind of sleazy."

The investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to the media continues, though Mr. Libby has been the only one charged. The five-count indictment against him doesn't actually allege he leaked Ms. Plame's name or that he disclosed classified information. Yet both factors are expected to factor into the government's case against him.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed Mr. Libby's authorization to release NIE information in a letter to Mr. Libby's defense team last month. That letter, which recapped discussions between the two sides in the case, was filed with the court as part of a motion to compel Mr. Fitzgerald to turn over information he had refused to provide. A judge is expected to rule on the matter in coming weeks.

Mr. Fitzgerald doesn't say in the court filings that Mr. Libby's superiors gave him permission to disclose Ms. Plame's identity. A 1982 federal law makes it illegal to intentionally blow the cover of a covert agent, potentially endangering the agent's life and those with whom the agent works. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald declined comment.

Mr. Fitzgerald makes clear in his letter that his interest in mentioning the authorization isn't to show some motive or intent. Rather, he notes that Mr. Libby's discussions with reporters, where he is alleged to have discussed Ms. Plame's identity, are "inextricably linked" to the administration's efforts to shore up support for the war, in part by citing the intelligence report.

Mr. Libby's attorneys have said they don't plan to raise a defense based on authorization by superiors. In recent court filings, they have indicated that they are likely to focus on the demands of Mr. Libby's job and suggest that any inconsistencies between his testimony and other facts are the result of a mistake, not an intent to lie.

Ms. Plame, who has since retired from the CIA, was first named in a newspaper column by Robert Novak on July 14, 2003, that cited two senior administration officials. That article and subsequent ones discussed White House reaction to public criticism of the war a week earlier by Ms. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Mr. Wilson had been sent by the CIA to check out claims that Iraq had sought uranium ore, critical to making nuclear weapons, from Niger, and found no evidence to support that.

Senators: Cheney Should Be Probed in Leak on Yahoo! News

2006-02-12T17:23:00.000-05:00

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald should investigate Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the CIA leak probe if they authorized an aide to give secret information to reporters, Democratic and Republican senators said Sunday.

Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record), D-R.I., called the leak of intelligence information "inappropriate" if it is true that unnamed "superiors" instructed Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to divulge the material on Iraq.

Sen. George Allen (news, bio, voting record), R-Va., said a full investigation is necessary.

"I don't think anybody should be releasing classified information, period, whether in the Congress, executive branch or some underling in some bureaucracy," said Allen, who appeared with Reed on "Fox News Sunday."

According to court documents disclosed last week, Libby told a federal grand jury that he disclosed in July 2003 the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate as part of the Bush administration's defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq.

Fitzgerald said in the documents it was his understanding that "Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors."

The White House has refused to comment on the case.

"I think this calls into question in terms of Fitzgerald's investigation of the conduct of the vice president and others," Reed said. "I think he has to look closely at their behavior."

Allen expressed confidence in Fitzgerald, whom he called "a very articulate, professional prosecutor."

"And I think the facts will lead wherever they lead, and I think he will prosecute as appropriate," Allen said.

Libby, 55, was indicted on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he told reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information.

The Columbus Dispatch - National/International

2006-02-11T10:29:00.000-05:00

Saturday, February 11, 2006
Alan Johnson
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson charged yesterday that he and his wife, ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, are victims of character assassination by the Bush White House.

"This administration used national security information for political ends, notably to compromise my wife’s identify as a CIA clandestine officer. There is no doubt about that," Wilson said at the Ohio Newspaper Association’s annual meeting in Columbus.

But the 25-year diplomat, who also served under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, said the issue is much larger.

"This is not just about two people. This is a debate over what sort of country are we."

Wilson offered an insider assessment of the Iraq war and the Bush administration in a candid 45-minute speech at the Hyatt on Capitol Square.

"What I worry about, and what all Americans should worry about, is the extent to which the national security rationale for collecting information was perverted by political types for political reasons."

White House spokesman Allen K. Abney would not respond directly.

"He’s making all these comments in the context of an ongoing investigation," Abney said. "We’re not going to comment on this."

Wilson came under scrutiny in 2003 after he challenged President Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union address that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa in an effort to build a nuclear arsenal.

Having been assigned to check out that allegation on a trip to Niger in 2002, and finding it without basis, Wilson said he was surprised to see the president use it as a rationale for the Iraq war.

"It was . . . my duty to call my government to account."

He did that in a 1,500-word New York Times opinion-page piece titled "What I Did Not Find in Africa."

Shortly after that, columnist Robert Novak disclosed the identity of Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative, possibly in violation of federal law forbidding disclosure of people in sensitive intelligence positions. Wilson said it was Bush administration retaliation.

The disclosure triggered a federal investigation that led to Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, and resulted in the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Associated Press reported Thursday that documents filed by federal special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicate that Libby told a federal grand jury that his superiors approved leaking sensitive security information to the news media to support the Iraq invasion.

Wilson said the administration misled the American people about the invasion.

"I believe . . . that when you send your soldiers, sailors, Air Force and Marines off to kill and to die in the name of the American people, we need to know precisely what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, why we’re asking them to pay that price."

The "longest-lasting wound" of the war, Wilson said, will be losing "our ability to lead the world."

While Wilson acknowledged that he and his wife are facing formidable opponents, he dismissed it as insignificant compared to his challenges as ambassador in Iraq during the Gulf war.

"If in your life you’ve been able to face down Saddam Hussein, facing down the likes Scooter Libby isn’t all that challenging."

Wilson, who is a registered Democrat, supported U.S. Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign. He has also written a book, The Politics of Truth.

Aaron McLear, spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said, "Joe Wilson’s insatiable quest for the limelight continues to be long on selfpromotion and short on facts. Misstatements, inaccuracies, partisan rants and outright untruths have been hallmarks of his sensational attempts to smear this administration while promoting his favorite product: Joe Wilson."

Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks - Yahoo! News

2006-02-09T21:34:00.001-05:00

By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer

A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that his superiors authorized him to give secret information to reporters as part of the Bush administration's defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq, according to court papers.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in documents filed last month that he plans to introduce evidence that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, disclosed to reporters the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate in the summer of 2003.

The NIE is a report prepared by the head of the nation's intelligence operations for high-level government officials, up to and including the president. Portions of NIEs are sometimes declassified and made public. It is unclear whether that happened in this instance.

In a Jan. 23 letter to Libby's lawyers, Fitzgerald said Libby also testified before the grand jury that he caused at least one other government official to discuss an intelligence estimate with reporters in July 2003.

"We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors," Fitzgerald wrote.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to comment. "Our policy is that we are not going to discuss this when it's an ongoing legal proceeding," he said.

William Jeffress, Libby's lawyer, said, "There is no truth at all" to suggestions that Libby would try to shift blame to his superiors as a defense against the charges.

Libby, 55, was indicted late last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information from an intelligence estimate report.

Plame's identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq.

On Thursday, Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., said Cheney should take responsibility if he authorized Libby to share classified information with reporters.

"These charges, if true, represent a new low in the already sordid case of partisan interests being placed above national security," Kennedy said. "The vice president's vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious. If he used classified information to defend it, he should be prepared to take full responsibility."

In the summer of 2003, White House officials — including Libby — were frustrated that the media were incorrectly reporting that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger and had received a report of his findings in Africa before the war in Iraq had begun.

In an effort to counter those reports, Libby and other White House officials sought information from the CIA regarding Wilson and how his trip to Niger came about, according to court records.

Fitzgerald, in his letter to Libby's lawyers, said he plans to use Libby's grand jury testimony to support evidence pertaining to the White House aide's meeting with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

During the meeting with Miller on July 8, Libby also discussed Plame, Fitzgerald said. "Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain," the prosecutor wrote.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her source.

Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks - Yahoo! News

2006-02-09T21:34:00.000-05:00

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information (02/09/2006)

2006-02-09T13:28:00.000-05:00

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Feb. 9, 2006

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Beyond what was stated in the court paper, say people with firsthand knowledge of the matter, Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.

Previous coverage of the CIA leak investigation from Murray Waas

Libby testified to the grand jury that he had been authorized to share parts of the NIE with journalists in the summer of 2003 as part of an effort to rebut charges then being made by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make a public case for war.

Wilson had been sent on a CIA-sponsored mission to investigate allegations that the African nation of Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon. Despite the fact that Wilson reported back that the information was most likely baseless, it was still used in the President's 2003 State of the Union speech to make the case for war.

But besides sharing details of the NIE with reporters during the effort to rebut Wilson, Libby is also accused of telling journalists that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, had worked for the CIA. Libby and other Bush administration officials believed that if Plame played a role in the selection of her husband for the Niger mission, that fact might discredit him.

A federal grand jury indicted Libby on October 28, 2005, on five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice, alleging that he concealed his role in leaking information about Plame to the media. He resigned his positions as chief of staff and national security adviser to Cheney the same day. Libby has never claimed that Cheney encouraged him to disclose information about Plame to the media.

In a January 23 letter, related to discovery issues for Libby's upcoming trial, Fitzgerald wrote to Libby's attorneys: "Mr. Libby testified in the grand jury that he had contact with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the National Intelligence Estimate ("NIE") … in the course of his interaction with reporters in June and July 2003.… We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors."

Although it is not known if Cheney had told the special prosecutor that he had authorized Libby to leak classified information to reporters, Dan Richman, a professor of law at Fordham University and a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, said, "One certainly would not expect Libby, as part of his defense, to claim some sort of clear authorization from Cheney where none existed, because that would clearly risk the government's calling Cheney to rebut that claim."

The public correspondence does not mention the identities of the "superiors" who authorized the leaking of the classified information, but people with firsthand knowledge of the matter identified one of them as Cheney. Libby also testified that he worked closely with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in deciding what information to leak to the press to build public support for the war, and later, postwar, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence.

In the correspondence, Fitzgerald also asserted that Libby testified that he had met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003, with the "purpose" of intending "to transmit information" to her "concerning the NIE."

That particular meeting has been key to Fitzgerald's investigation because the special prosecutor alleges that Libby lied both to the FBI and to his federal grand jury by saying that he had not discussed Plame with Miller on that date, when in fact he did tell her of Plame's work for the CIA.

In an account of her grand jury testimony, Miller has written that Libby discussed the NIE with her: "Mr. Libby also cited a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced by American intelligence agencies in October 2002 … which he said had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium." Portions of the NIE were later declassified, but the material in it related to Niger was still classified at the time.

Libby, through a spokesperson, declined to comment, and the vice president, through a spokesperson, also declined to comment for this story.

The new disclosure that Libby has claimed that the vice president and others in the White House had authorized him to release information to make the case to go to war, and later to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence, is significant for several reasons. First, it significantly adds to a mounting body of information that Cheney played a central and personal role in directing efforts to counter claims by Wilson and other administration critics that the Bush administration had misused intelligence information to go to war with Iraq.

Second, it raises additional questions about Libby's motives in concealing his role in leaking Plame's name to the press, if he was in fact more broadly authorized by Cheney and others to rebut former Ambassador Wilson's charges. The federal grand jury indictment of Libby alleges that he had lied to the FBI and the federal grand jury by claiming that when he provided information to reporters about Plame's CIA employment, he was only passing along what he understood to be unverified gossip that he had heard from other journalists.

Instead, the indictment charges that Libby had in fact learned of Plame's CIA status from at least four government officials, Cheney among them, and from classified documents. Indeed, much of Libby's earliest and most detailed information regarding Plame's CIA employment came directly from the vice president, according to information in Libby's grand jury indictment. "On or about June 12, 2003," the indictment stated, "Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division."

Libby testified that Cheney told him about Plame "in an off sort of, curiosity sort of, fashion," according to other information recently unsealed in federal court. Not long after that date, Libby, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and a third administration official began to tell reporters that Plame had worked at the CIA, and that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger.

Finally, the new information indicates that Libby is likely to pursue a defense during his trial that he was broadly "authorized" by Cheney and other "superiors" to defend the Bush administration in making the case to go to war. Libby does not, however, appear to be claiming that he was acting specifically on Cheney's behalf in disclosing information about Plame to the press.

Libby's legal strategy in asserting that Cheney and other Bush administration officials authorized activities related to the underlying allegations of criminal conduct leveled against him, without approving of or encouraging him to engage in the specific misconduct, is reminiscent of the defense strategy used by Oliver North, who was a National Security Council official in the Reagan administration.

North, a Marine lieutenant colonel assigned to the National Security Council, implemented the Reagan administration's efforts to covertly send arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages held in the Middle East, and to covertly fund and provide military assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras at a time when federal law prohibited such activities. Later, it was discovered that North and other Reagan administration officials had diverted funds they had received from the Iranian arms sales to covertly fund the Contras.

If Libby's defense adopts strategies used by North, it might be in part because the strategies largely worked for North and in part because Libby's defense team has quietly retained John D. Cline, who was a defense attorney for North. Cline, a San-Francisco partner at the Jones Day law firm, has specialized in the use of classified information in defending clients charged with wrongdoing in national security cases.

Among his detractors, Cline is what is known as a "graymail" specialist-an attorney who, critics say, purposely makes onerous demands on the federal government to disclose classified information in the course of defending his clients, in an effort to force the government to dismiss the charges. Although Cline declined to be interviewed for this story, he has said that the use of classified information is necessary in assuring that defendants are accorded due process and receive fair trials.

In the Libby case, Cline has frustrated prosecutors by demanding, as part of pretrial discovery, more than 10 months of the President's Daily Brief, or PDBs, the president's morning intelligence briefing. The reports are among the most highly classified documents in government, not only because they often contain sensitive intelligence and methods, but also because they indicate what the president and policy makers consider to be the most pressing national security threats. In the past, the Bush administration has defied bipartisan requests from the Intelligence committees in Congress to turn over PDBs for review.

After Cline demanded the PDBs, Fitzgerald wrote to him on January 9 that the prosecutor's office has only "received a very discrete amount of material relating to PDBs" and "never requested copies of PDBs" themselves, in part because "they are extraordinarily sensitive documents which are usually highly classified." Moreover, Fitzgerald wrote, only a relatively small number of PDB pages included reference to Wilson's trip to Niger.

But Cline has insisted that it is imperative for his client's defense to be able to review the PDBs because part of Libby's defense is that he may have had a faulty memory regarding conversations he had with government officials and reporters regarding Plame, in that he had so many other pressing issues to consider every day as chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president.

In a January 31 court filing, attorneys for Libby argued: "Mr. Libby will show that, in the constant rush of more pressing matters, any errors he made in FBI interviews or grand jury testimony, months after the conversations, were the result of confusion, mistake, faulty memory, rather than a willful intent to deceive."

In the North case, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, was forced to dismiss many of the central charges against North, including the most serious ones-that North defrauded taxpayers by diverting proceeds from arms sales to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras-because intelligence agencies and the Reagan administration refused to declassify documents necessary for a trial on those charges.

Walsh and many of his deputies believed that the Reagan Justice Department refused to declassify documents necessary to try North because officials were personally sympathetic to him. A North trial would also have politically embarrassed the Reagan administration, and a North conviction might have led to charges against higher officials.

In court filings, Walsh said that much of what intelligence agencies and the Reagan administration had refused to declassify had long before been published in the media or made public in some other way.

"It was a backdoor way of shutting us down," said one former Iran-Contra prosecutor, who spoke only on the condition that his name not be used, because his current position as a private attorney requires frequent dealings with attorneys who were on the other side of the North case at the time. "It was a cover-up by means of an administrative action, and it was an effective cover-up at that."

The former prosecutor added: "The intelligence agencies do not declassify things on the pretext that they are protecting state secrets, but the truth is that we were investigating and prosecuting their own. The same was true for the Reagan administration. Cline was particularly adept at working the system."

Is it possible that a prosecution of Libby might be impeded or even derailed entirely by the refusal of the Bush White House or its Justice Department to declassify information that might be necessary to try Libby? "Under the current statute, it may well be the attorney general's call-or whomever he designates-to ultimately decide what should be declassified, and what might not be, in the Libby case," said Michael Bromwich, a former associate Iran-Contra independent counsel and a former Justice Department inspector general.

William Treanor, the dean of Fordham University's Law School, and also a former associate Iran-contra special counsel, said that it is less likely that the Bush administration would challenge Fitzgerald as former administrations did with special prosecutors. Walsh, dealing with the Reagan and elder Bush administrations, and Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, dealing with the Clinton administration, often alleged that political appointees in the Justice Department worked purposely to undermine their investigations.

"Walsh and Starr were not appointed by an attorney general," Treanor said, noting that Walsh, Starr, and earlier special prosecutors had been appointed by a three-judge federal panel instead of by the Justice Department. Currently, he pointed out, special prosecutors are appointed by the attorney general or their designate.

"With Walsh or Starr, the president and his supporters could more easily argue that a prosecutor was overzealous or irresponsible, because there had been a three-judge panel that appointed him," Treanor said. "With Fitzgerald, you have a prosecutor who was appointed by the deputy attorney general [at the direction of the attorney general]. The administration almost has to stand behind him because this is someone they selected themselves. It is harder to criticize someone you yourself put into play."

There are other reasons why it might prove difficult to undercut Fitzgerald, including outstanding questions about the role that Cheney and others in the Bush administration played in the effort to discredit Wilson, and the fact that Cheney is still the point man in defending the White House's use of prewar intelligence on Iraq.

And the new disclosure, that Libby is alleging that Cheney and other Bush administration officials "authorized" him to disclose classified information as a means to counter charges that the administration misused prewar intelligence, might also make it difficult for this administration to refuse to declassify information for Libby's trial.

But a Libby defense strategy asserting that he released classified information or took other actions as broadly authorized by Cheney might have other advantages, if the North case is any guide. At North's trial, the counts on which the jury acquitted him tended to be those involving actions that appeared to be authorized by superiors. He was found guilty of three felonies on which the evidence indicated that he was acting on his own initiative or for his own financial benefit.

"It was a memorable and powerful moment when North told the jury that he was 'a pawn in a chess game played by giants,'" Treanor said.

The claims by North that his activities had been broadly authorized by higher-ups, including even the president, also worked to his advantage when he was sentenced. Despite the fact that North had been convicted of three felonies and that Iran-Contra prosecutors argued before sentencing that letting North off with "only a slap on the wrist … would send exactly the wrong message … [only] 15 years after Watergate," he was sentenced to only probation, a fine, and community service.

North's trial judge, U.S. District Court Judge Gerhard Gesell, took note that the jury had acquitted North of criminal charges mainly where it appeared that his conduct might have been authorized by higher authorities: "Observing that many others involved in the events were escaping without censure or with prosecutorial promises of leniency or immunities, [the jury] used their common sense. And they gave you the benefit of a reasonable doubt."

Explaining his own leniency in sentencing the former NSC aide, Gesell told North: "I do not believe you were a leader at all, but really a low-ranking subordinate to carry out initiatives of a few cynical superiors. You came to be a point man in a very complex power play developed by higher-ups."

Later, North's convictions were overturned on appeal because of concerns that some of the evidence used against him during his trial might have been derived from his testimony before the House-Senate Iran-Contra investigating committee. North had been given immunity for that testimony.

But most outside legal observers say that Libby, because he was himself such a high-ranking official, will most likely face a much more difficult time than North did in arguing that, in some of his activities, he was just carrying out orders from Cheney or other senior White House officials.

"A defendant can make a claim that he is just a victim of Washington politics or doing the bidding for someone else," said Richman, the former prosecutor, "But there may be limits to a jury's sympathy when that defendant himself was so high-ranking. Given Libby's position in the White House, the jury is less likely to view him as a sacrificial lamb than as a sacrificial ram."

New Details Revealed on C.I.A. Leak Case - New York Times

2006-02-05T11:59:00.000-05:00

By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff told prosecutors that Mr. Cheney had informed him "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion" in mid-June 2003 about the identity of the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak case, according to a formerly secret legal opinion, parts of which were made public on Friday.

The newly released pages were part of a legal opinion written in February 2005 by Judge David S. Tatel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His opinion disclosed that the former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., acknowledged to prosecutors that he had heard directly from Mr. Cheney about the Central Intelligence Agency officer, Valerie Wilson, more than a month before her identity was first publicly disclosed on July 14, 2003, by a newspaper columnist.

"Nevertheless," Judge Tatel wrote, "Libby maintains that he was learning about Wilson's wife's identity for the first time when he spoke with NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert on July 10 or 11." Mr. Russert denied Mr. Libby's account. Ms. Wilson is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who has criticized the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

Over all, the new material amplified and provided new details on charges outlined in the October 2005 indictment against Mr. Libby. The indictment accused Mr. Libby of falsely telling investigators that he had first learned about Ms. Wilson from reporters, when he had, according to the charging document, learned of it from other government officials like Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Libby appeared in federal court in Washington on Friday for the first time in several months. A federal trial judge, Reggie B. Walton, set a calendar that means Mr. Libby's trial will not begin for at least 11 months, with jury selection to begin on Jan. 8, 2007.

Judge Walton had hoped to start the trial in the fall of 2006 but Mr. Libby's chief lawyer, Theodore V. Wells Jr., said he would be involved in another trial at that time.

Judge Tatel's comments in the formerly secret legal opinion were largely drawn from affidavits supplied by the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, that were written nearly two years ago, in August 2004. At that time, Mr. Fitzgerald was seeking to compel grand jury testimony from two reporters, Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine.

By that point, the newly disclosed pages showed, Mr. Fitzgerald had centered his inquiry on possible perjury charges against Mr. Libby, although that was not publicly known at the time. Mr. Fitzgerald had abandoned a prosecution based on a federal law that makes it a crime to disclose the identity of a covert officer at the C.I.A. Such charges, Judge Tatel wrote, were "currently off the table for lack of evidence."

Judge Tatel wrote his opinion as part of a unanimous decision by the three-judge panel which ruled on Feb. 15, 2005, that Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper had potentially vital evidentiary information and could not refuse to testify to the grand jury in the leak case on First Amendment grounds.

In a separate affidavit filed by Mr. Fitzgerald and disclosed Friday, the prosecutor wrote that Mr. Libby had testified that he had forgotten the conversation with Mr. Cheney when he talked to Mr. Russert. "Further according to Mr. Libby, he did not recall his conversation with the Vice President even when Russert allegedly told him about Wilson's wife's employment."

About eight pages of Judge Tatel's concurring opinion were deleted from the opinion released in 2005. After Mr. Libby's indictment, lawyers for The Wall Street Journal went to court and succeeded in obtaining the material released Friday by order of the same three-judge panel.

Not all of the previously withheld material was released. Several pages, which apparently contained information about Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation of Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, remained under seal. Mr. Rove has not been charged, but remains under investigation although his lawyer has expressed confidence that Mr. Rove will be cleared.

The release of new material represented an important First Amendment ruling for the right of public access to court records, said Theodore J. Boutros Jr., a lawyer for The Journal. "We're pleased that the court recognized that grand jury secrecy is not absolute and that there's an important public interest in the public being able to scrutinize the basis for a judicial decision."

The newly disclosed information provides new details about other events, like a previously reported lunch on July 7, 2003, in which Mr. Libby told Ari Fleischer, then the White House press secretary, about Ms. Wilson.

In his opinion, Judge Tatel said that Mr. Fleischer said that Mr. Libby had told him that Ms. Wilson sent had her husband on a trip to Africa to examine intelligence reports indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium ore from Niger.

Judge Tatel wrote that Mr. Fleischer had described the lunch to prosecutors as having been "kind of weird" and had noted that Mr. Libby typically "operated in a very closed-lip fashion." Judge Tatel added: "Fleischer recalled that Libby 'added something along the lines of, you know, this is hush hush, nobody knows about this. This is on the q.t.' "

Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting for this article.

The Cia Leak: Plame Was Still Covert - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com

2006-02-05T11:26:00.000-05:00

Feb. 13, 2006 issue - Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. Lawyers for Libby, and White House allies, have repeatedly questioned whether Plame, the wife of White House critic Joe Wilson, really had covert status when she was outed to the media in July 2003. But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion. (A CIA spokesman at the time is quoted as saying Plame was "unlikely" to take further trips overseas, though.) Fitzgerald concluded he could not charge Libby for violating a 1982 law banning the outing of a covert CIA agent; apparently he lacked proof Libby was aware of her covert status when he talked about her three times with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Fitzgerald did consider charging Libby with violating the so-called Espionage Act, which prohibits the disclosure of "national defense information," the papers show; he ended up indicting Libby for lying about when and from whom he learned about Plame.

The new papers show Libby testified he was told about Plame by Cheney "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion" in mid-June—before he talked about her with Miller and Time magazine's Matt Cooper. Libby's trial has been put off until January 2007, keeping Cheney off the witness stand until after the elections. A spokeswoman for Libby's lawyers declined to comment on Plame's status.

—Michael Isikoff

More Allegations of Libby Lies Revealed

2006-02-03T22:51:00.000-05:00

Judge's Report Shows Cheney Aide Is Accused Of Broad Deception

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 4, 2006; A03

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case alleged that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff was engaged in a broader web of deception than was previously known and repeatedly lied to conceal that he had been a key source for reporters about undercover operative Valerie Plame, according to court records released yesterday.

The records also show that by August 2004, early in his investigation of the disclosure of Plame's identity, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald had concluded that he did not have much of a case against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for illegally leaking classified information. Instead, Fitzgerald was focused on charging Cheney's top aide with perjury and making false statements, and knew he needed to question reporters to prove it.

The court records show that Libby denied to a grand jury that he ever mentioned Plame or her CIA job to then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer or then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller in separate conversations he had with each of them in early July 2003. The records also suggest that Libby did not disclose to investigators that he first spoke to Miller about Plame in June 2003, and that prosecutors learned of the nature of the conversation only when Miller finally testified late in the fall of 2005.

All three specific allegations are contained in previously redacted sections of a U.S. Court of Appeals opinion that were released yesterday. The opinion analyzed Fitzgerald's secret evidence to determine whether his case warranted ordering reporters to testify about their confidential conversations with sources.

Fitzgerald revealed none of these specifics when he publicly announced Libby's indictment in October on charges of making false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice.

The once-sealed portions of the federal court opinion were written in February 2005 by U.S. Circuit Judge David S. Tatel, who was a member of a three-judge panel that agreed with Fitzgerald that the testimony of two reporters, Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, was crucial to his investigation.

Yesterday, the same panel concluded that because Libby was indicted and now faced public charges, the court no longer had to keep secret many of the details of the grand jury investigation that Tatel analyzed. Dow Jones Inc., parent company of the Wall Street Journal, had petitioned the court to release the eight-page Tatel opinion. Three of the pages were redacted.

Attorneys for Libby and Fleischer and a spokesman for Fitzgerald declined to comment yesterday.

Since January 2004, Fitzgerald has been investigating whether senior Bush administration officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity to discredit allegations made by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Plame's name and her CIA role was first mentioned publicly in a column by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003, eight days after Wilson publicly accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify a war with Iraq.

According to Tatel's summary of the evidence that Fitzgerald presented in the court's chambers in August 2004, the prosecutor had at least a good circumstantial case on perjury but charging Libby with intentionally leaking classified information was "currently off the table," though it could be "viable" if he gained new evidence.

Tatel wrote that interviewing Miller would be crucial to making that decision, because Libby might have mentioned to her that he knew Plame's status was covert. He concluded that simply lying about a national security matter was serious enough to warrant ordering the reporters to testify about their conversations with Libby.

"While it is true that on the current record the special counsel's strongest charges are for perjury and false statements rather than security-related crimes ... perjury in this context is itself a crime with national security implications," he wrote.

The information gives a fuller picture of the case that Fitzgerald will likely put on against Libby. Yesterday, a federal judge scheduled his trial to start on Jan. 8, 2007.

In public remarks about the indictment, Fitzgerald has accused Libby of lying when he said that he believed he first learned of Plame from NBC reporter Tim Russert and passed along that information strictly as unverified gossip to Miller and Cooper.

Tatel's opinion also includes previously unknown details about testimony by Libby and other officials. For example, Libby acknowledged to investigators that Cheney told him in mid-June 2003 about Plame's CIA role and said she helped send her husband on a mission to Niger to determine whether Iraq was seeking nuclear material from the African nation.

That was soon after a Washington Post article on Wilson's Niger trip appeared. Libby emphasized in his testimony that Cheney only said it "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion."

Fitzgerald also contended that Libby lied to the grand jury when he said he never mentioned Plame or her CIA job to Fleischer when they had lunch on July 7. Fleischer recalled before the grand jury that Libby did mention Plame and said she worked in the "counterproliferation area of the CIA". Fleischer said Libby stressed that "the vice president did not send Ambassador Wilson to Niger ... the CIA sent Ambassador Wilson to Niger ... he was sent by his wife."

Fleischer added that he thought the lunch was "kind of weird" because the normally "closed-lip" Libby was sharing confidences and remarking that the information was "hush-hush" and "on the q.t."

Libby was also asked about two July conversations he had with Miller. He said he never mentioned Wilson's wife to Miller in the first conversation but passed along some information another reporter told him about Plame in the second, according to the documents.

Miller testified last year, however, that she thought Libby was the first government official to mention Wilson's wife to her and that he did so in three conversations: on June 23, when she visited his office in the Executive Office Building, and on July 8 and 12.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Trial set for early next year in Libby case - Yahoo! News

2006-02-03T14:46:00.000-05:00

By Andy Sullivan and James Vicini

A federal judge on Friday set a January 2007 trial date for a former top White House aide facing perjury and other charges in the leak of a CIA operative's identity, pushing the trial past November's congressional elections.

The judge said jury selection would begin on January 8 in the case of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. He faces five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice.

Libby, who attended the hearing, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which stem from a special prosecutor's investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the news media in 2003, effectively ending her career at the spy agency.

Her identity was disclosed after her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify the war in Iraq.

President George W. Bush's main political adviser, Karl Rove, remains under investigation in the Plame case.

A trial could put a spotlight on how the White House made its case for the Iraq war and raise questions about the role of the news media and whether reporters should have to testify in court.

Lawyers on both sides of Libby's case said they needed time to examine classified government material, resolve a dispute over what evidence should be shared and address legal issues over the involvement of reporters who may have to testify at trial.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton had said he had hoped to start the trial in early September. That would have placed the monthlong trial right before the November elections in which corruption and the Iraq war will be key issues.

LIBBY LAWYER BUSY IN SEPTEMBER

Walton, a Bush appointee, said Libby's main lawyer would be tied up with a 10-week trial around September and instead set the date for early January.

Walton asked Libby if he accepted the yearlong wait before a trial. "Yes," the somber-looking Libby said from the defense table in the only time he spoke during the 45-minute hearing.

Afterward, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald declined to comment but defense lawyer Theodore Wells said he was happy with the trial date.

"The January 8 date will permit us the time we need to prepare Mr. Libby's defense," Wells told reporters.

Fitzgerald told the judge he had turned over all relevant information, including an additional 1,000 pages this week, but Wells urged the judge to force Fitzgerald to turn over even more material.

"We believe there are thousands and thousands and thousands of pages that Mr. Fitzgerald is in possession of that he has decided not to give to us," Wells said.

Wells said in the next three weeks he expected to file a motion arguing that the indictment should be dismissed. He gave no details.

Wells said it was taking longer than expected to review the classified material because defense lawyers do not have a special photocopier.

Deciphering Libby's handwritten notes posed a challenge to the prosecution, Wells said.

"We're trying to work something out where Mr. Libby can help them read his notes," he said.

The Raw Story | Court filings shed more light on CIA leak investigation

2006-02-02T16:22:00.000-05:00

02/02/2006 @ 12:28 pm
Filed by John Byrne and Ron Brynaert

Third Time reporter, named in filings, says he has not testified in case

Advertisement
A series of striking revelations have emerged after the release of dozens of pages of court files in the CIA leak investigation that have gone unnoticed by the mainstream media, RAW STORY has found.

Some of them have been uncovered by astute bloggers – including the fact that the outed agent’s husband will not testify at a trial, and that a third Time reporter has been fingered as having information potentially relevant to some aspects of the case.

Moreover, the documents reveal that no formal damage assessment has been done with regard to how the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame affected the agency’s operations worldwide. They also hint that Vice President Cheney’s former Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby may have outed Plame on the orders of his “superiors.”

Fitzgerald’s Jan. 23 letter was penned in response to a series of telephone conversations, letters, and motions filed by Libby, who was indicted for obstructing justice in the Plame investigation. Libby has sought to force the prosecutor to turn over more information about his case to bolster his defense.

In the letter, Fitzgerald notes that a third Time Magazine reporter – who now serves as Slate’s chief political correspondent – had conversations with Administration officials about a trip conducted by Plame’s husband to investigate claims that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger.

"We also advise you that we understand that reporter John Dickerson of Time magazine discussed the trip by Mr. Wilson with government officials at some time on July 11 or after, subsequent to Mr. Cooper learning about Mr. Wilson’s wife," Fitzgerald writes. "Any conversations involving Mr. Dickerson likely took place in Africa and occurred after July 11."

Matt Cooper, also a Time reporter, testified that Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove had cautioned him to play down the Wilson trip. Wilson, an ardent Bush critic, said he found no evidence to support claims that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium in order to build a nuclear weapon. Such claims were a keystone in the Administration’s efforts to convince the United States and Congress to support a pre-emptive war.

Reporter says he hasn’t been contacted in case

Dickerson told RAW STORY in an email message Thursday morning that he has not been contacted by the prosecutor.

“I didn't know I was mentioned in the court filings until I saw it on the web,” he said. “I've never been contacted by anyone in Fitzgerald's office.”

From July 8 to July 12, 2003, President Bush took a five-country tour of Africa, accompanied by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. A pool of reporters, including Dickerson, accompanied the President’s retinue.

Although the White House correspondent made no mention of any such conversations in his series of articles on the trip (link), Dickerson did contribute to a Time online report published on July 17, 2003.

From A War on Wilson?: "And some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews, (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These officials have suggested that she was involved in her husband's being dispatched Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein's government had sought to purchase large quantities of uranium ore, sometimes referred to as yellow cake, which is used to build nuclear devices."

Dickerson left Time in May 2005 for Slate. After Libby was indicted, he wrote about conversations he had with Fleischer at the time.

"He walked reporters, including me, up to the fact, suggesting they look into who sent Wilson, but never used her name or talked about her position," Dickerson wrote.

According to Newsday, Dickerson’s name appeared in a January, 2004 subpoena sent to the White House in search of “administrative contacts” with reporters regarding Plame or other elements of the probe.

Regardless, Fitzgerald says he’ll tell Libby by tomorrow which journalists he expects to call at trial.

"We will be providing to you prior to February 3 copies of subpoenas and pertinent correspondence relating to reporters referenced in the Indictment and/or whom we expect to call at trial," Fitzgerald wrote Libby.

Prosecutor won’t call Wilson; Says no CIA damage assessment

In response to Libby's motion to gather more information on Wilson, Fitzgerald said he doesn't "expect" to call the former Ambassador to testify at trial. He advises Libby to instead refer to Wilson's many media appearances and written accounts.

Also of note is the fact that Fitzgerald asserts that the CIA has conducted no formal damage assessment with regard to Plame’s outing.

“A formal assessment has not been done of the damage caused by the disclosure of Valerie Wilson’s status as a CIA employee, and thus we possess no such document,” Fitzgerald writes. “In any event, we would not view an assessment of the damage caused by the disclosure as relevant to the issue of whether or not Mr. Libby intentionally lied when he made the statements and gave the grand jury testimony which the grand jury alleged was false.”

Finally, Fitzgerald alludes to "authorization" by Libby's "superiors" – who may include President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney – who may have allowed him to disclose information about a then-classified report on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction to the media. Previous reports have indicated that Cheney and Bush are not targets of the probe.

Fitzgerald writes, "As we discussed during our telephone conversation, Mr. Libby testified in the grand jury that he had contact with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the National Intelligence Estimate (“NIE”) to such reporters in the course of his interaction with reporters in June and July 2003 (and caused at least one other government official to discuss the NIE with the media in July 2003). We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors."

Read Fitzgerald's letter in PDF format here.

Raw Story researcher Muriel Kane contributed to this report.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Iraq, Niger, And The CIA (01/02/2006)

2006-02-02T16:21:00.000-05:00

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Feb. 2, 2006

Vice President Cheney and his then-Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were personally informed in June 2003 that the CIA no longer considered credible the allegations that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials. The new CIA assessment came just as Libby and other senior administration officials were embarking on an effort to discredit an administration critic who had also been saying that the allegations were untrue.

The campaign against Joseph Wilson continued even after the CIA concluded that Iraq had not tried to buy uranium from the African nation of Niger.

CIA analysts wrote then-CIA Director George Tenet in a highly classified memo on June 17, 2003, "We no longer believe there is sufficient" credible information to "conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad." The memo was titled: "In Response to Your Questions for Our Current Assessment and Additional Details on Iraq's Alleged Pursuits of Uranium From Abroad."

The campaign against Wilson led to the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA officer -- less than a month after the CIA assessment was completed. Libby resigned as Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser on October 28, 2005, after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice for concealing his role in leaking Plame's identity to the media.

Tenet requested the previously undisclosed intelligence assessment in large part because of repeated inquiries from Cheney and Libby regarding the Niger matter and Wilson's mission, although neither Cheney nor Libby specifically asked that the new review be conducted, according to government records and to current and former government officials. Tenet also asked for the assessment because information about Wilson's mission to Niger had begun to appear in the media, and Tenet thought that the press or Capitol Hill might raise additional questions about the matter.

The new disclosures raise questions as to why Libby and other Bush administration officials continued their efforts to discredit Wilson -- even as they were told that claims about Iraq's having procured uranium from Niger were most likely a hoax.

The answer may lie in part with the already well-known misgivings about the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and other senior Bush administration officials. At one point during that period -- the summer of 2003 -- Libby confronted a senior intelligence analyst briefing him and the vice president and accused the CIA of willfully misleading him and the administration on Niger. Libby was said to be upset that the CIA, in his view, had routinely minimized the extent to which Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction and was now prematurely attempting to distance itself from the Niger allegations.

Libby had also complained about the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control. WINPAC, as the center is known, scrutinizes unconventional-weapons threats to the United States, including the pursuit by both foreign nations and terrorist groups of nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons.

Libby, according to people with knowledge of the events, said that he and Cheney had come to believe that WINPAC was presenting Saddam Hussein's pursuit of such weapons in a far more benign light than Iraq's intents and capabilities reflected. Libby cited CIA bureaucratic inertia and caution and his view that many of WINPAC's analysts were aligned with foreign-policy elites who did not support the war with Iraq.

Libby and others in the office of the vice president apparently were even more suspicious because they mistakenly believed that Plame worked for WINPAC, according to these sources. When they also learned that Plame possibly played a role in Wilson's selection for the Niger mission, their suspicions only intensified.

One indication of Cheney's personal interest in the subject was that some of Libby's earliest and most detailed information regarding Plame's CIA employment came directly from the vice president, according to information contained in Libby's grand jury indictment.

"On or about June 12, 2003," the indictment stated, "Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA."

It would not have been improper or illegal for Cheney to discuss Plame's CIA employment with Libby or other government officials with high security clearances. No public evidence has emerged during the two-year grand jury probe by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Libby acted at the vice president's behest in leaking details of Plame's CIA employment to the press, or that Cheney even knew that Libby was doing so.

Contemporaneous notes of Libby's that were obtained by federal investigators in the CIA leak case indicate that Cheney had originally learned about Plame from then-CIA Director Tenet. Tenet has confirmed that Fitzgerald interviewed him, but Tenet has refused to make public any details of what he told investigators. He declined to comment for this story.

Sources said that Tenet may have discussed Plame with Cheney because of requests from Cheney, Libby, and other administration officials for more information about the Niger matter and Wilson's mission. Cheney's and Libby's interest in Niger was apparently rekindled after New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote on May 6, 2003, that the CIA had sent an unnamed former ambassador to the African nation in February 2002 to investigate allegations that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. Kristof wrote that the ex-ambassador reported back to the CIA and the State Department that the allegations were "unequivocally wrong" and "based on forged documents."

The column led Cheney and Libby to inquire about the then-still-unnamed ambassador and his trip to Niger. On May 29, 2003, Libby asked then-Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman for information about the mission. Grossman in turn assigned the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research to prepare a report on the matter. Cheney's and Libby's interest in the issue led Tenet to seek more information as well.

On June 11 or 12, according to the grand jury indictment of Libby, Grossman reported back that "in sum and substance Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, and the State Department personnel were saying that Wilson's wife was involved in the planning of his trip."

Also on June 11, 2003, according to the indictment, "Libby spoke with a senior officer of the CIA to ask about the origin and circumstances of Wilson's trip, and was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip." On the very next day, June 12, the indictment said, Cheney more specifically informed Libby that Plame worked at the CIA's "Counterproliferation Division."

Tenet received the highly classified memo on Niger from his analysts on June 17, 2003, five days after Cheney and Libby spoke with each other about Plame's working for the CIA. Sources familiar with the matter say that both Cheney and Libby were informed of the findings in the June 17 memo only days after Tenet himself read and reviewed it.

In the memo, the CIA analysts wrote: "Since learning that the Iraqi-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq purchased uranium from abroad."

The memo also related that there had been other, earlier claims that Saddam's regime had attempted to purchase uranium from private interests in Somalia and Benin; these claims predated the Niger allegations. It was that past intelligence that had led CIA analysts, in part, to consider the Niger claims as plausible.

But the memo said that after a thorough review of those earlier reports, the CIA had concluded that they were no longer credible. Indeed, the previous intelligence reports citing those claims had long since been "recalled" -- meaning that the CIA had formally repudiated them.

The memo's findings were considered so significant that they were not only quickly shared with Cheney and Libby but also with Congress, albeit on a classified basis, according to government records and interviews.

On June 18, 2003, the day after the new Niger assessment was sent to Tenet, Robert D. Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, briefed members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the findings. And on the following day, June 19, 2003, Walpole briefed members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence as well.

Six days after the memo was sent to Tenet, on June 23, 2003, Libby met with then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and -- as part of an effort to discredit Wilson -- passed along to her what prosecutors have said was classified information that Wilson's wife, Plame, worked for the CIA, according to allegations contained in Libby's indictment.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson himself went public with his allegations that the Bush administration had misused the Niger claims to make the case to go to war. Wilson made his arguments in an op-ed in The New York Times and an appearance that same morning on NBC's Meet the Press.

On July 8, 2003, Libby and Miller met again. During a two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, according to testimony Miller gave to the federal grand jury hearing evidence in the CIA leak case, Libby first told her that Plame worked for the CIA's Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Office.

Around the same time, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove and at least one other senior Bush administration official leaked information to a number of journalists about Plame's CIA employment and her role in recommending her husband for the Niger mission.

Columnist Robert Novak, on July 14, 2003, published his now-famous column identifying Plame as a CIA "operative" and alleging that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger.

The disclosure did little to discredit Wilson. Instead, it had unintended and unforeseen consequences for Libby and the Bush administration: A special prosecutor would be named to investigate the leak; Judith Miller would spend 85 days in jail for refusing to testify regarding her conversations with Libby before ultimately relenting; and a federal grand jury would indict Libby on charges that he obstructed justice and committed perjury to conceal his own role in the leak of Plame's CIA status to the press.

As Libby awaits trial, one of the unresolved mysteries is why Libby insisted in interviews with the FBI and during his grand jury testimony that he learned about Plame's employment from journalists, when investigators already had Libby's own copious notes indicating that he had first learned many of the details of Plame's CIA employment from Cheney and other senior government officials.

One possibility examined by investigators is that Libby was attempting to cover for Cheney because of the political or legal fallout that might occur if it was determined that the vice president had been involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said, "The prosecutor's implicit inference before the jury may well likely be that Libby lied to protect the vice president. Even in a plain vanilla case, a prosecutor always wants to be able to demonstrate a motive."

That Cheney was one of the first people to tell Libby about Plame, and that Libby had written in his notes that Cheney had heard the information from the CIA director, Gillers said, might make it more difficult for Libby to mount a credible defense of a faulty memory. "From a prosecutor's point of view, and perhaps a jury's as well, the conversation [during which Libby learned about Plame] is the more dramatic and the more memorable because the conversation was with the vice president" and because the CIA director's name also came up, Gillers said.

The disclosure that Cheney and Libby were told of a CIA assessment that the agency considered the Niger allegations to be untrue, and that Tenet requested the assessment as a result of the personal interest of Cheney and Libby, would "demonstrate even further that Niger was a central issue for Libby," said Gillers, and would "make it even harder, although not impossible, to claim a faulty memory."

-- Murray Waas is a Washington-based journalist.

Print Story: Fitzgerald Hints White House Records Lost on Yahoo! News

2006-02-02T00:05:00.000-05:00

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is raising the possibility that records sought in the CIA leak investigation could be missing because of an e-mail archiving problem at the White House.

The prosecutor in the criminal case against Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff said in a Jan. 23 letter that not all e-mail was archived in 2003, the year the Bush administration exposed the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Lawyers for defendant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby this week accused prosecutors of withholding evidence the Libby camp says it needs to mount a defense.

"We are aware of no evidence pertinent to the charges against defendant Libby which has been destroyed," Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to the defense team.

But the prosecutor added: "In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." His letter was an exhibit attached to Libby's demand for more information from the prosecution.

Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, said the vice president's office is cooperating fully with the investigation, and referred questions to Fitzgerald's office.

Libby is charged with five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI regarding how he learned of Plame's identity and what he did with the information.

The Presidential Records Act, passed by Congress in 1978, made it clear that records generated in the conduct of official duties did not belong to the president or vice president, but were the property of the government.

The National Archives takes custody of the records when the president leaves office.

"Bottom line: Accidents happen and there could be a benign explanation, but this is highly irregular and invites suspicion," said Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project.

"A particular subset of records sought in a controversial prosecution have gone missing," Aftergood said. "I think what is needed is for the national archivist to ascertain what went wrong and how to ensure it won't happen again."

New York Daily News - World & National Report - Leak prober got supersecret files

2006-02-01T15:03:00.000-05:00

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald collected 10,000 pages of documents - including the most sensitive terrorism memos in the U.S. government - from Vice President Cheney's office, he said in court papers released yesterday.
Without serving any warrants in his probe of who outed CIA officer Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald even obtained censored copies of the President's Daily Brief, the supersecret CIA threat memo for President Bush.

Now Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's disgraced former chief aide, is asking a court to force Fitzgerald to fork over all the documents to fight charges of perjury and lying to the FBI.

Libby will show that "any errors he made in his FBI interviews or grand jury testimony, months after the conversations, were the result of confusion, mistake or faulty memory rather than a willful intent to deceive," his lawyers argued.

The special counsel got the presidential briefing in his hunt for any files concerning Plame or her husband, Joe Wilson, a diplomat sent to Niger in 2002 to see whether the African regime sold uranium to Iraq.

Fitzgerald, who is fighting Libby's request, said in a letter to Libby's lawyers that many e-mails from Cheney's office at the time of the Plame leak in 2003 have been deleted contrary to White House policy.

Libby's Lawyers Seek Papers on Plame's CIA Employment

2006-02-01T10:36:00.000-05:00

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 1, 2006; A05

Attorneys for Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff urged a court yesterday to force a prosecutor to turn over CIA records indicating whether former CIA operative Valerie Plame's employment was classified, saying the answer is not yet clear.

The defense team for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby also asked that the court require Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald to turn over any informal assessments conducted by the CIA to determine whether the leak of Plame's identity in July 2003 damaged national security or agency operations.

Libby was indicted in October on five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice in the course of Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of Plame's identity to the media. The indictment charges that Libby lied to investigators when he said he did not provide information about Plame to two reporters and when he said he learned about Plame from a third, NBC's Tim Russert.

Defense lawyers argued in court papers that it is crucial to determine whether Plame was not an undercover operative at the time Libby was discussing her with members of the media, and whether little or no damage was done to national security when her identity was publicly disclosed.

If either is true, the defense argued, it will "challenge the prosecution's contention that Mr. Libby has reason to lie to the FBI and the grand jury about his conversations with reporters in July 2003."

Plame's identity was first disclosed in Robert D. Novak's syndicated column on July 14, 2003. It appeared eight days after her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly asserted that the administration had twisted intelligence to justify war with Iraq.

The defense said it also is seeking records of daily briefings from the Office of the Vice President to show that Libby was immersed in national security matters from dawn to dusk every day.

"These documents are material to establishing that any misstatements he may have made were the result of confusion, mistake and faulty memory . . . rather than deliberate lies," according to the papers.

The demand for records is one of several pretrial discovery disputes that will likely be discussed when Fitzgerald and the defense lawyers appear before U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Friday.

A spokesman for Fitzgerald's office has declined to comment on defense motions. Defense lawyers also declined to comment on their filings.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Libby Defense Demands News Media Materials - Yahoo! News

2006-01-27T09:02:00.000-05:00

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

Lawyers for a former top White House aide charged in the CIA leak investigation said Thursday the prosecutor should surrender a wide range of information about news organizations and their reporters, including The Washington Post's Bob Woodward.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has failed to disclose information that would enable the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to properly defend himself, his attorneys argued in papers filed with U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton.

Libby is charged with five counts of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI about disclosing the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, who is married to former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a Bush administration critic.

A federal grand jury accused Libby of lying when he said he learned about Ms. Wilson's identity from reporters. The indictment contends Libby found out about her identity from the CIA, the State Department and his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The government should not be allowed to charge Mr. Libby with lying about statements concerning what reporters knew about Ms. Wilson's identity, and at the same time deny him information that may establish one of these possible defenses," Libby's lawyers argued in a 23-page brief.

"The government has refused to produce information in its possession about what reporters learned from sources other than Mr. Libby about Ms. Wilson's employment status," Libby's legal team argued.

The prosecutor has asserted that "such documents are not relevant to a perjury and obstruction case."

After Libby's Oct. 28 indictment, Woodward disclosed that he had learned of Ms. Wilson's identity in mid-June 2003, some three weeks before her name was first published by conservative columnist Robert Novak.

The indictment says Libby lied when he told investigators he learned of Ms. Wilson's identity from NBC correspondent Tim Russert; when he told Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper that reporters were telling the Bush administration that Ms. Wilson worked for the CIA; and when Libby told investigators he did not discuss Wilson's wife with New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Libby would have the right to produce testimony that tended to show many reporters knew about Ms. Wilson's CIA employment and that Russert did make the statement Libby allegedly attributed to him, but that Russert had forgotten about it, the court filing stated.

The defense says it also has a right to show whether other reporters knew about Ms. Wilson's CIA employment and were discussing that fact with government officials, "some of whom in turn may have shared such information with Mr. Libby," his lawyers said.

Print Story: Libby Wants to Use Classified Evidence on Yahoo! News

2006-01-23T15:22:00.000-05:00

By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer

Lawyers for a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday made their first request to use classified evidence at his trial, launching a highly secretive court process that could bog down the case.

In the filings made under seal in federal court, lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby put the judge and prosecutors on notice that they want a jury to hear evidence the government now says is classified.

Their action puts the Libby case on a dual track — one public, the other secret — that often can delay criminal cases from going to trial.

Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, was indicted last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters.

Plame's identity was revealed in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium "yellowcake" in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Africa to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

Although the specifics of Monday's filing remain secret, Libby's defense team hinted in a court document last Friday that they will want to disclose to a jury the nature of Plame's work as a CIA operative.

Libby's lawyers said Plame's now-classified duties are among the "significant disagreements" they have with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, an issue they believe is "material" to the defense's case.

Fights over classified information repeatedly delayed the case against acknowledged al-Qaida member Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Moussaoui, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, faces a trial next month in Alexandria, Va., where a jury will decide whether he should be executed.

In Libby's case, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton will decide what will be presented to a jury and in what form. In such cases, compromises can be worked out where secret information is presented in summaries to a jury.

In 1980, Congress passed the Classified Information Procedures Act, setting out a process for judges to weigh a defendant's right to a fair trial against the need to keep evidence secret to protect national security.

The legislation also was designed to keep defendants from threatening to reveal government secrets in order to force prosecutors to drop cases.

So far, Fitzgerald has turned over 850 pages of classified information to Libby's defense team. In a filing last week, he said he is working on getting four government agencies involved in the investigation to consent to declassify additional information.

That is no easy task, Fitzgerald said, and will take time.

Libby's Lawyers Want to Subpoena Reporters - Yahoo! News

2006-01-20T16:34:00.000-05:00

By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer

Lawyers for a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal judge Friday they want to subpoena journalists and news organizations for documents they may have related to the leak of a CIA operative's name.

In a joint filing with prosecutors, lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, 55, warned U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton that a trial likely will be delayed because of their strategy to seek more subpoenas of reporters' notes and other records.

Libby was indicted last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters.

Plame's identity was revealed in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium "yellowcake" in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Africa to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports; he concluded they were untrue.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, in announcing the charges against Libby, portrayed Cheney's former chief of staff as the first government official to have shared Plame's name and her work at the CIA with reporters in the summer of 2003.

Libby's defense team did not disclose the names of reporters or news organizations it wants to subpoena.

The filing provides the most concrete indication yet that a large part of Libby's trial strategy will be identifying other government officials who knew Plame was a CIA operative and told reporters about it.

The kind of subpoena cited is for documents or records, not testimony. Such subpoenas usually require records to be turned over before trial so the defense team would have a chance to review them. Libby's team said it expects a delay in the trial while news organizations fight the subpoenas, if Walton agrees to issue them.

Last summer, several reporters were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of Plame's identity. New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her source.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the defense's strategy is no surprise but still alarming.

"Every key witness in this case is going to be a reporter," Dalglish said. "It's an absolutely ugly situation, ... putting reporters in a very, very bad position, ... and it should send a chill up the spine of American citizens across the country."

The defense attorneys also told Walton that a significant disagreement is brewing between Libby's team and Fitzgerald's prosecutors over whether reporters heard Plame's name from government sources other than Libby.

Libby's lawyers said information about other sources used by reporters is "material to the preparation of the defense."

No trial date has been set. Walton had requested the update on the prosecution's exchange of evidence with the defense before a Feb. 3 hearing in the case.

Fitzgerald said he has turned over 10,150 pages of classified and unclassified documents to Libby's defense team.

But the defense attorneys said they want more. They said they may subpoena other executive branch agencies — besides the special prosecutor's office and the FBI — if Fitzgerald continues to refuse to turn over information he has from those departments. They did not specify which agencies.

Shortly after Libby's indictment, The Washington Post revealed that one of its editors, Bob Woodward, who achieved fame for his reporting on the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration, may have been the first reporter to learn about Plame.

Woodward gave a sworn deposition to Fitzgerald late last year, telling the special prosecutor that a top administration official told him in mid-June 2003 that Wilson was married to Plame.

The Raw Story | Rove camp 'frustrated' by uncertainty in CIA leak case

2006-01-20T12:07:00.000-05:00

Filed by John Byrne

"ROVE RETURNS to spotlight with RNC speech," the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire blares Friday.

"Bush's top strategist makes rare public remarks Friday at party's winter meeting," the paper's John Harwood adds. "But he isn't yet clear of exposure in CIA leak case, while Democrats demand to know if he met with Abramoff. WMAL radio in Washington, where Rove is scheduled to appear today, asks on its Web site: 'Has Karl Rove become a liability to the White House?'"

RAW STORY has learned that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald -- who is investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame -- has met with his new grand jury at least once since the year began. The special prosecutor remains U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, and is juggling other cases as he deals with Rove.

"I think it's fair to say that there is no change in [Rove's] status," Rove's attorney Robert Luskin told Jason Leopold for Truthout last week. "He is not a target of the investigation, but there remains an open investigation."

Adds Harwood: "The Judge in Libby's CIA-leak case sets Feb. 3 status hearing and asks both sides for joint filing by Friday on discovery process. Fitzgerald hasn't been seen much in Washington lately, and Rove camp remains frustrated by uncertainty over his status. Libby joins Hudson Institute as senior adviser on Asia and antiterror war."

Jason Leopold is on leave from Raw Story this month. He is scheduled to return in February.

Russert Resisted Testifying on Leak

2006-01-10T10:05:00.000-05:00

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 10, 2006; A05

Lawyers for NBC News reporter Tim Russert suspected in the spring of 2004 that his testimony could snare Vice President Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in a lie and Russert resisted testifying at the time about private conversations with Libby, according to court papers released yesterday.

Russert was aware that a special prosecutor probing the leak of a CIA operative's name knew of his summer 2003 telephone conversation with Libby, and that Libby had released him from any promise of confidentiality. But Russert, the Washington bureau chief for NBC News and host of "Meet the Press," and his attorneys argued in previously sealed court filings in June 2004 that he should not have to tell a grand jury about that conversation, because it would harm Russert's relationship with other sources.

Russert ultimately testified under oath about the conversation after a federal judge ordered him to do so in July 2004. The information Russert provided became important evidence that Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald used to indict Libby in October on five felony counts of lying to the FBI and a grand jury, and of obstruction of justice.

Fitzgerald accused Libby of lying to investigators when he said he believed he heard about Valerie Plame's CIA role from Russert in their July 2003 telephone conversation. Russert testified that they never discussed Plame.

U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan released the court papers involving Russert yesterday. They were sought by the New York Times.

It "appears that Mr. Russert's testimony is sought solely because the Special Prosecutor believes that his recollection of a telephone conversation with an Executive Branch official is inconsistent with that official's statements," they wrote.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

CIA couple outed by 5-year-old son | Reuters.com

2005-12-29T18:44:00.000-05:00

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The Washington couple at the heart of the CIA leak investigation had their cover blown by their small son as they tried to sneak away on vacation on Thursday.

"My daddy's famous, my mommy's a secret spy," declared the 5-year-old of his parents, former diplomat Joe Wilson and retired CIA operative Valerie Plame.

The former spy, who just retired from the agency, and the diplomat have been at the center of a CIA leak scandal that has reached into the White House.

They said they were headed to an undisclosed vacation location with their twins but stopped for a brief interview inside the airport terminal.

A special prosecutor has indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, for lying in the investigation and has opened a second grand jury.

Plame's cover at the CIA was blown after her husband accused the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence to support military action against Iraq. Wilson said it was deliberately intended to undercut his credibility.

Wilson said he does not know how the current investigation was progressing and has only spoken to the special prosecutor twice, most recently in late September.

Plame would not be interviewed and stood out of hearing distance with the other twin.

Wilson said his wife's retirement allows her to spend more time with the soon to be 6-year-olds. "She enjoyed her career there," Wilson said of the CIA.

Philippine News Online: 'Upset' Ralston says she's not going anywhere

2005-12-21T15:09:00.000-05:00

Rita M. Gerona-Adkins, Dec 21, 2005
WASHINGTON, D.C. --- Susan B. Ralston has determined to clear the air once and for all after speculations about her job at the White House have been published, including in the Philippine News.

“I am focused on my job serving the President in my current capacity,” she said in a telephone call from her office at the White House on December 12 to this correspondent.

Ralston, the 38-year old, highest ranking Filipino American in the Bush White House, works as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush in addition to her functions as Assistant to Karl Rove, the president’s Senior Adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff.

A correction was posted online Dec. 7 by the Philippine News, but she took the opportunity to express her lingering discomfort about the “inaccuracy” of an earlier report [Dec. 5-11, 2005 issue] about her having left the White House for the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Not mincing her words, she added, “It was inappropriate, completely irresponsible…without checking. I am so upset!”

“I am trying to do my job, and creating rumors is not appropriate, and has been very damaging,” she added.

She did not elaborate on the damage, but according to Maria Tamburri, White House Liaison for Media Affairs, mainstream media had flooded the White House with follow-up calls after a Dec. 5-11, 2005 PN story had come out about Ralston’s transfer to the commerce department.

Responding to the question about her leaving the White House on Dec. 31, as reported Nov. 29 by the Manila Mail, a bi-monthly metropolitan D.C.-based FilAm publication, Ralston said, “I don’t have any definite plans to leave the White House, on Dec. 31 or at another time. I do not know what my [future] plans are, what I may or may not do, but I continue to work here at my [White House] desk.”

She also said that she was not called for verification about that report.

As for further speculations, she indicated they are not necessary and urged those interested to check directly with the White House.

“Call the White House – switchboard telephone 202-456-1414,” she advised.

Asked if she may be called to testify again by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald regarding further investigation of CIA leakage and outing of agent Valerie Plame, and possible White House cover-up, Ralston said she could not comment as the case is still under investigation.

However, she stressed, “I have not been notified.”

Ralston had appeared twice at the grand jury investigation, specifically on why a telephone call to Rove by a Time reporter was not logged. However, despite the explanation that calls that are channeled to the White House switchboard are not typically recorded on the telephone logs, the prosecutor got documentation of switchboard calls that also were recorded in the logs.

Washington watchdogs are speculating that Rove may be called for further investigation by a new grand jury. There is also speculation that Ralston may also be called to testify again.

As Rove’s assistant that bloggers refer to as Rove’s stalwart “gatekeeper”, Ralston – who in an earlier assignment had worked with lobbyist Jack Abramoff who is currently undergoing investigation for alleged shady lobby deals – has acquired high visibility in Washington’s corridors of power.

She also has become a continuing object of curiosity and concern in the Filipino American and Asian Pacific American communities – communities that on some occasions, she has lent her presence and given of her personal support for their advocacy causes.

The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Woodward Said Novak's Source "Was Not in the White House"

2005-12-20T19:48:00.000-05:00

Over roast beef at IOP, reporter hinted at deeper knowledge

Published On Monday, December 19, 2005 11:23 PM

By ZACHARY M. SEWARD

Crimson Staff Writer

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As reporters barraged the White House last week with renewed questions on the CIA leak case, one of the Washington press corps’ own may have been holding on to a key part of the mystery.

Bob Woodward, the Washington Post’s distinguished reporter and associate managing editor, has already faced scrutiny for his role in the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s undercover status at the CIA. But in a conversation at Harvard earlier this month, Woodward hinted that he knows the identity of yet another key player in the case: Robert D. Novak’s original source for his July 2003 column on Plame, which touched off the scandal in the first place.

“His source was not in the White House, I don’t believe,” Woodward said of Novak over a private dinner at the Institute of Politics on Dec. 5. He did not indicate what information, if any, he had to corroborate the claim.

Speculation as to the identity of Novak’s source, who first told the columnist that Plame worked at the CIA, intensified last week after Novak contributed a new line to the drama.

“I’m confident the president knows who the source is,” Novak said last Tuesday in North Carolina, according to a report in the Raleigh News & Observer. “I’d be amazed if he doesn’t.”

He continued, “So I say, don’t bug me. Don’t bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed Novak’s claim on Thursday. “I don’t know what he’s basing it on,” McClellan said.

Novak and Woodward are among the highest-profile and best-connected journalists in the Beltway, and both men have been said to maintain warmer-than-usual relationships with the Bush administration.

The leak in Novak’s column prompted an investigation by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a 1985 graduate of Harvard Law School, which has thus far resulted in the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was the vice president’s chief of staff, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice arising from the inquiry.

Woodward gave a two-hour deposition to Fitzgerald under oath on Nov. 14, after failing to reveal for more than two years that he had been told in “mid-June 2003” by a current or former Bush administration official that Plame worked as an “analyst” at the CIA, according to a statement released by Woodward a day after he testified.

The statement revealed scant details about his source, except to say that it was not Libby and that the information had been passed to him in a “casual and offhand” manner. Woodward made similar comments during the dinner at Harvard, saying he took the information about Plame as “gossipy and not ill-willed.”

Woodward’s dismissals mirror Novak’s description of the leak as “an offhand revelation,” prompting speculation that their sources might be one and the same. Both men have said independently that Fitzgerald’s investigation would ultimately find no evidence of a calculated leak by the Bush administration, which some reports have suggested was part of an effort to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, who incensed the White House by criticizing the intelligence that built the case for the war in Iraq.

Novak reportedly received confirmation of Plame’s position at the CIA from President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, who remains under investigation in the case. But if Novak’s original source was not a White House employee, as Woodward suggested at the Harvard dinner, that could help dispute the theory that the leak was part of a broader conspiracy.

Woodward did not respond to several e-mails and phone calls over the past three days. Novak, who has generally declined to comment on his involvement in the case, did not respond to an e-mail, either.

At the Harvard dinner, Woodward sparred with his friend and former Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, over the motives behind the leak. The pair had just come from the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Institute of Politics, where they spoke for more than an hour before television cameras and a large audience. The invite-only dinner afterward, which was attended by Harvard students as well as a handful of journalists and politicians, was declared on-the-record from the outset by Alex C. Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, who moderated the dinner conversation.

Responding to Bernstein’s claim that the release of Plame’s identity was a “calculated leak” by the Bush administration, Woodward said flatly, “I know a lot about this, and you’re wrong.”

Woodward was generally far more frank at the dinner than he was before the audience at the Forum. Asked at the dinner whether his readers should worry that he has been “manipulated” by the Bush administration, Woodward replied, “I think you should worry. I mean, I worry.”

Woodward would not discuss why he had disclosed certain details and not others about the June 2003 conversation in which he learned that Plame worked at the CIA.

“Everything that I told Fitzgerald was in that statement,” Woodward said, referring to the first-person account of his testimony that ran in the Post on Nov. 16. “I remember when we were putting that together and people wanted to change this thing or that thing, I had to say, ‘Wait a minute, this is my statement, not your statement.’”

Woodward said that his source had released him to speak with Fitzgerald about their conversation but not to disclose the source’s name publicly. But his assertion about Novak’s source, over roast beef and asparagus at the Institute of Politics, suggests that Woodward knows—or, in journalistic parlance, “has heard”—more than he has previously acknowledged.

Still, it is far from clear how deep into the nation’s capital his knowledge extends. Is Woodward far ahead of his peers on this Washington scandal, as he and Bernstein were when they uncovered Watergate in the Nixon administration? Or is Woodward too close to his sources in the Bush administration to see the wider scenario at play?

The latter charge has been levied at Woodward in the past month by such press gadflies as Frank Rich ’71, the New York Times columnist; Jay Rosen, former chair of the journalism department at New York University; and even Nora Ephron, Bernstein’s ex-wife.

Also unclear is how much can be gleaned from Woodward’s comment about Novak’s source. Woodward is widely hailed for protecting the identity of his most famous source, W. Mark Felt or “Deep Throat,” in the decades after Watergate, but he was occasionally misleading in order to protect Felt.

In a 1979 Playboy interview with J. Anthony Lukas ’55, a former associate managing editor of The Crimson, Woodward explicitly denied that “Deep Throat” was in “the intelligence community.” Felt, whose family identified him as Woodward’s source earlier this year, was deputy director of the FBI, which conducts intelligence, among other duties.

In another instance, Woodward told a colleague at the Post, Richard Cohen, that Felt was not “Deep Throat” in order to discourage Cohen from writing a column outing Felt.

“I lied, and insisted to Cohen that he had it wrong. W-R-O-N-G! I spelled it out, I recall,” Woodward wrote this year in his book about Felt, “The Secret Man.”

In the CIA leak case, Woodward kept the identity of his source—or even that he had a source—secret from everyone, including the Post’s executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr. Woodward publicly apologized to Downie for not telling him earlier.

“There was a breakdown in communications and not in trust,” Woodward said at the Harvard dinner of his failure to inform anyone at the Post of his role in the scandal. Referring specifically to Downie, Woodward said, “I think we have a better relationship now as we’ve gone through this.”

The leak case has sparked intense interest in Washington and across the country because of its close link to the discredited intelligence that sent the U.S. military to war in Iraq.

Asked at the Harvard dinner whether the American media had adequately questioned the White House on its intelligence before the war, Woodward replied, “Did we drop the ball? Did we fail? And I would say yes.”

The National Law Journal Selects Plamegate Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as 2005 Lawyer of the Year: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

2005-12-20T10:46:00.000-05:00

Monday December 19, 10:30 am ET

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 19, 2005--The National Law Journal® today announced the selection of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as its 2005 "Lawyer of the Year," for his direction of the ongoing investigation into leaks related to CIA agent Valerie Plame. The editors of the newspaper also named Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift as the runner-up in this year's award program for his role in challenging the constitutionality of the Guantanamo Bay prisoner tribunals, from within the military. Profiles of both lawyers headline the year-end December 19th issue of The National Law Journal, available today, and are also online at www.nlj.com.
"Through his dogged pursuit of the CIA leak investigation, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, a Republican appointee, has set Washington on its ear," said Rex Bossert, editor in chief of The National Law Journal. "He is following his leads to the top echelons of the Bush administration and proving that the rule of law trumps politics, even in the nation's capital."

"While many journalists think Fitzgerald has gone too far in pursuing reporters' sources, he has focused single-mindedly on what is allowed under the law, and thus has prompted an examination of whether a federal shield law is warranted," added Bossert.

Since his appointment in 2003 as special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice, Fitzgerald has taken on some of the most influential people in Washington in his attempt to determine whether senior officials in the Bush administration violated the Intelligence Protection Act of 1982. The ongoing investigation has snowballed, gathering in its path top administration officials and well-known journalists. Fitzgerald, viewed by some as exacting and thorough and by others as obsessive and relentless, will continue to be tested as the leak investigation enters its second year this month.

Fitzgerald originally earned recognition as a meticulous and sometimes single-minded prosecutor while working for the Southern District of New York, where he served as chief of the organized crime/ terrorism unit, handled the prosecution of 12 defendants charged with conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993 and prosecuted the Gambino crime family. Appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois four years ago, he manages a staff of more than 160 attorneys, including the group that brought fraud charges this year against Conrad Black, accusing the former publishing executive at Hollinger International and three of its other executives of illegally diverting almost $84 million from the company.

Swift, one of five Judge Advocate General lawyers assigned to represent the first round of commission defendants, has defied skepticism at home and abroad that he and his colleagues would do more than a perfunctory job defending accused terrorists. Swift's odyssey has taken him from Guantanamo Bay where his Yemeni client, Salim Hamdan, is being held, to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear his challenge to the constitutionality of the military commissions.

Founded in 1978, The National Law Journal has the largest paid circulation of any weekly publication serving the legal community. The newspaper is published by ALM.

Headquartered in New York City, ALM is a leading integrated media company, focused on the legal and business communities. ALM currently owns and publishes 39 national and regional magazines and newspapers, including The American Lawyer®, Corporate Counsel®, The National Law Journal and Real Estate Forum®. ALM's Law.com® is the Web's leading legal news and information network, while ALM's GlobeSt.com® is the Web's leading information source for commercial real estate professionals. Other ALM businesses include book and newsletter publishing, court verdict and settlement reporting, production of professional trade shows, conferences and educational seminars, market research and content distribution. ALM was formed by U.S. Equity Partners, L.P., a private equity fund sponsored by Wasserstein & Co., LP. More information on ALM's businesses and services is available on the Web at www.alm.com.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Why Novak Called Rove (12/16/05)

2005-12-16T11:53:00.000-05:00

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Dec. 16, 2005

On July 9, 2003, senior presidential adviser Karl Rove was well prepared as he returned a telephone call from columnist Robert Novak. On his desk were talking points and other briefing materials that then-White House Political Director Matt Schlapp and other staffers had compiled for Rove in anticipation of the conversation.

For a White House that took great pride in its disciplined approach to managing the flow of information to the public, such thorough staff preparation -- even for a single conversation with a newspaper columnist -- was not out of the ordinary, former and current administration officials said in interviews.

But despite the meticulous preparation for what should have been a routine phone call, something went awry. As a result of what both Rove and Novak have insisted were only brief comments at the very end of the conversation, Novak wrote a column disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA officer; a special prosecutor was named to investigate the leak; a New York Times reporter was jailed for 85 days; and the then-chief of staff to Vice President Cheney was indicted on criminal charges for concealing his own role in the leak. Rove himself anxiously awaits word on whether he will also be charged by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Ironically, the materials prepared for Rove in advance of the conversation had nothing to do with Valerie Plame, the CIA officer whom Novak would identify -- using Rove as one of his sources -- as an "agency operative" in a July 14, 2003, column.

Instead, the voluminous material on Rove's desk -- including talking points, related briefing materials, and information culled from confidential government personnel files -- involved a different woman: Frances Fragos Townsend, a former senior attorney in the Clinton administration's Justice Department whom President Bush had recently named to be his deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism.

Bush had personally assigned Rove to help counter what the president believed to be a "rearguard" effort within his own administration, by persons unknown, to discredit Townsend and derail her appointment, according to White House documents and accounts given by former and current officials.

Just before his July 9 conversation with Rove, Novak had been relentlessly calling around the White House asking questions about Townsend. Adam Levine, then an assistant White House press secretary and a Rove protege, told Rove that Novak had called, and that Novak was upset that Rove had not called him back. Levine would say later that he was uncertain whether Novak had stated the purpose of the call.

On July 8, Rove's secretary wrote Townsend's name on a telephone message slip, indicating that Townsend was the subject of Novak's inquiry. It was then that Rove instructed his staff to prepare briefing materials for him to have on hand to answer Novak's questions on Townsend.

When he finally got on the phone with Novak, Rove -- consulting the talking points and briefing materials spread across his desk -- argued the case that Townsend was qualified to be a deputy national security adviser, according to an account that Rove gave to another senior administration official at the time, as well as Rove's later account to federal investigators. If, in fact, Rove stuck to the information in the talking-points memo, he would have told Novak that President Bush, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and then-CIA Director George Tenet all had full confidence in Townsend.

Some of the conversation was on background, meaning that Novak could quote Rove as a "senior administration official," while other things were off-the-record and could not be written at all.

Although it is unclear whether Rove was the "official" referred to, Novak would write in his column: "Townsend did not return my telephone calls. The White House official representing her said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice obtained endorsements of her by [then-Attorney General John] Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and CIA Director George Tenet."

According to the accounts of their conversations that Rove and Novak gave to federal investigators, the subject of Valerie Plame came up only after they had finished talking about Townsend.

Three days earlier, on July 6, Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had published an op-ed piece in The New York Times and had appeared on NBC's Meet the Press alleging that the Bush administration had "twisted" intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq.

In 2002, the CIA had sent Wilson to Africa to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein's regime was attempting to buy uranium from the government of Niger to build an atomic weapon. Wilson reported back that the allegations were most likely unfounded. Still, the Niger-Iraq allegation found its way into Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2003.

Both Novak and Rove have told federal prosecutors that it was Novak who raised Plame's name, with the columnist saying he had heard that "Wilson's wife" had worked for the CIA and had been responsible for having her husband sent on the Niger mission.

"I heard that too," Rove responded, according to published accounts of what Rove told federal investigators of the conversations. Novak's version of what was said has been slightly different. He reportedly has told investigators that Rove's response was something to the effect of, "Oh, you know about it."

Novak indicated to Rove that he was still going to write a column that would be critical of Townsend. But according to an account that Novak later provided of his conversation with Rove, he also signaled to Rove that Wilson and Plame would be the subject of one of his columns. "I think that you are going to be unhappy with something that I write," he said to Rove, "and I think you are very much going to like something that I am about to write."

On July 10, Novak's column appeared in newspapers across the country, with a headline suggested by Novak's syndicate: "Bush Sets Himself Up for Another Embarrassment."

The column referred to Townsend as another potential "enemy within." Novak opined that Townsend would likely prove disloyal to Bush, because she had been "an intimate adviser of Janet Reno as the Clinton administration's attorney general," and he pointedly noted that earlier in her career, "Townsend's boss and patron ... was [then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York] Jo Ann Harris, whose orientation was liberal Democratic."

Four days later, on July 14, Novak wrote his now-famous column on Plame, in which he outed her as an "agency operative." Although the column was little noticed at the time, it would eventually unleash a firestorm in Washington and lead to the appointment of Fitzgerald; the jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller until she agreed to testify before the grand jury; and the grand jury indictment of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby and his resignation as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.

Double-Edged Sword
The previously undisclosed information in the Townsend affair -- which involved efforts by various senior officials in the Bush administration to discredit Townsend and undermine her appointment as the president's deputy national security adviser -- is important for at least two reasons.

First, this account -- reconstructed through interviews with current and former administration officials, attorneys involved in the CIA leak case, and a review of confidential White House records -- serves as a window into the bitter conflicts over foreign policy fought at the highest levels of the administration.

The senior staff in the Office of the Vice President adamantly opposed Townsend's appointment. The staff included two of Cheney's closest aides: Libby, then the chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president; and David Addington, who at the time was Cheney's counsel but who has since succeeded Libby as chief of staff.

Among other things, Libby and Addington believed that Townsend would bring a more traditional approach to combating terrorism, and feared she would not sign on to, indeed might even oppose, the OVP's policy of advocating the use of aggressive and controversial tools against terror suspects. One of those techniques is known as "extraordinary rendition," in which terror suspects are taken to foreign countries, where they can be interrogated without the same legal and human-rights protections afforded to those in U.S. custody, including the protection from torture.

Libby's opposition to Townsend was so intense that he asked at least two other people in the White House to obtain her personnel records. These records showed that she had been turned down for two lesser positions in the Bush administration because of her political leanings, according to accounts provided by current and former administration officials. Libby also spoke about leaking the material to journalists or key staffers or members on Capitol Hill, to possibly undercut Townsend, according to the same accounts.

Second, the new information on Townsend sheds light on why the first federal grand jury in the CIA leak case ended its two-year term this fall without bringing any criminal charges against Rove. On the very last day of its term, October 28, the grand jury indicted Libby on five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice for allegedly concealing his own role in the Plame leak.

The papers on Frances Townsend that Rove had on his desk on July 9 appear to have corroborated Rove's and Novak's accounts to prosecutors that the principal focus of their conversation was Townsend's appointment. But on the issue of Valerie Plame, prosecutors have been unable to determine whether in fact Novak was the one who first broached the subject, and whether Rove simply confirmed something that Novak already knew. Sources close to the investigation say this uncertainty is one of the foremost reasons Fitzgerald has not decided yet whether to bring criminal charges against Rove.

At the same time, the Townsend information could prove to be a double-edged sword for Rove. According to sources close to the investigation, prosecutors looking at Rove's actions are weighing the exonerating information regarding the July 9 Rove-Novak conversation against the more incriminating conversation about Plame that Rove had on July 11, 2003, with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper.

Cooper has told the grand jury that Rove was the first person to tell him of Plame's CIA employment. Unlike Novak, Cooper has testified that Rove did not represent the information on Plame as simply hearsay or rumor.

Fitzgerald is said to be continuing his investigation into whether Rove made false statements, committed perjury, and obstructed justice. The investigation is focused on Rove's apparent failure to disclose his conversation with Cooper in his first interview with the FBI in October 2003 or in his first appearance before the grand jury in February 2004. In October 2004, Rove revised his testimony in a second appearance before the grand jury, saying he had indeed talked to Cooper and that he had not disclosed the talk earlier because of a faulty memory.

Dan Richman, a professor of law at Fordham University and a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, says that even if some evidence appears to exonerate Rove, if there's evidence that Rove withheld information from the authorities about Cooper, Rove's reticence "might even be construed as an attempt to deflect attention from the Cooper call, [and this] could raise troubling questions for Fitzgerald and could come back to haunt Rove."

In recent weeks, Fitzgerald has intensified his investigation, obtaining permission from a federal court to present new information on Rove and other Bush administration officials to a second grand jury. The prosecutor has also questioned additional witnesses, and summoned some to testify. On December 7, Fitzgerald, accompanied by two deputies and the lead FBI agent on the case, presented evidence for three hours to the second grand jury.

Inside The OVP
The virtually simultaneous White House insider campaigns to leak information on Townsend and Plame, as well as the contradictory efforts by various Bush administration officials to discredit or defend Townsend, reflect the ideological fault lines that have split officials into competing factions at the highest levels of the administration.

These internal conflicts -- which existed from the earliest days of the Bush presidency -- intensified in the emotionally charged days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, numerous current and former administration officials said in interviews.

Although White House officials were never able to determine who leaked information to Novak about Townsend, senior aides to Cheney, foremost among them Libby and Addington, privately opposed her appointment.

In conversations with others in the White House, Libby and Addington expressed concerns that had less to do with Townsend's political associations than with the fact that they believed that she favored a more "law enforcement" approach to fighting terrorism, including opposition to rendition, according to an official who spoke to both men at the time.

Libby, Addington, and others also had concerns that as a Justice Department official, she had been too slow in invoking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the mechanism by which the government seeks court approval for wiretaps and other electronic surveillance of potential terrorists and spies. Townsend, who declined several requests to be interviewed for this article, has said that in refusing the FISA requests, she was only following the law; that she did not want to jeopardize potential prosecutions by allowing wiretaps that would later be thrown out in court; and that the rules for such electronic surveillance were much stricter before September 11.

When Townsend's appointment was first being considered, Libby specifically sought from at least two other people at the White House confidential government personnel records indicating that Townsend had been turned down earlier for at least two senior administration positions because of her political background, according to accounts provided by two senior government officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

In one of the instances, Libby inquired about obtaining confidential personnel information from the White House Presidential Personnel Office, which screens high-level political appointees, and from a federal agency where Townsend had previously been denied a job, according to the account of one of the officials knowledgeable about the request.

Libby's tactics against Townsend appear to have paralleled those he took around the same period of time in attempting to blunt Wilson's criticism of the administration's use of prewar intelligence.

According to the grand jury indictment of Libby, he sought information from State Department and CIA officials on Plame's CIA employment. Libby also wanted to learn whether Plame had played a role in her husband's selection for the Niger mission. The indictment alleged that Libby had asked Addington, "in sum and substance, what paperwork there would be at the CIA if an employee's spouse undertook an overseas trip." The court papers do not say what action, if any, Addington may have taken in response to Libby's request.

A spokesman for the Office of the Vice President said that officials could not comment for this story, because of the ongoing federal grand jury investigation.

In his separate effort to block Townsend, Libby also spoke to others in the White House about possibly leaking information to someone in the media or providing it to staffers on Capitol Hill to create outside pressure on the president not to make the appointment, according to the accounts given by two senior White House officials.

Libby gave key Republican House and Senate members at least some of the material, which served as a basis for a memo by congressional staffers that was circulated widely on Capitol Hill criticizing the potential Townsend appointment, according to the White House officials' accounts.

And Libby suggested both inside and outside the White House that Townsend was being considered as a national security adviser to the president because her husband had been a classmate of George W. Bush's at Andover and Yale.

(Other administration officials insist that Bush and John Townsend knew each other only in passing at Andover and Yale, and privately scoff at Libby's notion that their early acquaintance would play a major role in the president's selection of Frances Townsend as his adviser.)

Libby pointedly said that the Bush-Townsend connection was the reason that the ordinary vetting procedures had been set aside to allow for Townsend's appointment, according to the accounts provided by the two senior officials.

In at least one instance, according to documents and sources, Townsend had in fact been considered for a senior position at the Homeland Security Department, but the job offer was pulled back because of opposition by the White House Office of Political Affairs and the Presidential Personnel Office. After the turndown, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge expressed disappointment that he was unable to hire Townsend, two senior government officials said.

One senior government official familiar with the screening operation said it was a high priority to "push back on political appointees" regarding issues of loyalty to the president, and that party affiliation was central to many decisions, as it had been in the White House under previous presidents.

But the intense interest in Townsend's personnel records on the part of the vice president's office raised eyebrows among other senior White House staffers, especially after Novak wrote in his July 10 column on Townsend that "careful political screening by the Bush operation for routine appointments seems to have broken down in filling highly sensitive terrorism posts."

Ironically, Rove, who was tasked by the president to defend Townsend, had largely devised the system of screening political appointees. A senior administration official asserted in an interview that once Bush made the decision to back the Townsend nomination, Rove would have put aside whatever personal feelings he had and would have done everything possible to implement Bush's decision.

"His attitude would have been, 'This has been done. There was a presidential decision. Let's now put the best possible face on it,' " the official said of Rove.

One Shattered, One Thriving
That Rove and Libby and others on the vice president's staff would work at cross-purposes with one another was hardly a surprise to many senior West Wing staffers, even as they later considered the irony that during the very same telephone conversation in which Rove was doing damage control with Novak to blunt the effort to undercut Townsend, Rove appeared to be working in tandem with Libby when he spoke to Novak about Plame.

A former senior White House aide said in an interview that while Rove and Libby were often allies, they were two men with "different objectives" that were by their nature inherently in conflict. Rove, this person said, was Bush's "top political strategist," while Libby's primary role was that of "defender-in-chief for the vice president." That, of course, led to inevitable conflict between Libby and Rove.

Whatever conflict there was between the two men was submerged as well as possible, in large part because of the president's personality and management style: "The president and [Chief of Staff] Andy [Card] have set the tone," said the former White House aide. "There is an expectation of comity. Everyone slaps each other's backs even if they don't like each other."

One official said that Rove and Libby, reflecting sometimes two distinct power centers in the White House, often viewed each other with mistrust and as a "necessary evil in the larger scheme of things," but they respected each other's abilities.

Libby, Addington, and Rove did not return phone calls for this article.

A spokesperson for President Bush, Dana Perino, said in response to a query for this article, "Fran Townsend is doing a fantastic job for the president. She is not only his homeland-security adviser, but also his counterterrorism adviser. She has earned the trust of both the president and her colleagues in the White House."

As for concerns regarding Townsend's past positions in the Clinton administration, Perino added that Townsend's "background as a law enforcement official, in addition to her experience at the Justice Department and Coast Guard, make her uniquely qualified to serve in this important role in the White House."

Lee Ann McBride, a press secretary to Vice President Cheney, said she could not answer any questions as to whether Libby, Addington, or others in the OVP had ever had reservations about Townsend's appointment, because the White House has a firm policy of never commenting on anything regarding its "internal deliberations." McBride said that "the vice president's office works very closely with Fran Townsend and the Homeland Security Council. She continues to do a remarkable job on the issues that are so crucial to the safety and security of all Americans."

In the meantime, while Libby awaits trial, Rove anxiously awaits a final decision as to whether Fitzgerald will bring charges against him.

As for Plame, she retired from the CIA on December 9, her career having been shattered by the disclosure that she worked undercover. She is considering filing a civil suit against those who exposed her identity, although she has delayed a final decision.

In sharp contrast, Townsend's career is thriving. Her portfolio has been expanded to include homeland-security issues. And Bush also considered her for secretary of Homeland Security, but pulled back, in part because of her hard-line positions on the treatment of terror suspects, which could have drawn opposition to her nomination. Ironically, her views on the treatment of suspected terrorists are similar to those of Cheney.

An August 27, 2005, profile of Townsend in The Washington Post illustrated the high esteem in which she is held inside the White House. "Just a little over two years ago, she had never met Bush and was viewed with suspicion by the inner circle of a tribalistic White House that does not easily accept outsiders," The Post wrote. "But the hard-charging Townsend has parlayed a succession of powerful patrons into one of the government's most important jobs.... Townsend has impressed Bush with a tough efficiency and a bit of a swagger that resembles his own. Her influence has grown to the point that Cabinet secretaries and agency directors who do not normally return media calls about White House staff members rush to phone with lavish praise for a profile." Among those who made admiring comments were Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

That was no accident. The same disciplined White House media operation that had worked so hard to blunt criticism by Wilson and prepared briefing materials to defend Townsend was once again in high gear.

In anticipation of the Post profile, aides prepared talking points on Townsend for White House staffers who might be called by reporters. One person familiar with the materials called them "prepackaged virtual scripts" to read from if contacted.

newsobserver.com | Bush can settle CIA leak riddle, Novak says

2005-12-14T16:38:00.000-05:00

Rob Christensen, Barbara Barrett, Jane Stancill and Dan Kane, Staff Writers
Newspaper columnist Robert Novak is still not naming his source in the Valerie Plame affair, but he says he is pretty sure the name is no mystery to President Bush.
"I'm confident the president knows who the source is," Novak told a luncheon audience at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh on Tuesday. "I'd be amazed if he doesn't."

"So I say, 'Don't bug me. Don't bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.' "

It was Novak who first revealed that Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA. Wilson had angered the Bush administration when he accused it of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat before the war.Disclosing the identity of a CIA agent is illegal; the disclosure set off a furor in Washington, resulting in an ongoing investigation by a special prosecutor and the indictment and resignation of Lewis Libby, the chief aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Woodward, a Washington Post editor, recently disclosed that he, too, had been told by an administration figure about Plame's secret identity -- probably, he said, by the same source who told Novak.

Novak said his role in the Plame affair "snowballed out of proportion" as a result of a "campaign by the left."

But he also blamed "extremely bad management of the issue by the White House. Once you give an issue to a special prosecutor, you lose control of it."

Burr meets with Alito

U.S. Sen. Richard Burr met with Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel A. Alito for about half an hour Tuesday, according to a release from Burr's office.

The pair discussed Alito's experience and his views on judicial activism.

Burr, a Republican, said in a statement that Alito "has the qualifications and experience necessary" to serve on the nation's highest court. Burr said he hopes Alito receives a fair hearing and an up-or-down vote on his nomination.

Alito was nominated by President Bush to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. His Senate Judiciary Committee hearing is scheduled to begin Jan. 9.

Foreign journalists coming

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday announced a journalism exchange program sponsored by the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Aspen Institute and six journalism schools, including UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The Edward R. Murrow Journalism Program will bring 100 foreign media professionals to the United States to study journalism starting in April. UNC-CH's interim journalism dean, Tom Bowers, attended Tuesday's announcement in Washington.

During the event, Rice took time to express sorrow over the killing of Lebanese journalist Gebran Tueni in Beirut. And despite the Bush administration's recent controversies involving the media, she pointed out the importance of a free press.

"We all know that the bedrock pillar of a free society is a free press and that it is crucial for the foundation of any democracy," Rice said.

Protesters' eye on Black

House Democrats might not receive a warm welcome at a party fund-raiser Thursday night at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. Protesters are planning to congregate near the entrance to call for House Speaker Jim Black's resignation.

Don Yelton, a political activist who has twice tried to win election to the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners, is organizing the protest. He said Black, a Mecklenburg County Democrat, is a big part of the lack of accountability in the legislature, citing among other things the federal investigation into his ties to the creation of the state lottery and the work of his former political director, Meredith Norris.

"It's time that we the people take the state back from the corrupt politicians," said Yelton, a former Democrat turned Republican. He hosts a local public affairs TV show in Asheville.

Byron York on Karl Rove & Pat Fitzgerald on National Review Online

2005-12-14T10:59:00.000-05:00

Will Rove be Indicted?
As rumors fly, here’s what’s known at this point.

There have been rumors flying around Washington in the last few days that Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, might soon be indicted in the CIA leak investigation. At least for now, the rumors appear to be based on someone hearing that someone else had heard something, or that someone had gotten a sense that something was about to happen and told someone else. Are there any facts to back up such gossip and guessing? No one seems to know.

But it is true that there is growing nervousness among people who support Rove's side in the case. They know that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, in addition to presenting some new evidence to a new federal grand jury, has also re-presented previously-gathered evidence to that grand jury. To most observers, that suggests Fitzgerald could be planning to indict someone.

Rove's supporters also know that the time is about right for something to happen. Back in late October, when Fitzgerald indicted Vice President Dick Cheney's then-chief-of-staff Lewis Libby, he refrained from taking action in Rove's case because of a new argument made by Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin. That new argument, everyone agreed, would take a while to check out and assess. Now, it seems likely that enough time has passed; Fitzgerald has either found Rove's and Luskin's case persuasive or he hasn't.

If Rove were to be indicted — and for all anyone on the outside knows, there might be someone else in Fitzgerald's sights — most people knowledgeable about the case believe charges would stem from the presidential adviser's testimony about his brief July 11, 2003, conversation with Time magazine's Matthew Cooper.

Rove has appeared before Fitzgerald's grand jury four times. Before that, he was interviewed once by FBI agents assigned to the investigation. The problem, if there is one, apparently involves the first two appearances — the FBI interview and the first grand jury testimony. In both those instances, apparently, Rove did not tell investigators about his conversation with Cooper. By the time Rove appeared for a second time before the grand jury, he had discovered evidence — an internal White House e-mail — showing that he did indeed talk to Cooper. He gave the evidence to Fitzgerald, who then questioned him about it at length.

Rove is thought to have testified that he simply did not remember the Cooper conversation — Cooper himself described the talk as being about two minutes long and occurring right as Rove was leaving on vacation — until he discovered the e-mail. Supporting Rove's contention is the fact that Rove, apparently, testified from the very beginning that he talked to columnist Robert Novak, which suggests he was not trying to hide his involvement in the case from Fitzgerald.

As far as anyone outside the investigation knows, Fitzgerald does not have a problem with testimony from Rove's second, third, and fourth appearances before the grand jury. In addition, it appears that Rove, like Libby, would not be charged with violating any of the underlying laws in the case — either the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act. So for now, the agonizing question for Rove's supporters is whether Fitzgerald believes Rove's earlier testimony involving Cooper constituted the crimes of making false statements (in the case of the FBI interview) or perjury (in the grand jury testimony).

Rove's supporters believe it would be a weak case, a good deal weaker than the perjury and obstruction case Fitzgerald has made against Libby, which itself was somewhat undermined when it turned out that there was at least one significant part of that story — Libby's conversations with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward — that Fitzgerald didn't know about at the time he indicted Libby. Still, it's possible Fitzgerald will forge ahead, in part because his much-publicized, two-year investigation has so far produced relatively meager results. After intense probing, and working with virtually unlimited power and discretion, the hard-charging prosecutor has succeeded in indicting one person, Libby, although not for an underlying offense, and disrupting or marring the careers of journalists Judith Miller, Cooper, Woodward, and, most recently, Time's Viveca Novak. Some Fitzgerald watchers find it difficult to believe that he will close up shop and go home with a record like that.

Time Reporter May Have Tipped Rove's Lawyer to Leak

2005-12-11T23:24:00.000-05:00

By Carol D. Leonnig and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 12, 2005; A04

A Time magazine reporter testified in the CIA leak case that she alerted Karl Rove's lawyer in early 2004 that the top Bush adviser had leaked information to her colleague about Valerie Plame, according to a first-person account published yesterday in Time.

The reporter, Viveca Novak, did not initially tell her bosses at Time that she may have tipped off Rove's lawyer or that the special prosecutor in the CIA leak was interested in the details of her conversation with Robert D. Luskin, Rove's lawyer. As a result, she and Time editors agreed she would take a leave of absence while they contemplate her future.

The casual chat between Novak and Luskin, which took place in the first half of 2004, is now central to Rove's efforts to avoid indictment in the more than two-year-old case. Novak's account in this week's issue of Time does little to explain how a conversation over drinks between Rove's lawyer and a reporter chasing the story could help clear the senior Bush adviser. In addition to raising new questions about the role of journalists in the Plame affair, Novak's testimony provides fresh and significant insight into Rove's campaign to avoid charges in a case that threatens the man President Bush once called the "architect" of his reelection.

Rove is believed to be under investigation for providing false statements about his role in the public disclosure of Plame's employment at the CIA.

Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald -- who charged I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney with lying and obstructing justice -- recently presented evidence to a new grand jury. Sources close to the case said one of the biggest pieces of unfinished business is whether to indict Rove -- and that a decision could come as early as this month.

The sources, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they have been urged by Fitzgerald not to discuss the case, said Luskin told the prosecutor about the Novak conversation a few days before Libby was indicted on Oct. 28.

It was only part of what the sources described as a furious, last-minute effort by Luskin to convince the prosecutor that Rove was guilty of nothing more than a bad memory -- and certainly not of trying to cover up his role in the Plame case. Of the information presented by Luskin that day, the Novak conversation is the only piece known to require additional investigation. Now that Fitzgerald has deposed Luskin and Novak, some close to the case think Rove's fate could soon be known.

Novak, according to her first-person account, testified Thursday that in early 2004 she met with Luskin. She told him that Time reporters were buzzing that Rove was one of the sources who told Matthew Cooper, a reporter at the magazine, in July 2003 that Plame worked at the CIA.

This became a big deal once Fitzgerald started investigating whether anyone in the Bush administration illegally disclosed Plame's CIA identity as part of a broader White House effort to discredit allegations made by Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that Bush had hyped intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

According to Novak's account, she mentioned to Luskin only the speculation about the identity of Cooper's confidential source because she felt Luskin was "spinning" her. She and Luskin met for drinks occasionally after work at Cafe Deluxe on Wisconsin Avenue, and at one of those meetings, she said, Luskin insisted to her that Rove faced no legal exposure in the investigation. She said she pushed back, saying to the attorney, "Are you sure about that?" and remarked that she had heard from Time colleagues that Rove was Cooper's source for a story he did on Plame in July 2003. "He looked surprised and very serious," Novak wrote in the Time article.

It is not clear why this matters. Novak wrote that Luskin told her the tip set in motion a cycle of events that led Rove and his lawyers to search phone logs and other material to determine whether Rove had talked to Cooper -- and eventually prompted Rove to change his testimony. But another lawyer in the case said Luskin had a different strategy in mind when alerting Fitzgerald to the conversation.

Until he testified for a second time in October 2004, Rove maintained he did not recall talking to Cooper. Shortly before testifying, Luskin found an e-mail written by Rove to former deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in July 2003 in which Rove mentioned the conversation with Cooper. Rove then testified that that e-mail jarred his memory, a lawyer close to the case said.

It appears the timing of the Luskin-Novak conversation is crucial to the Rove defense. Novak said she does not recall the precise date but said she talked with Luskin in January, March and May 2004. She wrote that she believed the talk probably took place in May.

A lawyer close to the case said Luskin has contended the conversation happened before Rove's first appearance before the grand jury in February 2004, when he testified he did not recall discussing Plame with Cooper. Luskin refused to comment. A spokesman for the Rove defense said in a statement that Rove is cooperating and that private discussions with the prosecutor will not be discussed publicly.

One possible explanation of why the date is so important is that Luskin could contend it would have been foolish for Rove to try to cover up his role when he knew -- as a result of Novak's disclosure to Luskin -- that a number of people knew he had talked to Cooper and that it probably would soon become public.

Novak is not related to Robert D. Novak, the conservative columnist who was the first person to disclose Plame's CIA employment in a July 2003 column.

Viveca Novak's standing at Time is in doubt as a result of the episode. She waited to alert her editors for nearly a month after it appeared she might become a part of the leak investigation story -- rather than a writer helping to cover it, according to the dates provided in her account.

She said she hoped she would not have to go before the grand jury. She hired a lawyer and opted not to tell her editors in hopes that she would not become a figure in the story and the subject of news accounts. But on the day she was writing a story about Washington Post reporter and Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward being deposed in the investigation, she learned Fitzgerald wanted to interview her under oath.

Time editor Jim Kelly said in an interview yesterday that he and Novak agreed in conversations Saturday evening that she needed to "take a deep breath" and Kelly needed time to deliberate about her performance and future. "Clearly there was a failure to keep her bureau chief posted about this," he said. "It's fair to say I am disturbed by that."

Kelly added, "there was no struggle" and the two agreed to temporarily part ways. "I take very seriously what's happened, and Viveca takes it very seriously, too," he said.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Lawyer Knew Rove Was a Source, Reporter Says - New York Times

2005-12-11T19:23:00.000-05:00

By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - A lawyer for Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, learned in the first half of 2004 that Mr. Rove had probably been a source for the magazine's July 2003 article that mentioned the C.I.A. officer who has come to be at the heart of the C.I.A. leak case, a Time reporter wrote today.

The Time reporter, Viveca Novak, wrote in a first-person article published on the magazine's Web site that she met with Robert D. Luskin, a lawyer for Mr. Rove, on three occasions in early 2004. She said it was probably during one of these meetings that she raised the possibility that Mr. Rove had discussed the C.I.A. officer with a Time colleague, Matthew Cooper.

Ms. Novak's conversation with Mr. Luskin has been under scrutiny by the special counsel in the leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald. In her article, Ms. Novak wrote that the prosecutor sought to question her about the matter after Mr. Luskin told Mr. Fitzgerald of their conversation about Mr. Rove in the belief that the information would help Mr. Rove.

Ms. Novak's testimony appeared to bring Mr. Fitzgerald near to an endpoint in his deliberations about whether to charge Mr. Rove. Mr. Fitzgerald met for the first time with a new grand jury last week, although it is not known what evidence, if any, he presented to the panel.

Mr. Rove is the only person known to remain under scrutiny in the leak case. Mr. Luskin has waged what other lawyers in the case have said is a vigorous behind-the-scenes attempt to save Mr. Rove from criminal charges. Today, Mr. Luskin would not discuss the case or his conversations with Ms. Novak.

Ms. Novak wrote that she was questioned under oath last week about her conversations with Mr. Luskin and said she felt free to cooperate with the prosecutor because Mr. Luskin wanted her to testify. In her article, Ms. Novak said that she was writing about her conversation with Mr. Luskin - over his objection - because she feels "that he violated any understanding to keep our talk confidential by unilaterally going to Fitzgerald and telling him what was said."

At the time of her 2004 conversation with the lawyer, Ms. Novak wrote, Mr. Luskin seemed surprised when she told him that Mr. Cooper had spoken with Mr. Rove.

In her article, she wrote: "I remember Luskin looking at me and saying something to the effect of 'Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt.'

"I responded instinctively," she recalled in the article, "thinking he was trying to spin me, and said something like, 'Are you sure about that? That's not what I hear around Time'."

"He looked surprised and very serious," she wrote, recalling that Mr. Luskin said, "There's nothing in the phone logs."

It was only later disclosed in news accounts that Mr. Cooper's phone call on July 11, 2003, had been transferred to Mr. Rove via a White House switchboard, which could explain why there was no record of the call.

Ms. Novak wrote that the conversation with Mr. Luskin had occurred at any one of three meetings anywhere from January 2004 to May 2004. Although she said he believed the key conversation was more likely in May, the prosecutor asked her about a meeting with Mr. Luskin on March 1, 2004, which she had initially overlooked. She said she could not recall when the conversation about Mr. Rove and Mr. Cooper had taken place.

After her exchange with Mr. Luskin, whenever it was, Ms. Novak recalled that she felt uncomfortable thinking that she might have inadvertently disclosed information that should have been withheld from the lawyer.

"I was taken aback that he seemed so surprised," she wrote. "I had been pushing back against what I thought was his attempt to lead me astray. I hadn't believed that I was disclosing anything he didn't already know. Maybe this was a feint. Maybe his client was lying to him. But at any rate, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I hadn't intended to tip Luskin off to anything. I was supposed to be the information gatherer."

The prosecutor has focused for months on the accuracy of Mr. Rove's statements to the grand jury that he forgot about the conversation with Mr. Cooper until sometime in 2004, when he found an internal White House e-mail message addressed to Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, that confirmed it.

Ms. Novak is not related to Robert Novak, the columnist who first disclosed the name of Ms. Wilson in a column on July 14, 2003. Mr. Cooper's article, which relied on Mr. Rove as a source, was published several days later and also identified Ms. Wilson by her unmarried name, Valerie Plame.

Mr. Fitzgerald has been investigating whether there was a deliberate attempt to disclose details about Ms. Wilson's employment at the C.I.A. as part of an effort by members of the Bush administration to discredit Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, who had complained about the government's misuse of intelligence on Iraq.

Ms. Novak said that she had not told her editors at Time about her conversation with Mr. Luskin. In addition, she said that although Mr. Luskin told her in late October that Mr. Fitzgerald might be interested in talking to her, she waited until Nov. 20, more than a week after a preliminary meeting with the prosecutor and after he had asked for her testimony under oath, to inform her editors that she had become embroiled in the case.

So far, Mr. Fitzgerald has brought one indictment, against I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Mr. Libby was indicted on Oct. 28 on five obstruction of justice and perjury counts and immediately resigned. He has pleaded not guilty.

Even if Mr. Fitzgerald concludes his inquiry involving Mr. Rove, it may not end the criminal investigation. Bob Woodward, a reporter for The Washington Post, disclosed last month that a government official told him about Ms. Wilson in mid-June 2003, which would make Mr. Woodward the first reporter known to have been told about Ms. Wilson's C.I.A. affiliation.

Mr. Woodward wrote that he testified under oath in a deposition to Mr. Fitzgerald after his source, whom he refused to identify publicly, went to the prosecutor to disclose the conversation. It is not known what action, if any, Mr. Fitzgerald intends to take in the matter.

Ms. Novak's article was accompanied by an editor's note that said that she had taken a leave of absence.

Time's managing editor, Jim Kelly, said in a telephone interview: "I'm taking this seriously. I'm upset and she's upset," adding that her article "was full of regret about what happened."

Mr. Kelly suggested that were several issues of concern to editors, among them her failure to alert editors in a timely way about her conversation with Mr. Luskin and her dealings with the prosecutor. Mr. Kelly said that he would meet with Ms. Novak early next year to decide if further steps were warranted.

Time: Rove's Lawyer Told of Conversation - Yahoo! News

2005-12-11T18:46:00.000-05:00

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

Months before Karl Rove corrected his statements in the Valerie Plame investigation, his lawyer was told that the president's top political adviser might have disclosed Plame's CIA status to a Time magazine reporter.

Rove says he had forgotten the conversation he had on July 11, 2003, with Time's Matt Cooper. But the magazine reported Sunday that in the first half of 2004, as President Bush's re-election campaign was heating up, Rove's lawyer got the word about a possible Rove-Cooper conversation from a second Time reporter, Viveca Novak.

Novak described her conversation with the lawyer, Robert Luskin, in a first-person account released Sunday on Time's Web site.

Luskin declined comment. Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Rove's legal team, said the deputy White House chief of staff has cooperated fully with prosecutors.

"The integrity of the investigation requires that we not discuss the substance of any communications with the special counsel," Corallo said in a statement. "Out of respect for the investigative process, we have abided by that rule and will continue to withhold comment on our interactions with the special counsel."

Six weeks ago, in a so-far successful effort to avert Rove's indictment, Luskin disclosed his conversation with Novak to the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald. Rove remains under investigation.

In her first-person account, Novak wrote that Luskin clearly thought disclosing their discussion "was going to help Rove, perhaps by explaining why Rove hadn't told Fitzgerald or the grand jury of his conversation with my colleague Matt Cooper."

Fitzgerald questioned Novak under oath Thursday, the day after the prosecutor began presenting evidence to a new grand jury considering evidence in the leak investigation.

The prosecutor is investigating the Bush administration's leaking of Plame's CIA status to the news media in 2003, as Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of manipulating prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Novak says Luskin appeared surprised when told in 2004 of a possible Rove-Cooper conversation about the CIA status of Wilson's wife.

Luskin said in effect that "Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt," Novak wrote. "I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me."

Novak said she told Luskin "something like, 'Are you sure about that? That's not what I hear around Time.' He looked surprised and very serious" and at the end of their discussion that day said, "Thank you. This is important."

Novak said the conversation with Luskin occurred anywhere from January 2004 to May 2004; she thinks it was perhaps in March.

It was not until October 2004 — sometime between five months and nine months after Novak's conversation with Luskin — that Rove disclosed his conversation with Cooper to the prosecutor.

Rove's disclosure followed Luskin's discovery of a White House e-mail from July 11, 2003. The message, from Rove to then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, referred to Rove's conversation earlier that day with Cooper.

It is not known publicly whether Fitzgerald's investigators had the e-mail all along and simply overlooked it or whether the White House had not produced the e-mail for the prosecutor.

By the time Rove stepped forward to disclose the Cooper conversation to investigators, Cooper was under intense pressure from the prosecutor to reveal the original source of his information that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

Five months ago, his court appeals exhausted and after receiving a personal waiver from Rove, Cooper disclosed that his source had been the president's top political adviser.

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is under indictment in Fitzgerald's probe on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI. Libby has pleaded not guilty.

TIME.com: What Viveca Novak Told Fitzgerald -- Dec. 19, 2005 -- Page 1

2005-12-11T14:40:00.000-05:00

It was in the midst of another Washington scandal, almost a decade ago, that I got to know Bob Luskin. He represented Mark Middleton, a minor figure in the Democratic campaign-finance scandals of 1996. Luskin kept Middleton out of the spotlight and never told me much. Still, there is the occasional source with whom one becomes friendly, and eventually Luskin was in that group.

We'd occasionally meet for a drink--he didn't like having lunch--at Cafe Deluxe on Wisconsin Avenue, near the National Cathedral and on my route home. In October 2003, as we each made our way through a glass of wine, he asked me what I was working on. I told him I was trying to get a handle on the Valerie Plame leak investigation. "Well," he said, "you're sitting next to Karl Rove's lawyer." I was genuinely surprised, since Luskin's liberal sympathies were no secret, and here he was representing the man known to many Democrats as the other side's Evil Genius. I began spending a little more time than usual with Luskin as I tried to keep track of the investigation. But how it all bought me a ticket to testify under oath to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald still floors me.

The week of Oct. 24, 2005, was Indictment Week--that Friday, the grand jury's term would expire, and it was expected that Fitzgerald would finish up his probe by then so he wouldn't have to start working with a new grand jury. It seemed clear that Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was in deep trouble, but Rove's status was uncertain. Sometime during that week, Luskin, who was talking at length with Fitzgerald, phoned me and said he had disclosed to Fitzgerald the content of a conversation he and I had had at Cafe Deluxe more than a year earlier and that Fitzgerald might want to talk to me.

Luskin clearly thought that was going to help Rove, perhaps by explaining why Rove hadn't told Fitzgerald or the grand jury of his conversation with my colleague Matt Cooper about former Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife until well into the inquiry. I knew what Matt had been through--the unwanted celebrity, the speculation unrelated to fact, the dissection of his life and career. I didn't face the prospect of prison, since Luskin clearly wanted me to tell Fitzgerald about the incident and thus Luskin was not a source I had to protect, but no journalist wants to be part of the story. I clung to Luskin's word might, but the next week he told me Fitzgerald did indeed want to talk to me, but informally, not under oath. I hired a lawyer, Hank Schuelke, but I didn't tell anyone at TIME. Unrealistically, I hoped this would turn out to be an insignificant twist in the investigation and also figured that if people at TIME knew about it, it would be difficult to contain the information, and reporters would pounce on it--as I would have. Fitzgerald and I met in my lawyer's office on Nov. 10 for about two hours. Schuelke had told him I would discuss only my interactions with Luskin that were relevant to the conversation in question. No fishing expeditions, no questions about my other reporting or sources in the case. He agreed, telling my lawyer that he wanted to "remove the chicken bone without disturbing the body."

He asked how often Luskin and I met during the period from fall 2003 to fall 2004 (about five times), when, where and so forth. I had calendar entries that helped but weren't entirely reliable. Did I take notes at those meetings? No. Luskin was more likely to speak freely if he didn't see me committing his words to paper. Did Luskin ever talk to me about whether Rove was a source for Matt on the subject of Wilson's wife?

That was the "chicken bone" Fitzgerald had referred to, the conversation Luskin had told him about that got me dragged into the probe. Here's what happened. Toward the end of one of our meetings, I remember Luskin looking at me and saying something to the effect of "Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt." I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me, and said something like, "Are you sure about that? That's not what I hear around TIME." He looked surprised and very serious. "There's nothing in the phone logs," he said. In the course of the investigation, the logs of all Rove's calls around the July 2003 time period--when two stories, including Matt's, were published mentioning that Plame was Wilson's wife--had been combed, and Luskin was telling me there were no references to Matt. (Cooper called via the White House switchboard, which may be why there is no record.)

I was taken aback that he seemed so surprised. I had been pushing back against what I thought was his attempt to lead me astray. I hadn't believed that I was disclosing anything he didn't already know. Maybe this was a feint. Maybe his client was lying to him. But at any rate, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I hadn't intended to tip Luskin off to anything. I was supposed to be the information gatherer. It's true that reporters and sources often trade information, but that's not what this was about. If I could have a do-over, I would have kept my mouth shut; since I didn't, I wish I had told my bureau chief about the exchange. Luskin walked me to my car and said something like, "Thank you. This is important." Fitzgerald wanted to know when this conversation occurred. At that point I had found calendar entries showing that Luskin and I had met in January and in May. Since I couldn't remember exactly how the conversation had developed, I wasn't sure. I guessed it was more likely May.

As my meeting with Fitzgerald wrapped up, I asked what would happen next. He said he would consider whether he needed to interview me again under oath, but that if he did, he wouldn't require me to appear before the grand jury. I hoped that would be the end of it. But on Friday, Nov. 18--when I was on deadline, writing, ironically, about Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's newly discovered role in the investigation--my lawyer called and told me Fitzgerald did indeed want me under oath. I realized that I now needed to share this information with Jay Carney, our Washington bureau chief. On Sunday, Nov. 20, I drove over to his house to tell him. He then called Jim Kelly, the managing editor. Nobody was happy about it, least of all me.

A new meeting with Fitzgerald was arranged for Dec. 8. Leaks about my role began appearing in the papers, some of them closer to the mark than others. They all made me feel physically ill. Fitzgerald had asked that I check a couple of dates in my calendar for meetings with Luskin. One of them, March 1, 2004, checked out. I hadn't found that one in my first search because I had erroneously entered it as occurring at 5 a.m., not 5 p.m.

When Fitzgerald and I met last Thursday, along with another lawyer from his team, my attorney, a lawyer from Time Inc. and the court reporter, he was more focused. The problem with the new March date was that now I was even more confused--previously I had to try to remember if the key conversation had occurred in January or May, and I thought it was more likely May. But March was close enough to May that I really didn't know. "I don't remember" is an answer that prosecutors are used to hearing, but I was mortified about how little I could recall of what occurred when.

This meeting lasted about an hour and a half. As before, Fitzgerald was extremely pleasant, very professional, and he stuck to his pledge not to wander with his questions. Does what I remembered--or more often, didn't remember--of my interactions with Luskin matter? Will it make the difference between whether Rove gets indicted or not? I have no idea. I didn't find out until this fall that, according to Luskin, my remark led him to do an intensive search for evidence that Rove and Matt had talked. That's how Luskin says he found the e-mail Rove wrote to Stephen Hadley at the National Security Council right after his conversation with Matt, saying that Matt had called about welfare reform but then switched to the subject of Iraq's alleged attempt to buy uranium yellowcake in Niger. According to Luskin, he turned the e-mail over to Fitzgerald when he found it, leading Rove to acknowledge before the grand jury in October 2004 that he had indeed spoken with Cooper.

One final note: Luskin is unhappy that I decided to write about our conversation, but I feel that he violated any understanding to keep our talk confidential by unilaterally going to Fitzgerald and telling him what was said. And, of course, anyone who testifies under oath for a grand jury (my sworn statement will be presented to the grand jury by Fitzgerald) is free to discuss that testimony afterward.

TIME.com: The Roving Investigator -- Dec. 19, 2005 -- Page 1

2005-12-11T10:24:00.000-05:00

In his continuing inquiry into the Valerie Plame leak, Patrick Fitzgerald questions another TIME reporter
By RICHARD LACAYO
Reporters like to be the ones asking the questions, but the Valerie Plame leak investigation just hasn't been working that way. In his quest to find out whether White House officials leaked that Plame was a cia officer as a way to punish her husband Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador and a critic of the White House case for the Iraq war, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has got testimony from a parade of journalists, including Judith Miller of the New York Times, Matthew Cooper of TIME, nbc's Tim Russert and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Now add one more to the list: TIME correspondent Viveca Novak. As TIME reported two weeks ago, Novak had recently agreed to cooperate with a request from Fitzgerald to answer questions about conversations she had had with Robert Luskin, the attorney for White House senior adviser Karl Rove. Novak cooperated because, unlike her colleague Cooper, she did not have a confidential source to protect. Last Thursday, Novak was questioned under oath by Fitzgerald for more than an hour at the Washington office of her lawyer.

What Fitzgerald wanted to know about was a conversation Novak had had over drinks with Luskin in the first half of last year. In that exchange, Luskin told Novak that Rove had not been Cooper's source for a TIME.com story that Cooper had co-authored in July 2003 about how "government officials" had told TIME that Wilson's wife worked at the cia. That was in keeping with what Rove had told Fitzgerald's grand jury in February 2004. But at the restaurant that night, Novak challenged Luskin, saying she was hearing a different story around TIME's Washington bureau—namely that Rove was indeed Cooper's source. TIME editors learned about the conversation only last month, when Novak first disclosed it to the magazine's Washington bureau chief, James Carney. By then, Luskin had told Fitzgerald about the conversation, and Novak had already phoned and met with the special counsel.

Why is that conversation supposedly important? Because in October 2004, a few months after it took place, Rove made another appearance before the grand jury, saying this time that he had found an e-mail showing that he had spoken with Cooper. As Luskin tells it, his talk with Novak led him to a new search for evidence that Rove had been in contact with Cooper. That turned up an e-mail Rove had sent, shortly after speaking with Cooper, to Stephen Hadley, then Deputy National Security Adviser, telling Hadley about the conversation. Cooper later testified about his version of the chat last July, but only after receiving a specific waiver from Rove and after a costly battle by Time Inc. to keep Cooper's notes from Fitzgerald. Norman Pearlstine, Time Inc.'s editor-in-chief, relented after the Supreme Court refused to hear the company's appeal.

What will Fitzgerald do now? That's Washington's favorite parlor game. The day before he questioned Novak, the special counsel met for three hours with his new grand jury, which presumably will decide Rove's fate.

Republicans sinking in sleaze, Times Online, The Times, Sunday Times

2005-12-09T20:43:00.000-05:00

By Tim Reid
A decade ago the Democrats were thought to be shady. Now it is the turn of Mr Bush's party

A DECADE ago Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries seized control of Congress after 40 years of Democrat rule by promising to end the culture of graft and corruption on Capitol Hill.

Today, after a string of indictments, scandals and a criminal investigation that threatens to implicate dozens of politicians next year, the tables have turned full circle. It is now President Bush’s Republicans who are seen as the party of sleaze.

Polls suggest that two thirds of Americans believe that corruption is a serious political problem. That, allied with the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq, is raising fears in the White House of a voter backlash in next year’s mid-term congressional elections.

Since the summer, leading Republicans have been hit by a steady stream of scandals.

In September Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful politicians in America, had to step down as leader of the House of Representatives after being indicted for violating election finance laws. He is vigorously contesting the charges.

Bill Frist, the Republican leader of the Senate, is also under investigation over insider trading allegations involving the sale of his stock in a healthcare company. Mr Frist has denied any wrongdoing.

How the Bush Administration led the country into the Iraq war, and Democrat accusations that the White House manipulated prewar intelligence, then dominated much of October and November after the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, for his role in the Valerie Plame CIA-leak affair. Mr Libby was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, and he too has pleaded not guilty.

This week Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor leading the CIA-leak investigation, convened a new grand jury to investigate further the role of Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s chief political adviser, in the Plame affair. The move suggests that Mr Fitzgerald may yet bring charges against Mr Rove.

Meanwhile, Randy “Duke” Cunningham resigned from the House of Representatives two weeks ago in one of the most spectacular cases of political corruption in recent years.

Mr Cunningham, a Republican congressman since 1991 and member of the House Defence Appropriations committee, admitted accepting $2.4 million (£1.4 million) in bribes from defence contractors, including a Rolls-Royce and a $7,200 antique Louis-Philippe commode.

But of greatest concern to White House strategists is a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice into a Republican lobbyist named Jack Abramoff that could lead to the indictment of several politicians — mostly Republican — next year.

Over the past two years other investigations have exposed an intricate web of contacts between Mr Abramoff, one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington, and senior politicians.

Mr Abramoff allegedly gave them millions of dollars in donations as well as gifts, meals at top restaurants and lavish overseas trips, including golfing holidays at St Andrews. In return he sought legislative favours on behalf of his clients.

Last week Michael Scanlon, an Abramoff business partner and former aide to Mr DeLay, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials and defraud several Native American tribes. The tribes had hired Mr Abramoff to lobby politicians to get legislation favouring their gambling interests.

Scanlon is thought to have agreed to provide prosecutors with evidence that politicians took money in direct exchange for favourable votes.

One of the congressmen Scanlon is accused of bribing has been identified as Bob Ney, a Republican from Ohio. Mr Ney has been subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating Mr Abramoff, and denies wrongdoing.

It is alleged that, in addition to $14,000 in campaign contributions, Mr Ney received from Mr Abramoff’s Native American clients, he also got a golfing trip to St Andrews.

Among others who went on a St Andrews trip was Mr DeLay, who once described Mr Abramoff as my “dear friend”. The cost of Mr DeLay’s trip went on the lobbyist’s credit card.

Another Abramoff friend and former associate who went to St Andrews was David Safavian. He was forced to resign as the White House’s chief procurement officer in September after being charged with obstructing the Government’s investigation into his dealings with Mr Abramoff.

More than 30 members of Congress have been revealed to have taken legislative action favourable to Mr Abramoff’s Native American gambling clients after receiving money from the lobbyist or the tribes. Most are Republican, but they include Harry Reid, the Democrats’ Senate leader, and another Democrat senator, Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota.

Time Reporter Testifies in Leak Case

2005-12-09T10:54:00.000-05:00

Rove Lawyer Was Deposed Last Week by Special Prosecutor

By Carol D. Leonnig and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 9, 2005; A08

A special prosecutor questioned Time magazine reporter Viveca Novak under oath yesterday about a conversation she had with the attorney for presidential adviser Karl Rove that has become part of the CIA leak investigation, according to a top editor at the magazine.

In another twist, the lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, was deposed on the same issue last Friday, a source close to the case said.

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's questions in both sessions focused on the same subject: the conversation that Luskin and Novak, longtime friends, had over drinks sometime in the first half of 2004 about Rove's potential exposure in the probe.

Fitzgerald's decision to delve into the once-removed chat between a reporter and the lawyer for the top Bush political adviser comes as the prosecutor considers whether to charge Rove. For more than a year after the investigation began, Rove failed to reveal to the FBI and the grand jury that he had privately told another reporter for Time, Matthew Cooper, about the CIA role of undercover operative Valerie Plame.

Novak was deposed a day after Fitzgerald spent three hours meeting with a new grand jury in the leak inquiry. A previous grand jury investigating the case indicted Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on Oct. 28 and then disbanded. At the time, Fitzgerald warned Luskin that Rove remained under investigation, and he said in public filings that he would probably present information to a new grand jury.

Fitzgerald has spent two years investigating whether White House officials leaked Plame's name in the summer of 2003 to discredit allegations made by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration twisted intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Viveca Novak is not related to columnist Robert D. Novak, who disclosed Plame's identity in July 2003.

According to sources familiar with Rove's status, Luskin persuaded Fitzgerald in late October to postpone indicting Rove by alerting Fitzgerald to Luskin's previous conversation with Novak, among other things. Luskin argued that these private discussions helped show Rove did not intentionally conceal his conversation with Cooper from investigators. Rove has argued he forgot about the chat he had with Cooper on the phone in the summer of 2003.

Sources familiar with their conversations say Novak's and Luskin's accounts to Fitzgerald appear to conflict on when they spoke.

The timing of Rove's actions since the leak investigation began in September 2003 have been of keen interest to Fitzgerald, according to sources familiar with the prosecutor's questions. Rove did not mention his contact with Cooper to the FBI during interviews in 2003, or to the grand jury in February 2004.

He revealed to the grand jury that he spoke with Cooper on Oct. 15, 2004. That was one month after Fitzgerald subpoenaed Cooper to testify about his confidential conversations with administration sources other than Libby. It also came two days after a federal judge ordered that Cooper cooperate.

Viveca Novak and Luskin refused to comment yesterday. Fitzgerald and his spokesman have declined to comment on the Novak-Luskin conversation.

A source familiar with Novak's account said she believes the conversation took place in March or May, and definitely took place after February 2004, when Rove first testified before the grand jury.

But one person close to the case said the conversation took place before Rove's first grand jury appearance in February. This person said the conversation was not the event that led Rove to change his testimony.

Time's managing editor, Jim Kelly, said yesterday that the magazine will publish Novak's account of her testimony in its Monday edition, and it will be available in an online edition Sunday. Kelly said he did not yet know and could not comment on the full details of Novak's testimony or Fitzgerald's questions because he had not spoken with the reporter.

Novak was traveling from Washington to New York yesterday afternoon, he said, and planned to brief him and other Time editors at the magazine's headquarters about her testimony.

"To be fair, I need to speak with Viveca now that she has testified under oath," he said. "We felt it important to let Viveca prepare for her testimony. Now we'll be looking at the questions that have been raised by this whole incident."

Prosecutor, Time Reporter Meet on Yahoo! News

2005-12-08T14:28:00.000-05:00

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than an hour Thursday morning at a law firm representing Viveca Novak, a Time magazine reporter whose testimony was being sought in the CIA leak case.

Fitzgerald and an associate emerged from the office of attorney Hank Schuelke at 11:30 a.m. EDT, declined to answer questions and rode away in a taxi cab. A short time later, a court stenographer left the building.

An hour later, Schuelke escorted Novak from the building and helped her into a taxi. He declined comment when asked if she had provided sworn testimony in Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of an undercover CIA agent's identity. Time Washington bureau chief Jay Carney referred questions about Novak to the magazine's managing editor, Jim Kelly, who was not immediately available for comment.

Fitzgerald had been seeking testimony from Novak about her conversations with Robert Luskin, an attorney for deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove, who is still under investigation.

Novak, a reporter in Time's Washington bureau, had agreed to cooperate in Fitzgerald's investigation, according to an article in the Dec. 5 issue of the magazine.

The special counsel's meeting with Novak and Schuelke comes a day after Fitzgerald spent three hours meeting with grand jurors about the leak inquiry, which so far has yielded the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

For nearly two years, Fitzgerald has been looking into who in the administration leaked the identity of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame's identity to the news media.

Plame's CIA status was disclosed eight days after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat in the run-up to the war.

Rove's legal problems stem from the fact that it was not until more than a year into the criminal investigation that he told the prosecutor about disclosing Plame's CIA status to Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper on July 11, 2003.

Rove says he did not disclose the Cooper conversation to investigators because he had forgotten it. It occurred days before Plame's identity was revealed by the media.

The presidential adviser revealed the CIA employment of Wilson's wife to Cooper two days after another conversation in which Rove and conservative columnist Robert Novak discussed Plame's CIA status.

Robert Novak was the first journalist to disclose Plame's identity, on July 14, 2003. Cooper co-wrote a Time article about Plame on July 17, 2003.

Robert Novak and Viveca Novak are not related.

Viveca Novak specifically has been asked to testify under oath about conversations she had with Luskin starting in May 2004, the magazine reported.

Novak has written or contributed to articles about the CIA leak investigation.

New Grand Jury in CIA Leak Case Hears From Prosecutor

2005-12-08T00:07:00.000-05:00

By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 8, 2005; A17

The CIA leak investigation returned to a more active stage yesterday as a special prosecutor presented information to a grand jury for the first time in six weeks.

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's decision to enlist a new grand jury comes as he continues to investigate possible criminal charges against senior White House adviser Karl Rove. Rove faces possible legal consequences for not telling investigators for months that he had provided information about CIA operative Valerie Plame to Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper in July 2003.

Rove disclosed the conversation only after Cooper was subpoenaed to testify about their discussions, said sources familiar with Rove's account. Rove maintains that he initially forgot about the contact, the sources said.

Yesterday was the first time a grand jury has met to consider the case since Oct. 28, when a previous grand jury indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. Fitzgerald, who arrived with four deputies, an FBI agent and boxes of files, declined to comment on the three-hour session as he left the courthouse. No witnesses were seen entering the grand jury room.

But several legal experts and sources involved in the case said Fitzgerald was probably providing the new grand jury with a primer on what has been learned in the investigation and what remains unresolved. They said the prosecutor's move into a more active probe could spell trouble for Rove, or for other people enmeshed in more recent developments in the case.

Fitzgerald has spent two years investigating whether White House officials knowingly disclosed Plame's identity and undercover status in 2003 to discredit allegations made by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration twisted intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The term of the previous grand jury expired on the day it indicted Libby on five felony counts of lying, perjury and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald said then that he would continue to look into lingering issues, and he privately told Rove's attorney that Rove remained under investigation.

Two other revelations have been made since then. Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward disclosed that, unbeknown to Fitzgerald, an administration source had told him about Plame's CIA role in June 2003, before Libby allegedly disclosed similar information to another reporter. In a Nov. 14 deposition, Woodward answered questions under oath from Fitzgerald about the mid-June 2003 conversation with his source. The source, whose identity has not been revealed, had testified much earlier in Fitzgerald's investigation but did not mention the conversation, said two sources familiar with the investigation.

Time magazine disclosed on Nov. 27 that one of its reporters, Viveca Novak, would soon answer Fitzgerald's questions about conversations she had with Rove attorney Robert Luskin in 2004. Sources familiar with the case said Luskin told Fitzgerald in October that those conversations would help buttress Luskin's argument that Rove did not intentionally conceal his contacts with reporters from the grand jury.

Novak is scheduled to give a deposition under oath to Fitzgerald today, two sources close to the case said.

Luskin declined to comment on the grand jury session yesterday. "What I can say is, there's been no change in Karl's status since late October," he said. At that time, Fitzgerald told Luskin that Rove remained under investigation but that he would hold off on charging him because of information Luskin had provided late that month.

Randall D. Eliason, who headed public corruption prosecutions in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, said Fitzgerald would not go through the trouble of repeating information to a new grand jury unless he is considering criminal charges or there are significant, potentially criminal matters he wants to resolve.

"The fact that Fitzgerald is going through the effort to re-present is certainly a sign that the investigation is active," Eliason said.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Fitzgerald Back Before CIA Leak Grand Jury on Yahoo! News

2005-12-07T18:44:00.000-05:00

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was back before a federal grand jury on Wednesday in the CIA leak case, with deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove still under investigation.

Since the Oct. 28 indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, two more reporters have been pulled into the investigation — The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Time magazine's Viveca Novak.

Woodward has given a deposition about a conversation he had in mid-June 2003 in which a senior Bush administration official disclosed the CIA status of undercover officer Valerie Plame. Fitzgerald is seeking Novak's testimony about her conversations with Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, in 2004.

Fitzgerald did not comment on Wednesday's nearly three-hour grand jury session where the prosecutor was accompanied by three deputies and an FBI agent.

Rove's legal problems stem from the fact that it was not until more than a year into the criminal investigation that he told the prosecutor about disclosing Plame's CIA status to Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper on July 11, 2003.

After weeks of avoiding many public appearances with the president, Rove has been noticeably at Bush's side this week.

They traveled together Monday to North Carolina for a speech on the economy.

Rove also rode with Bush in his limousine Wednesday across Washington and listened attentively from the sidelines while the president delivered a speech on Iraq.

In the last grand jury activity in the leak case, on Oct. 28, Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI. Libby resigned and has pleaded not guilty.

For nearly two years, Fitzgerald has been looking into who in the administration leaked Plame's identity to the news media.

Plame's CIA status was disclosed eight days after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat in the run-up to the war.

Rove was not indicted. But Fitzgerald made clear at the time of Libby's indictment that the investigation was not finished.

The prosecutor underscored that point in court papers last month, saying the investigation continues and will involve proceedings before a different grand jury. The earlier grand jury's term expired the day it indicted Libby.

Rove says he did not disclose the Cooper conversation to investigators because he had forgotten it. It occurred days before Plame's identity was revealed by the media.

The presidential adviser revealed the CIA employment of Wilson's wife to Cooper two days after another conversation in which Rove and conservative columnist Robert Novak discussed Plame's CIA status.

Robert Novak and Viveca Novak are not related.

Robert Novak was the first journalist to disclose Plame's identity, on July 14, 2003. Cooper co-wrote a Time article about Plame on July 17, 2003.

Two and one half months later, the Justice Department began the criminal investigation. That led the White House spokesman to check with Rove and Libby before providing public assurances that neither Rove nor Libby had been involved in leaking Plame's identity.

Philippine News Online: Is Ralston still at the White House?

2005-12-07T12:24:00.000-05:00

SUSAN BONZON RALSTON, presumably the most influential Filipino American in the Bush Administration has reportedly left the White House.

The former Special Assistant to President Bush and deputy to presidential adviser Karl Rove has reportedly moved to the Department of Commerce, Philippine News learned from a source close to Ralston.

Asked for the reason for the transfer, the source quoted Ralston as saying, “Too much pressure (on the job).”

The media office of the Commerce department said they are not making any statement. A White House operator says Ralston remains in the White House roster.

As Rove’s deputy, Ralston is responsible for managing the activities of the Office of the Senior Adviser, including areas related to policy, strategic planning, political affairs, public liaison, and intergovernmental efforts of the White House. Her bio says she is also responsible for the development and production of presidential and major surrogate events.

One of her biggest tasks was providing coordination between the White House and the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004.

As the highest-ranking FilAm close to Bush, Ralston was able to provide access to American officialdom for certain segments of the community, especially those of Filipino veterans and community affairs. She also paved the way for a presentation at the White House on the issue of the Balangiga Bells.

“Susan is an asset to the Filipino American community, and I am so proud to have opportunities to work with her on some occasions. She is dedicated, hardworking, efficient, an exemplary professional to follow, admire and be proud of,” said Vellie Dietrich Hall, one of two FilAms appointed by Bush to the White House Commission for Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs.

The Valerie Plame case has put Ralston in the spotlight only because of her position as Rove’s assistant. Rove’s role is believed to be critical to the investigation on the outing of the CIA agent, a criminal offense. Ralston had patched a call from a reporter to Rove prior to the media leak.

Prior to her current public service position, Ralston was the Assistant Director of Governmental Affairs at Greenberg Traurig and has also worked for the lobbying firm of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds, LLP.

Before moving to Washington, DC, she was an office administrator for M&J Wilkow, Ltd., a commercial real estate firm in Chicago, Illinois.

Ralston received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from the University of Loyola at Chicago and has an M.B.A. from Keller Graduate School of Management.

She and her husband Troy currently reside in Woodbridge, VA.