|
Banned
|
Time to stick a fork in him?
Rove, architect of Bush's career for the last 32 years, will employ every excuse that he and his lawyers can think of, primarily that he did not "know" that Plame was a covert agent. Has he met his match in prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald? Have the "terrorist" bombings in the London tubes distracted the attention of the public to the extent that Isikoff's new newsweek story will not stay in the headlines?
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0031010-6.html
NEAR THE TOP OF THE WEB PAGE:
Q What can you tell us about how the investigation into the CIA leak are proceeding? Are White House officials being interviewed today, for instance?
MR. McCLELLAN: On that question, specifically, I think it's important to keep in mind that this is an ongoing investigation. The Department of Justice, the career officials of the Department of Justice are working to get to the bottom of this. And the White House is committed -- at the direction of the President, the White House is committed to cooperating fully and doing everything we can to assist the career officials get to the bottom of this. It is a very serious matter..........
......MR. McCLELLAN: Again, I think that's best to address to the Department of Justice, because it is an ongoing investigation.............
NEAR THE BOTTOM OF THE WEB PAGE:
.........Q Scott, earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
MR. McCLELLAN: Those individuals -- I talked -- I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.
Q So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?
MR. McCLELLAN: They assured me that they were not involved in this.
Q Can I follow up on that?
Q They were not involved in what?
MR. McCLELLAN: The leaking of classified information.
Q Did you undertake that on your own volition, or were you instructed to go to these --
MR. McCLELLAN: I spoke to those individuals myself. ..........
|
It is apparant from Scottie's carefully worded answer to a reporter during the WH October 10, 2003 press briefing, that Rove's defense hinges on maintaining the talking point that he did not "knowingly" leak "classified information". It will most likely come down to prosecution of Rove, if there is one, on a perjury charge if his attorney, Robert Luskin was correct when he claimed that Rove did not discuss the matter of Joe Wilson's wife with news reporters before Novak's July 13 column. If Isikoff's report is accurate, Rove did dicuss "Wilson's wife" with at least one reporter before Novak published.
Link to Novak's July 14, 2003 "Mission to Niger" http://www.townhall.com/columnists/r...20030714.shtml
Quote:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
July 18 issue - It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.
Last week, after Time turned over that e-mail, among other notes and e-mails, Cooper agreed to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case. Explaining that he had obtained last-minute "personal consent" from his source, Cooper was able to avoid a jail sentence for contempt of court. Another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, refused to identify her source and chose to go to jail instead.
For two years, a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating the leak of Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent. The leak was first reported by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak apparently made some arrangement with the prosecutor, but Fitzgerald continued to press other reporters for their sources, possibly to show a pattern (to prove intent) or to make a perjury case. (It is illegal to knowingly identify an undercover CIA officer.) Rove's words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak. Rove has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. But last week, his lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Rove did—and that Rove was the secret source who, at the request of both Cooper's lawyer and the prosecutor, gave Cooper permission to testify.
The controversy arose when Wilson wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times saying that he had been sent by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate charges that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson said he had found no evidence to support the claim. Wilson's column was an early attack on the evidence used by the Bush administration to justify going to war in Iraq. The White House wished to discredit Wilson and his attacks. The question for the prosecutor is whether someone in the administration, in an effort to undermine Wilson's credibility, intentionally revealed the covert identity of his wife.
In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." 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 e-mail 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 ... "
Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.
A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false," the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.
Fitzgerald is known as a tenacious, thorough prosecutor. He refused to comment, and it is not clear whether he is pursuing evidence that will result in indictments, or just tying up loose ends in a messy case. But the Cooper e-mail offers one new clue to the mystery of what Fitzgerald is probing—and provides a glimpse of what was unfolding at the highest levels as the administration defended a part of its case for going to war in Iraq.
|
Quote:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...home-headlines
THE NATION
A Prosecutor Who Didn't Back Down
Patrick J. Fitzgerald pushed for the jailing of two reporters who refused to testify. Legal observers disagree on whether he was right.
By Stephen Braun
Times Staff Writer
July 8, 2005
WASHINGTON — Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald lived up to his billing as a hard-nosed U.S. attorney when he pressed for the jailing of a reporter who refused to testify in his investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name. But his action just as likely was spurred by the unique fact-finding mission given special prosecutors, legal observers and those who have worked with Fitzgerald in the past said Thursday.
The imprisonment Wednesday of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for failing to testify before a grand jury served to aid Fitzgerald's probe, several lawyers said.
It showed the targets of his inquiry that he meant business. A second reporter, Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, agreed to testify after also being threatened with jail. Cooper said he had been prepared to go to jail but that his source called him at the last minute to release him from his confidentiality pledge.
Even if Fitzgerald's investigation fails to produce any indictments, said Andrew C. McCarthy, a former prosecutor who is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Fitzgerald, he said, "has to show he investigated the case in a fair and comprehensive manner." So Fitzgerald's move against Miller and Cooper allows him to show that he took all available measures to get at the truth.
While McCarthy and other lawyers insisted Fitzgerald had done the right thing in trying to compel testimony, not all former special prosecutors agreed.
Lawrence E. Walsh, independent counsel in the Iran-Contra probe of Reagan administration officials between 1986 and 1993, said that he never considered taking action against reporters and could not imagine a justification for it.
"I felt it was up to me and my associates to conduct our own investigation and not force a reporter to do it for us," Walsh, a former federal judge, said in a telephone interview from Oklahoma City. "Maybe there's a need in this particular case, but I don't see it."
Fitzgerald, 44, aggressively prosecuted terrorism cases in New York before being appointed by President Bush in 2001 as U.S. attorney in Chicago.
In his current role as special prosecutor, he pressed for months to compel Miller, Cooper and several other reporters to testify in an effort to learn more about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Her identity as an undercover agent was exposed in July 2003 by conservative syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who cited "two senior administration officials" as his sources.
Plame's husband, former U.S. envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV, charged that her name had been leaked by White House officials in retaliation for his public accusation that the Bush administration had used faulty intelligence in deciding to wage war in Iraq.
In response, the Justice Department opened an investigation into whether White House officials had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which prohibits a government officer from knowingly revealing the identity of undercover intelligence agents. In December 2003, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft recused himself from the case and a Justice deputy appointed Fitzgerald as special prosecutor to ensure an independent inquiry.
As Fitzgerald's probe nears a conclusion, said Paul Rosenzweig — a legal analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation who worked on the investigation of President Clinton under then-special prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr — there are three apparent options:
Fitzgerald could indict someone for leaking Plame's name in violation of the 1982 identity protection law.
He could indict anyone found to have committed perjury in the course of the investigation.
Or, failing to win indictments, Rosenzweig said, Fitzgerald could issue a detailed report containing his findings and explaining the obstacles that prevented him from filing charges.
"Special prosecutors have to explore every option. It comes with the territory," Rosenzweig said. "They know any decision they make will be challenged. If you take a moderate course, you're accused of pulling your punches. If you go harder, you're called unfair."
But the 93-year-old Walsh — who won indictments of 11 Reagan administration aides, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, national security advisor John M. Poindexter and his aide, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North — said that as special prosecutor, he had abided by a cautionary message he was given in 1938 by legendary New York prosecutor Thomas Dewey.
Soon after Walsh was hired as a young assistant, he said, Dewey "called us in on a New Year's Day and laid down one rule: No one was to subpoena a reporter without his permission. It was a point of respect for another profession and his belief that we had to do our job ourselves."
Since 1970, internal Justice Department guidelines have instructed prosecutors to press for reporters' notes and testimony only as a last resort. Those guidelines are not binding, Rosenzweig said, but they have also applied to all special prosecutors.
"The difference between main Justice and a special prosecutor is that regular prosecutors have to consider the timing and strains on resources it takes to go after a reporter and all the appeals and bad publicity that come with it," Rosenzweig said. "But special prosecutors have their own budgets and have more control over their timing.
"They already work with the understanding that their case is unique and important. That's why they've been appointed," Rosenzweig added. "If Fitzgerald feels he's exhausted every avenue and has no choice but to go after a reporter's testimony, he's not going to have second thoughts about it."
Fitzgerald earned his reputation as a tough prosecutor when he was assigned to oversee terrorism-related cases in the U.S. attorney's office in New York. He led the first major federal probe of Al Qaeda and won convictions of five terrorists accused of plotting the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in east Africa.
Admired by counter-terrorism agents for his courtroom aggressiveness and photographic recall of facts, Fitzgerald also has been criticized by defense lawyers for harsh tactics.
Lawyers representing a former pilot for Osama bin Laden complained when Fitzgerald pressed for a lengthy prison term after the man refused to testify to a federal grand jury in New York.
And in 2003, Fitzgerald won a guilty plea on a fraud charge from the head of an Islamic charity in Chicago — but only after agreeing to dismiss the original terrorism charges.
The Sept. 11 commission that investigated U.S. intelligence failures following the terrorist attacks later concluded that the government's treatment of two Islamic charities had raised "substantial civil liberty concerns."
In taking on the Plame case, Fitzgerald had to understand that "someone's nose would be out of joint no matter what he did," McCarthy said.
|
|