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Banned
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Okay !!!.............it only took 14 days....two friggin' weeks for the "liberal press", the "press" that is "biased against Bush"....against conservatives and conservative "arguments and policies"....to print the name of President Bush's private criminal defense attorney, James E. Sharp.
Would not a "liberal press", "broadcast" the reminder that Bush, upon a request by special prosecutor Fitzpatrick, in the course of his grand jury investigation of the "outing" of CIA "operative, Valerie Plame, was interviewed by Fitzpatrick a year ago, on June 24, 2004, and that Bush responded to the interview request by "lawyering up".....hiring the same D.C. criminal defense attornery to represent him, as indicted former Enron CEO "Kenny Boy" Lay, has retained?
Well....up until now....the press did not make any mention of a reminder. They never mentioned "James E. Sharp's" name. Maybe just an oversight? A truly, "liberal press", would not miss an opportunity to embarass this president, would they?
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/politics/24bush.html
The New York Times
July 24, 2005
For Bush, Effect of Investigation of C.I.A. Leak Case Is Uncertain
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, July 23 - His former secretary of state, most of his closest aides and a parade of other senior officials have testified to a grand jury. His political strategist has emerged as a central figure in the case, as has his vice president's chief of staff. His spokesman has taken a pounding for making public statements about the matter that now appear not to be accurate.
For all that, it is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. operative's identity will mean for President Bush. So far the disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president.
Yet Mr. Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely.
For starters, did Mr. Bush know in the fall of 2003, when he was telling the public that no one wanted to get to the bottom of the case more than he did, that Mr. Rove, his longtime strategist and senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had touched on the C.I.A. officer's identity in conversations with journalists before the officer's name became public? If not, when did they tell him, and what would the delay say in particular about his relationship with Mr. Rove, whose career and Mr. Bush's have been intertwined for decades?
Then there is the broader issue of whether Mr. Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the C.I.A. officer's identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.
For the last several weeks, Mr. Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, have declined to address the leak in any substantive way, citing the continuing federal criminal investigation.
But Democrats increasingly see an opportunity to raise questions about Mr. Bush's credibility, and to reopen a debate about whether the White House leveled with the nation about the urgency of going to war with Iraq. And even some Republicans say Mr. Bush cannot assume that he will escape from the investigation politically unscathed.
"Until all the facts come out, no one is really going to know who the fickle finger of fate points at," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster.
The case centers on how the name of a C.I.A. operative came to be appear two years ago in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. The operative, who is more usually known as Valerie Wilson, is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration eight days before Mr. Novak's column of twisting some of the intelligence used to justify going to war with Iraq. Under some conditions, the disclosure of a covert intelligence agent's name can be a federal crime.
The special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has kept a tight curtain of secrecy around his investigation. But he spent more than an hour in the Oval Office on June 24, 2004, interviewing Mr. Bush about the case. Mr. Bush was not under oath, but he had his personal lawyer for the case, <font face=arial,sans-serif color=red size=-1>James E. Sharp,</font> with him.
Neither the White House nor the Justice Department has said what Mr. Bush was asked about, but prosecutors do not lightly seek to put questions directly to any president, suggesting that there was some information that Mr. Fitzgerald felt he could get only from Mr. Bush.
Allan J. Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University in Washington, said the lesson of recent history, for example in the Iran-contra case under President Ronald Reagan, is that presidents tend to know more than it might first appear about what is going on within the White House.
"My presumption in presidential politics is that the president always knows," Mr. Lichtman said. "But there are degrees of knowing. Reagan said, keep the contras together body and soul. Did he know exactly what Oliver North was doing? No, it doesn't mean he knew what every subordinate is doing."
Although it is possible that other officials will turn out to have played leading roles in the leak case, the subordinates whose actions would appear to be of most interest to Mr. Bush right now are Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby, who as Mr. Cheney's chief of staff had particular reason to protect the vice president.
According to accounts by various people involved in the case, Mr. Rove spoke in the days after Mr. Wilson went public with his criticism in July 2003 to both of the first two reporters to disclose that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A., Mr. Novak and Matthew Cooper of Time. Mr. Cooper has said he also spoke about the case with Mr. Libby.
By September 2003, as a criminal investigation was getting under way, Mr. McClellan was telling reporters that Mr. Rove had nothing to do with the leak, saying he had checked with Mr. Rove about the topic.
Around the same time, the president was saying he had no idea who might have been responsible. Asked by a reporter on Oct. 6, 2003, whether the leak was retaliation for Mr. Wilson's criticism, Mr. Bush replied: "I don't know who leaked the information, for starters. So it's hard for me to answer that question until I find out the truth."
Asked the next day if he was confident that the leakers would be found, Mr. Bush, alluding to the "two senior administration officials" cited by Mr. Novak as his sources, replied: "I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth."
Republicans said the relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove was so deep and complex that it was hard to imagine the president cutting ties with him barring an indictment.
"Can you survive being involved in something you probably shouldn't have been involved in where you didn't break any laws?" Mr. Fabrizio said. "Well, you probably can, especially if you are Karl."
Mr. Fabrizio said that even if Mr. Rove left the White House, he would continue to consult with Mr. Bush "unless they put him in a tunnel."
Mr. McClellan and other White House officials have repeatedly declined to answer when asked if Mr. Rove or Mr. Libby had told the president by October 2003 that they had alluded to Ms. Wilson's identity months earlier in their conversations with the journalists.
But Mr. Bush's political opponents say the president is in a box. In their view, either Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby kept the president in the dark about their actions, making them appear evasive at a time when Mr. Bush was demanding that his staff cooperate fully with the investigation, or Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby had told the president and he was not forthcoming in his public statements about his knowledge of their roles.
"We know that Karl Rove, through Scott McClellan, did not tell Americans the truth," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois and a former top aide in the Clinton White House. "What's important now is what Karl Rove told the president. Was it the truth, or was it what he told Scott McClellan?"
There is a third option, that neither Mr. Rove nor Mr. Libby considered their conversations with the journalists to have amounted to leaking or confirming the information about Ms. Wilson. In that case, they may have felt no need to inform the president, or they did inform him and he shared their view that they had done nothing wrong.
Mr. Bush has also yet to answer any questions publicly about what if anything he learned from aides about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Wilson in the days after Mr. Wilson leveled his criticism of the administration in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003.
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2500724_2.html
What Did the President Know?
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, July 25, 2005; 1:30 PM
...........Stevenson writes that Bush has several times said he didn't know who might have been responsible for the leak.
"But Mr. Bush's political opponents say the president is in a box. In their view, either Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby kept the president in the dark about their actions, making them appear evasive at a time when Mr. Bush was demanding that his staff cooperate fully with the investigation, or Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby had told the president and he was not forthcoming in his public statements about his knowledge of their roles."
Flashback I: Bush and Cheney Get Interviewed
Bush was interviewed by prosecutors for more than an hour on June 24, 2004.
Susan Schmidt wrote in The Washington Post at the time: "Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald and several assistants questioned the president for about 70 minutes in the Oval Office yesterday morning. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the substance of the interview but said Bush, who was accompanied by a private lawyer, was not placed under oath."
Cheney was interviewed a few weeks prior to that, though details were even sketchier. David Johnston wrote in the New York Times at the time: "Vice President Dick Cheney was recently interviewed by federal prosecutors who asked whether he knew of anyone at the White House who had improperly disclosed the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer, people who have been involved in official discussions about the case said on Friday. . . .
"It is not clear when or where Mr. Cheney was interviewed, but he was not questioned under oath and he has not been asked to appear before the grand jury, people officially informed about the case said."
Flashback II: The Gonzales Tip
On the evening of Sept. 29, 2003, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales gave White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. a 12-hour head start before he officially notified the rest of the White House staff the next morning that the Justice Department had just opened a criminal investigation into the CIA leak -- and that as a result, all relevant records should be preserved.
That is not exactly news.
For the record: White House spokesman Scott McClellan described precisely this sequence of events to the press corps in his Oct. 1, 2003 briefing.
Some Democrats immediately and publicly asked if that delay resulted in the destruction of evidence, and in a letter to Bush a few days later, four Democratic senators asked why the Justice Department allowed Gonzales such a grace period.
McClellan announced that it was "silly" to suggest that the delay indicated that Justice wanted to shield the White House in any way.
Don't remember any of that? Not your fault. It didn't get much ink.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2500724_3.html
But it's getting a lot of attention today. Why? Possibly because press coverage of the Bush administration, in the first term, failed to sufficiently heed some developments that, in retrospect, seem worthy of more attention.
Something similar happened when the Downing Street Memo first came to light in May. That memo suggested among other things that Bush was already set on invading Iraq long before acknowledging as much in public. In that case, it took the American mainstream press more than a month to acknowledge that it was a story worth writing about again, even though it was, technically, old news.
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There is still no renewed coverage by any MSM news source that Bush's attorney, Jim Sharp, is also Kenny Lay's D.C. defense attorney. Let us bide our time until we see that embarrassing little snippet reported again.
I submit the preceding two articles and WaPo repoter Dan Froomkin's comments about media coverage as it relates to "missed opportunities" for the "liberal bias" of the press to rear it's ugly head, to the detriment of Bush, Cheney, and to Repubilican politicos.
I see big changes looming on the horizen, the beginning of more constant and thorough coverage of the above mentioned folks, that will most likely be met by comments such as, "well....what else would you expect from the "liberal media"?
If you have the ability to contemplate what I have posted for you to consider iin this thread, and you can filter out your preconceived notions about the press, isn't it at least a possibility that the press has underreported potentially negative and embarrassing stories about the people and the actions of the current federal administration, and that the changing trend in the press coverage may speak to the consequences (playing out, seemingly in slow motion) of past actions of this administration, instead of to the myth that a "liberal press" missed no opportunity to report negatively about Bush et al?
Last edited by host; 07-26-2005 at 01:10 AM..
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