If Rove is Indicted, Will Media Mention Bush's Criminal Defense Attorney Jim Sharp? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

host · 07-10-2005, 02:27 PM

A little background to refresh your memory. There are posters here who are convinced that the "media" is this "liberal" bastion that "has it in" for Bush. If this is true, with all of the coverage of Rove's involvement in the outing of CIA covert agent Valery Plame, and with rumors that Rove's indictment is imminent, how do you explain the total absence of any coverage that contain details that I am posting here:

1.)The WH press spokesman McClellan was evasive when Bush consulted D.C. criminal defense attorney Jim Sahrp on June 3, 2004.

2.)McClellan reluctantly admitted that Bush had retained Jim Sharp during a June 24, 2004 announcement and Q&A with reporters that Bush had met with Patrick Fitzgerald, federal prosecutor who is investigating the Plam outing. Bush was accompanied by his new attornery Jim Sahrp, and he was questioned without making a sworn statement.

3.)Sharp has a secretive background that includes an accusation by a former friend and client (see findlaw.com excerpt below), that Sharp was involved in a plan for his client to make false statements at the client's criminal trail. MCClellan would not confirm Sharp's legal, fuull name when reporters questioned him about it on June 3, 2004.

4.)The media has all but ignored the admission by indicted former Enron CEO and major Bush campaign donor, last july 12, 2004 that Jim Sharp was also the D.C. lawyer on Lay's defense team. Sharp also represented retired Gen. Richard Secord who was complicit with Oliver North in the Iran-Contra crimes.

Wouldn't the controversy of the jailing of NY Times reporter Judith Miller and the publication today in Newsweek related to the Plame leaks to reporters by Bush admin. officials be the predictable moment for a "liberal" press, using the excuse that it was "only keeping the public informed" to publish this info?

Is their any possibility that this "omission" could influence you to reconsider what you think that you know about "liberal bias" of the press?

Quote:

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:4...62.html+&hl=en
Bush consults attorney over inquiry into CIA leak
From news reports NYT, AP
Friday, June 04, 2004

"In terms of whether or not I need advice from counsel, this is a criminal matter, it's a serious matter," the

president said. "I have met with an attorney to determine whether or not I need his advice, and if I deem I need

his advice, I'll probably hire him."

Earlier, Bush's chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, confirmed that Bush had been in contact with a Washington

attorney, Jim Sharp. "In the event the president needs his advice, I expect he probably would retain him,"

McClellan said.

There was no indication that Bush had been questioned.

A federal grand jury has questioned numerous White House and administration officials to learn who leaked the name

of the CIA operative, Valerie Plame, wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to the media. Wilson has charged that

officials made the disclosure in an effort to discredit him.

Bush's decision to consider hiring his own lawyer in the case surprised many law enforcement officials and

political figures who have followed the politically charged case for months.

Sharp, who represented Air Force General Richard Secord in the Iran-contra affair but is not widely known in

Washington legal circles, could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0040624-3.html
MR. McCLELLAN: All right, let's get started. We'll release this transcript, as well.

I told you I'd keep you informed at the appropriate time. The President met with Pat Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney

in charge of the leak investigation, as well as members of his team. The meeting took place in the Oval Office. It

lasted for a little more than an hour, probably about an hour and 10 minutes.

Q This morning?

MR. McCLELLAN: This morning. He also recently retained a lawyer, Jim Sharp, who you all have reported about before.

I would just say that -- what I've said previously, and what the President has said: The leaking of classified

information is a very serious matter. The President directed the White House to cooperate fully with those in

charge of the investigation. He was pleased to do his part to help the investigation move forward. No one wants to

get to the bottom of this matter more than the President of the United States, and he has said on more than one

occasion that if anyone -- inside or outside the government -- has information that can help the investigators get

to the bottom of this, they should provide that information to the officials in charge.

And I think because this is an ongoing investigation that further questions are best directed to the officials in

charge of the investigation.

Q When did he actually retain Sharp? Meaning, when was he informed that this interview would take place?

MR. McCLELLAN: Recently.

Q Like, when was this interview set up?

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know the exact time when it was set up, but it occurred earlier today. But --

Q Did the President answer every question put to him?
......................
Q Can you refresh my memory?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, this is an ongoing investigation, John, and I'm going to direct further questions to the

officials in charge of the investigation.

Q Yes, but this would be a White House matter. I mean, would the President fire a person if they had -- if it's

found that they leaked this information? Would he admonish them, reprimand them -- what would he do?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think that we made that clear previously -- I made that clear previously in briefings, you can go

back and look exactly at what I said. It still stands.***

Q Do you just want to reiterate it now, just so that we've all got it straight?

MR. McCLELLAN: John, I think you can refer further questions to the people in charge of the investigation.

Q Scott, could you, for us -- I know that you may not know now, but can you, for us, find out when the President

retained Sharp?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think I would just describe it as recently.

Q Can you find out for us?

MR. McCLELLAN: I will look into it, but that's probably the extent to --

Q The President of the United States is retaining a private attorney --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- how I would characterize it.

Q I'm putting the inquiry in, then. When he retains -- the President is retaining a private attorney, we'd like to

know what day it was.

MR. McCLELLAN: I appreciate that and if I have more on this, I'll let you know, I'll put it on the end of the

gaggle transcript.

Quote:

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20040604.html
The Serious Implications Of President Bush's Hiring A Personal Outside Counsel For The Valerie Plame Investigation
By JOHN W. DEAN Friday, Jun. 04, 2004

Quote:

http://www.legalunderground.com/2004...ents_lawy.html
June 04, 2004
Who Is the President's Lawyer?

From USA Today: "Bush consults lawyer in CIA leak case." The USA Today article identifies the President's lawyer as

"Jim Sharp." Reportedly, Jim Sharp is James E. Sharp of Washington. Although little about James E. Sharp is

available on the Internet (he keeps a low profile), Sharp represented Richard Secord in the Iran-Contra scandal. An

article at Bloomberg.com confirms that the Sharp who's representing President Bush is also the Sharp who

represented Secord. Details are in a cached article here.

Quote:

http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/TRANSC...12/lkl.00.html
CNN LARRY KING LIVE

Interview With Ken Lay

Aired July 12, 2004 - 21:00 ET

(NEAR THE BOTTOM OF WEB PAGE)
KING: Who's your -- who's the main lawyer?

LAY: Mike Ramsey, as far as the activities...

KING: He's criminal...

LAY: ... here in Houston. He's criminal. He's here in Houston. But we have a whole team -- Earl Silbert in

Washington, D.C...

KING: You have Earl?

LAY: We have him. And...

KING: Former prosecutor.

LAY: Former U.S. prosecutor for over 20 years. Jim Sharp, former assistant U.S. prosecutor for a long time. We have

Carrington, Coleman in Dallas, which has some excellent lawyers on the civil side. So, we have a number of really

key advisers here that are involved.

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Jul14.html
Bush Twins in Vogue

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, July 14, 2004; 11:22 AM

.....Blogger Joshua Micah Marshall points to the BeatBushBlog, which spotted evidence in the transcript of Larry

King's interview with former Enron chairman Ken Lay that one of Lay's lawyers appears to be James E. Sharp -- the

same man who's representing Bush in the Plame case.......

Quote:

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bi...&no=9911287MAN
U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals
PEGG v US

Joe Harry PEGG, Petitioner-Appellant,

v.

UNITED STATES of America, Respondent-Appellee.

No. 99-11287.

United States Court of Appeals,

Eleventh Circuit.

June 12, 2001.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida.(No. 97-00064-CIV-FTM-17),

Elizabeth A. Kovachevich, Chief Judge.

Before CARNES and RONEY, Circuit Judges, and ALAIMO*, District Judge.

1. The Facts Concerning the Guilty Plea.

The facts of this case unfolded over a sixteen-year period. Pegg became acquainted with Washington, D.C. attorney

James E. Sharp in 1981 when Sharp represented Pegg in a joint federal and state marijuana prosecution. Pegg and

Sharp became good friends thereafter, and Sharp continued to represent Pegg on and off through their friendship. In

March 1994, a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida returned the indictment that is the subject of this appeal. Pegg

was charged as one of several individuals who conspired to import marijuana into the United States in 1988 and

1989. Pegg asked Sharp and Tom Lankford, Sharp's law partner, to represent him in the matter, and both Sharp and

Lankford agreed. Sharp engaged John Fitzgibbons, a Tampa attorney, to be local counsel for Pegg in the case.

Cynthia Collazo, the Assistant United States Attorney ("AUSA") assigned to prosecute Pegg's case, frequently

discussed the possibility of a plea agreement with all three of Pegg's attorneys. They also discussed the

likelihood that Pegg could receive a reduced sentence if he entered into a plea agreement and cooperated with the

government......

........a. The Attorney's Conflict of Interest.

As to the first prong of the showing Pegg had to make, the district court found and the government does not deny

that Sharp labored under an actual conflict of interest created by co-conspirator Baxter's allegations that Sharp

had engaged in unethical and criminal activity in connection with his representation of Pegg......

djtestudo · 07-10-2005, 03:01 PM

I'm not exactly sure what the problem is here. Bush consulted an attorney, who also represented Ken Lay and someone from Iran-Contra?

Elphaba · 07-10-2005, 03:09 PM

The articles in sum would paint Sharp as a shady character that defends criminal conduct. Why would Bush choose him vs. his own legal counselor if he didn't anticipate criminal charges being made? Very fishy, indeed. Host, I won't be holding my breath for the "liberal" press to pursue this.

samcol · 07-10-2005, 03:40 PM

I'm still trying to sort out this story as its very confusing to me. Hopefully this isn't old news, but its funny that McClellan said the Plame leaker (possibly Rove?) should be fired. In the articles that Host posted it seems Mclellan has taken a very defensive approach to any questions about this. Is it possible that he didn't know who the Plame leaker was back in 2003, but now is trying to hide it since the person who leaked it could be Rove?

Quote:

FLASHBACK: McClellan Said Plame Leaker Should Be Fired

CNN | September 29 2003

McClellan said that if anyone at the White House leaked Plame's identity, he should be fired, and pursued to the "fullest extent."

"No one was authorized to do this. That is simply not the way this White House operates and if someone leaked classified information it is a very serious matter," he said.

Will McClellan re-iterate his position now that his own boss, Karl Rove, has been fingered as the source?

host · 07-11-2005, 01:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by djtestudo

I'm not exactly sure what the problem is here. Bush consulted an attorney, who also represented Ken Lay and someone from Iran-Contra?

That damn "liberal" press....always out to "get" Bush.....
It's about "access", folks. This White House will see to it that journalists who do their jobs and ask more than soft ball questions, get no access....as in the example of Helen Thomas....

Quote:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200507080006
Posted to the web on Friday July 8, 2005 at 6:04 PM EST

Plamegate: Why won't the White House press corps ask about Rove's role?

Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser known as "Bush's Brain," has become increasingly tangled up in the investigation into who outed CIA operative Valerie Plame. But the White House press corps has yet to ask a single question about Rove during any of the four White House press briefings held since Rove's lawyer admitted that Rove was a source for a reporter to whom information about Plame was leaked, as Think Progress has noted.

Quote:

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/08/corps-silent-6/
Posted by Judd July 8, 2005 1:32 pm Filed Under: Media, Ethics

Day 6: WH Press Corps Silent on Rove

The White House just released the transcript of today’s Gaggle.

For the fourth straight time since his lawyer admitted that Rove was one of Matt Cooper’s sources, no member of the White House press corps asked a question about Rove’s role. (And there are plenty of questions to ask.)

A major figure in the White House is deeply entangled in a major scandal. Why is the White House press corps ignoring the story?

The curious things about this story are that Scott McClellan seemed upset by routine questions from reporters as to who James Sharp is and when he was retained to represent Bush. With the latest developments, Sharp's name should at least be mentioned in current press coverage, but it is not, and neither is Bush's June 24, 2004 "interview" with prosecutor Fitzgerald. If the press is "liberal as charged", the news that Bush and Ken Lay are represented by the same D.C. criminal defense lawyer would be reported relentlessly, if nothing else, to embarass Bush.

Bush and his advisors, just five months before last year's election, did not need the media associating Bush with Sharp's previous clients, but the press did even not bother to give the story "Runaway Bride", or "missing white girl in Aruba" style coverage.
There is a reason that has not been disclosed as to why Bush selected nearly anoymous attorney Jim Sharp, especially with the Lay "connection" and the consideration that it is easy to predict that Sharp would be associated with his past clients, Iran Contra figure Richard Secord, and Watergate defendant
and Nixon aid, Jeb Stuart McGruder. Why is Sharp so "low key"? How did Kem Lay and Bush and Secord, for that matter, even know to retain his services?

Where is the press? Where were they when this story broke, 13 months ago?
Here is more on private presidential counsel, James E. Sharp:

Quote:

http://web.archive.org/web/200406211...04ramares.html
Who is James Sharp and why is George W. Bush talking to him?

By Kéllia Ramares
Online Journal Associate Editor

June 14, 2004—The White House revealed recently that George W. Bush has spoken with a private attorney about the criminal probe into the leak of an undercover CIA operative's name.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Bush would probably retain attorney Jim Sharp of Washington D.C., if he thinks he needs the lawyer's advice while a Federal grand jury investigates the leak of the name of Valerie Plame as a CIA covert operative. Bush is not believed to be a target of the probe, but he anticipates being questioned about the leak.

Plame was identified as CIA by veteran Washington journalist Robert Novak. He said her name was leaked to him by two senior administration officials. Plame is the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

In February 2002, Wilson went to Niger to investigate the claim that Niger sold yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Wilson found no credible evidence of such a sale. Documents concerning such a sale were crude forgeries. Nevertheless, on January 29, 2003, in his State of the Union Address, George W. Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Wilson believes that the leak concerning his wife was retaliation for his unwillingness to back the White House's Niger-Iraq claims.

Where's the White House Counsel?

Bush spoke to a private attorney and not a White House counsel because there is no attorney-client privilege between a president and a White House counsel that allows the counsel to withhold information from a Federal grand jury.

In 1997, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case In re: Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum that "the White House may not use [a governmental attorney-client] privilege to withhold potentially relevant information from a federal grand jury." In 1998, the US DC Circuit Court of Appeals said in the case In re: Bruce Lindsey that "a government attorney may not invoke the attorney-client privilege in response to grand jury questions seeking information relating to the possible commission of a federal crime." Both cases were brought by then-Independent Counsel Ken Starr. The first related to his Whitewater investigation, the second to Monica Lewinsky.

Why Jim Sharp?

A search, earlier this month, of the Martindale-Hubbell Legal Directory through its Lawyer Locator search engine showed the entries for Sharp and his law firm were totally barebones. (Legal directories are like telephone directories; they publish the information given to them by their listees). Placing Sharp's name and city in the search engine, turned up James E. Sharp of Washington, DC, and the firm Sharp and Associates. According to this entry, Sharp was born in 1940, received his B.S. from the University of Arizona, received his law degree from the University of Oklahoma, and was admitted to the bar in 1965. There were no indications of where Jim Sharp was admitted to the bar. Many attorneys are admitted in multiple jurisdictions. Sharp did not list any awards, publications or memberships in prestigious professional associations. Nor did he list any practice specialties.

The entry states that Sharp is "Rated AV," which is a Martindale-Hubbell legal ability and general ethical standards rating. An AV rating means "a lawyer has reached the height of professional excellence. He or she has usually practiced law for many years, and is recognized for the highest levels of skill and integrity."

The personal entry had no street address, email address, phone or fax number for the firm. One has to search the Lawyer Locator by firm and then all that turns up is the street address, K Street N.W., a street famous as the home of businesses catering to government officials. None of the "Associates" of Sharp & Associates were listed in the firm entry.

The West Legal Directory, which is where legal columnist John Dean of Findlaw.com got his information, contains the firm's phone and fax number as well as an email address. It also does not list any "Associates" for Sharp and Associates. The practice area WLD lists for James E. Sharp is a rather strange one given the situation that has brought his name to media attention; it's estate planning. That's wills and trusts and setting up college funds for the grandkids. It's not about what to say if you are questioned by a Federal criminal grand jury probing the leak of a CIA covert operative's name. Why turn to an obscure estate planner for advice about a criminal grand jury?

Is James E. Sharp Really an Estate Planner?

Other sources paint Sharp as an excellent trial lawyer, with a white collar crime practice, a private person but one whose accomplishments are well known to older Washington, DC, lawyers. Articles in the New York Times on June 3 by Eric Lichtblau and David E. Sanger and on June 5 by Michael Janofsky, plus a transcript of the June 3 CNNﾒs American Morning with senior legal analyst Jim Toobin, paint the following portrait of Sharp's legal career:

He began practicing law in Navy JAG and also served as assistant US District Attorney for the District of Columbia. In about four decades of law practice, he has represented Richard Nixon friend Bebe Rebozo, Nixon advisor Jeb Stuart McGruder during the Watergate scandal, and Gen. Richard V. Secord during Iran-Contra. Sharp has also numbered former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay and author Clifford Irving among his clients. Maybe that's where the estate planning comes in. Despite the list of well-known Republican clients, his political donations go mostly to Democrats, including the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry.

Janofsky's article quotes attorney Richard Hibey, a friend of Sharp's describing Sharp as " . . . publicity averse. To do the kind of work we do, it's important to stay out of the limelight."

And What Kind of Work Would that Be?

Hibey's own resume gives a clue. He joined the Washington D.C. law firm of Miller and Chevalier, Chartered, in September of 2002. The Miller Chevalier press release announcing the addition of Hibey to their litigation department noted that Hibey has represented "Ferdinand Marcos, former President of the Philippines; Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard; and Iran-Contra figure Clair George, who was the CIA's espionage chief." The press release does not mention Hibey's failure to object to the imposition of a life sentence against Pollard, in violation of his plea agreement.

The Miller Chevalier press release also states that "Mr. Hibey has represented a number of high profile clients in cases ranging from espionage, human rights violations, RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations], and other white collar crimes to complex civil matters."

International law Prof. Francis Boyle, of the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign does not know Jim Sharp personally. But he wonders if Sharp has a very special type of law practice:

"There is sort of a CIA bar out there as it were," Boyle says. "That is, lawyers who have worked for the CIA in the past or have been CIA agents, either covertly or overtly or whatever. And oftentimes, they are the ones called upon to engage in legal matters related to the CIA, either when they are defending a CIA agent or when the CIA is somewhat involved.

"It's sort of a very small clique of lawyers there in Washington, D.C. with expertise when it comes to the CIA, covert operations and things of that matter.

"One thing we know about both Presidents Bush is that they are CIA. President Bush, Sr., of course, Director of the CIA . . . As for President Bush, Jr., we do know, it was reported in the New York Times, that Bush Sr. sent him out to work for a CIA front organization for a summer. I think it was up in Alaska. So it does not surprise me that Bush Jr. went to a lawyer, an unknown lawyer, who represented Secord, who again is probably tied into the CIA somewhere.

"And, as you know, this investigation does involve the leaking and public identification of the name of a CIA agent, which is a felony under the United States law. So the CIA is shot through this whole thing and it wouldn't surprise me if Bush got a lawyer who might have ties to the CIA."

Is James E. Sharp Part of the "CIA Bar?"

We may never know. But it is a safe bet that George W. Bush has consulted with this private criminal defense attorney and private man to discuss the old Watergate question, "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

Quote:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=A+T...b-t&fl=0&x=wrt
A Top Lawyer Who Kept Out of the Limelight, Until Now
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY NY Times

Published: June 5, 2004

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, June 4 - James E. Sharp, the lawyer President Bush intends to hire if he is questioned in the case involving the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity, may be one of the best lawyers in Washington the public has never heard of.

He is also a contributor to several Democrats, including John Kerry's presidential campaign.

In a legal career spanning nearly four decades, Mr. Sharp, who is 63, has represented his share of high-profile clients, including an author (Clifford Irving), a presidential friend (Bebe Rebozo), a presidential adviser (Jeb Stuart Magruder), a senator accused of bribery (Daniel B. Brewster of Maryland), a Filipino general (Fabian C. Ver) accused of murdering the president of his country and a fallen corporate leader (Kenneth Lay).

Advertisement

But unlike some lawyers attracted to fame through publicity, Mr. Sharp has remained well below the radar screen of Washington celebrity.

"He's an absolutely superb trial lawyer, but as good as it he is, he's a very private guy," said Tom Mills, managing partner of the Washington office of the law firm, Winston & Strawn, where Mr. Sharp worked several years ago. "From the president's standpoint, he was a superb choice. From Jim's standpoint, he probably loves the client but hates that he raises his profile."

Richard A. Hibey, a lawyer at Miller & Chevalier and a friend of Mr. Sharp's since they served together as assistant United States attorneys for the District of Columbia, said: "Jim's just publicity averse. To do the kind of work we do, it's important to stay out of the limelight."

Mr. Sharp did not return a call seeking comment. Nor did his son, Jess, who works for the Bush administration's Domestic Policy Council.

Mr. Sharp's former colleagues said they did not believe that he and Mr. Bush knew each other before Mr. Bush sought him out as a potential lawyer in the spy matter. A grand jury is investigating who disclosed the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. undercover officer, to Robert D. Novak, a syndicated columnist.

But they were certain that Mr. Sharp's reputation as an effective lawyer, rather than any political considerations, led the president to seek him out. Indeed, donor records indicate that Mr. Sharp has given money to many more Democrats than Republicans.

Federal records show that over the last 12 months, he has contributed to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray of Washington, Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Mr. Sharp also gave to the presidential campaigns of Representative Richard A. Gephardt and Mr. Kerry.

The only Republican benefactor during the same period was Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, a former Democrat.

Mr. Sharp, however, has been entirely nonpolitical in giving his time and expertise. During the Watergate scandal of the 1970's, Mr. Sharp represented Mr. Magruder, the deputy director of President Richard M. Nixon's re-election campaign who was charged with obstruction of justice and was sentenced to four years in prison. He served less than a year.

Mr. Magruder was so appreciative of Mr. Sharp's counsel that he thanked him with an acknowledgement at the beginning of his 1974 book "An American Life: One Man's Road To Watergate."

"He was a great guy and a great attorney," Mr. Magruder said from Columbus, Ohio, where he is a Presbyterian minister and consultant to churches and schools. He recalled the early days of the Watergate investigation when his cover story was that the $250,000 he was given for break-in activities was "to protect the convention against antiwar protestors."

"I told that to the prosecutors, the grand jury and to Judge Sirica," he said, referring to Judge John J. Sirica, who presided over the first Watergate trials. "Sharp came over to my office and said, 'Jeb, that's a wonderful story, but if anything's not true, do you know how perjury works?' I told him not really."

Mr. Magruder continued: "He told me, 'Every time you tell a story under oath, that's five years. I'm sure your story is accurate, but go home and check it out.' I went home and got up to 80, times 5. That was 400 years. I called him the next day and said. 'Maybe we need to talk.' ''

Mr. Sharp, a native of Oklahoma, received his bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona and his law degree from the University of Oklahoma law school. He began his legal career as a Navy JAG and led an investigation into the series of explosions that led to a huge fire on the aircraft carrier Forrestal off the coast of Vietnam in 1967.

Later, he served as a federal prosecutor before moving into private practice in Washington, where he has alternated working in small firms, as he does now, and larger ones.

Mr. Hibey said Mr. Sharp's profile may be so low that many younger lawyers in the capital might not know much about him. "But Jim is well known by his peers, lawyers of my generation who are still alive and kicking.''

He added, "The president could not have reached out to anyone better.''

Correction: June 10, 2004, Thursday

An article on Saturday about James E. Sharp, the lawyer President Bush intends to hire if he is questioned in the case involving the disclosure of a C.I.A. officer's identity, misidentified the victim of a murder in which a client of Mr. Sharp was acquitted. The client, Gen. Fabian C. Ver of the Philippines, had been accused in the death of Benigno S. Aquino Jr., the nation's opposition leader, not President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

I know I keep repeating this, but as I read the posts in the politics forum, I become even more convinced (if that is still possibe), that most of the posters have strong opinions, but do not "know" what they think that they know. The "Attack in London" thread wins the prize....so many minds made up with no place to go.... They've solved the "case", assigned all the blame, and now square off to prosecute or defend the "muslim" perpetrators....amazing!

host · 07-14-2005, 04:17 AM

Google news searches for the terms guckert or jim (or james) sharp bush , serve up nothing, today. I predict that this will change. The WH press corps seem to have such short memories.............. do you think that they remain silent so as not to "risk" losing their "access". With the Bush WH, the question is, "access" to what?

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true
White House Briefing: Dan Froomkin
Inside the Real West Wing

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, March 10, 2004; 10:15 AM

It's the most powerful place on Earth.

The West Wing of the White House is the part you don't get to see on the tours. It's where the Oval Office is located, and where a few dozen other people have offices only a few steps away.

You've heard of some of those people -- Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scott McClellan. But some you've probably never heard of.
About White House Briefing

Today, I'm uncorking a rare thing -- unique on the Internet, as far as I can tell. It's a floor plan of the West Wing, showing precisely who sits where.

............ Which of These Is Not Like the Other?
<h3>
As Tom Brune reported last week in Newsday, the federal grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative has subpoenaed White House records on contacts with 25 journalists.

The list (low on the page) is full of familiar names: Columnist Robert Novak, of course, and MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Time's James Carney, The Post's Mike Allen, Newsweek's Evan Thomas.

And then there's Jeff Gannon of Talon News.

Who? Of what?

I first wrote about Gannon in my Feb. 19 column. Gannon works for a tiny, supremely conservative organization called Talon News which publishes a Web site by the same name as well as one called GOPUSA.com. With the sole exception of Gannon, who says he is compensated, all the "reporters" are volunteers.

Gannon's presence in the White House briefing room is something of an irritant to most of the press corps, which considers his questions at briefings to be preposterous softballs. [Note: This paragraph has been corrected. Gannon does not have an assigned seat in the briefing room as was previously reported here.]

And in return, Gannon sometimes writes on his own Web site about his views of the corps and how there is "perhaps no depth to which it will not sink in order to undermine a presidency."

Anyway, the reason Gannon is on the list is most likely an attempt to find out who gave him a secret memo that he mentioned in an interview he had with Plame's husband, former ambassador and administration critic Joseph Wilson.

Gannon asked Wilson: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"</h3>

According to a December Washington Post story by Mike Allen and Dana Milbank, "Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it."

On top of being secret, CIA officials said it was wrong.

Gannon won't talk about it. But he does keep lobbing those softballs. Sometimes he even brings props. And press secretary McClellan seems to appreciate it.

Yesterday, for instance, McClellan was getting hammered with questions about the 9/11 commission and the possible inappropriate juxtaposition of a visit to a 9/11 memorial with a fundraiser on Thursday.

It was getting ugly. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response," McClellan said in response to a jibe. (See the full text of the briefing.)

Then he saw daylight:

"Go ahead, Jeff."

Gannon: "Thank you. First of all, I hope the grand jury didn't force you to turn over the wedding card I sent to you and your wife. (Laughter.) Do you see any hypocrisy in the controversy about the President's mention of 9/11 in his ads, when Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt's campaign issued this button, that says, 'Remember Pearl Harbor'? I have a visual aid for folks watching at home."

McClellan: "You're pointing out some historical facts. Obviously, Pearl Harbor was a defining moment back in the period of World War II, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was strongly committed to winning World War II and talked about it frequently."

Gannon: "So you think it certainly is valid that the President does talk about it and --"

McClellan: "Yes, he addressed this this weekend, when he was first asked about it. September 11th was a defining moment for our nation. We all shared in that experience. And it's important that we look at how we lead in a post-September 11th world. And that's an important discussion to have with the American people, and to talk about the differences in approaches to winning the war on terrorism and preventing attacks from happening in the first place."

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
The When and How of Leak Being Probed
Timing of Disclosure of CIA Employee's Name a Factor in Deciding if Law Was Broken

By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 26, 2004; Page A06

A federal prosecutor investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative has directed considerable effort at learning how widely the operative's identity was disseminated to reporters before it was published last year by columnist Robert D. Novak, according to people with knowledge of the case.

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is trying to pinpoint precisely when and from whom several journalists learned that Joseph C. Wilson IV, an outspoken critic of the administration, was sent on an Iraq-related intelligence mission after a recommendation by his wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA employee. Plame's name first appeared in a July 14, 2003, column by Novak.

Robert D. Novak's July 14, 2003, column may have been seen by the White House before it ran. (CNN)

The timing could be a critical element in assessing whether classified information was illegally disclosed. If White House aides directed reporters to information that had already been published by Novak, they may not have disclosed classified information...........

.....Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet had issued a statement July 11, 2003, saying that Wilson's findings in Niger did not actually resolve the question of whether Hussein tried to buy uranium there. But Tenet nevertheless said the statement on Africa should not have been included in Bush's State of Union address, and he took responsibility for his agency's vetting of the speech. White House communications director Bartlett agreed, telling reporters that "there was no debate or questions with regard to that line when it was signed off on."

But an agency bureaucrat stirred a new round of confusion and White House anger the following week.

On July 16, two days after Novak's column appeared, Alan Foley, then-director of the CIA's intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control center, told Senate intelligence committee members that he had insisted the White House remove a reference to Niger and uranium from the State of the Union address. The White House maintained there was never any specific reference to Niger in drafts of the speech, nor, it said, had the CIA expressed any objection to referring to reports Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Africa.

Foley later told the committee staff he may have been confused, according to a Senate committee report on Iraq intelligence released this year. The Senate report determined that Foley's original testimony had been incorrect and that the CIA had not raised concerns about the Iraq-Niger reporting in the speech.

<h3>It was in the ensuing days that television reporters Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell would tell Wilson they had heard from administration aides that the real story was not what Wilson found in Niger but his wife's role in selecting him for the trip.</h3>

Where the "real story", or NEPOTISM "OP", all began.......
(We've only known this for a few days.....and the MSM press snores...)

Quote:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

July 18 issue

Page 2 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/...wsweek/page/2/

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.) <h3>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."</h3>

Karl played a "high stakes" strategy" that relied totally on the NEPOTISM card. The flaw in his plan was that, in order to discredit Wilson, Karl had to plant a scenario that Wilson's "factfinding" trip to Niger, was not an official assignment, sanctioned by VP Cheney or anyone else in the Bush administration, and the easiest way (so Karl thought....) was to plant the story, via the press, that Wilson's trip was a partisan plan to discredit Bush, because Wilson was chosen by his CIA wife, and was therfore, not a credible voice of criticism. An added dividend, as Wilson observed, was that Karl's tactic sent a warning to any other potential whistleblower.

It is ironic and a pathetic state of affairs that two years later the "so called liberal" media, none of it....can bring itself to print the name of Bush's private criminal attorney, or fake news reporter Jeff Guckert, both strongly associated with this case. Does the media fear Karl and the other "thugs" that he presides over, enough to avoid covering this story much longer?

powerclown · 07-14-2005, 07:41 AM

I don't think there's an over-reliance here on the fact that Wilson's wife sent him to Africa. Stand back for a moment and look at all the evidence, try to see in people's statements what their motivation is. Wilson has already made clear his motive when he said he wanted to see Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Now Howard "The Cannibal" Dean, John Kerry, and Hilary "I Burned All My Blue Dresses" Clinton are clamoring for Rove's head. It's pretty clear what's happening here.

Did Rove do something sleazy? Yes.
Did Wilson do something sleazy? Yes.
Did Robert Novak do something sleazy? Yes.
Did Valerie Plame do something sleazy? Most likely.
Did TIME magazine do something sleazy? Most likely.

The dems know that can't pin anything on Rove (lord knows they've been trying for the past 2 years) so now they're dragging him through the court of Public Opinion, praying that something - ANYTHING - will pressure Rove to resign.

Ustwo · 07-14-2005, 07:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown

The dems know that can't pin anything on Rove (lord knows they've been trying for the past 2 years) so now they're dragging him through the court of Public Opinion, praying that something - ANYTHING - will pressure Rove to resign.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner!

host · 07-15-2005, 10:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown

I don't think there's an over-reliance here on the fact that Wilson's wife sent him to Africa. Stand back for a moment and look at all the evidence, try to see in people's statements what their motivation is. Wilson has already made clear his motive when he said he wanted to see Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Now Howard "The Cannibal" Dean, John Kerry, and Hilary "I Burned All My Blue Dresses" Clinton are clamoring for Rove's head. It's pretty clear what's happening here.

Did Rove do something sleazy? Yes.
Did Wilson do something sleazy? Yes.
Did Robert Novak do something sleazy? Yes.
Did Valerie Plame do something sleazy? Most likely.
Did TIME magazine do something sleazy? Most likely.

The dems know that can't pin anything on Rove (lord knows they've been trying for the past 2 years) so now they're dragging him through the court of Public Opinion, praying that something - ANYTHING - will pressure Rove to resign.

Please explain your "Did Wilson do something sleazy? Yes." What can you offer to show that Wilson was not credible and forthright, in his July 6, 2003 NY Times Op-Ed piece, or subsequently, that comes from a non-partisan source. Wilson signed no NDA with the CIA before or after his trip to Niger. The subsequent revelations of the Duelfer WMD report, and the Jan. 12, 2005 admissions to reporters by Scott MCClellan, speaking on behalf of the president, <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/01/20050112-7.html">that the weapons that we all believed were there, based on the intelligence, were not there.</a>, only serve to strengthen Wilson's already strong credentials as a "whistleblower" acting appropriately in the wake of the failure of the executive administration to back it's oft repeated claims of the nature of the threat that Iraq posed to the U.S., that justified an military invasion of that sovereign country.

powerclown, you may accept Rove's distortions that "Wilson claimed Cheney sent him to Niger", or <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/page/2/">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.</a>

I don't accept it because there are no sources for those distortions besides "senior administration officials" and Sen. Pat Roberts partisan "addenedum".

This is a link to an accurate, IMO, of the distortions that are used to smear Wilson, and the defects in them: http://mediamatters.org/items/200507150008

Can you make a case that Wilson is "sleazy", inferring that he deserved the onslaught of Rove's campaign to marginalize Wilson and his wife, that Rove launched no later than immediately after Wilson wrote:

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.htm
In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.....

I have a hard time posting that anyone is "sleazy". I have to be certain of what I know, and not what others filter for me, before I'll post that about someone. What do you know, that persuades you that Wilson is sleazy?

powerclown · 07-16-2005, 11:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

I have a hard time posting that anyone is "sleazy".

Funny, you don't seem to have a hard time referring to members of the Bush Administration as "fuckers"or"thugs".
I'd hate to get on your bad side, host.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Just a few reasons why Wilson is a sleazeball:

Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Saturday, July 10, 2004

Quote:

Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

...

The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said.

Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq."

According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.

---

Quote:

The Senate Committee asked Wilson how he could have come to such grandiose conclusions (REGARDING THE ABOVE) without any information:

On at least two occasions [Wilson] admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on either unrelated past experiences or no information at all.

For example, when asked how he "knew" that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved "a little literary flair."

Quote:

"A little literary flair" is a good way to describe the following claim, also in the original Kristof column: "The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted--except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it [the forgery] anyway."

The Select Committee discovered otherwise:

DIA and CIA analysts said that when they saw the intelligence report they did not believe that it supplied much new information and did not think that it clarified the story on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal. They did not find Nigerien denials that they had discussed uranium sales with Iraq as very surprising because they had no expectation that Niger would admit to such an agreement if it did exist. The analysts did, however, find it interesting that the former Nigerien Prime Minister said [to Wilson] an Iraqi delegation had visited Niger [in 1999] for what [the prime minister] believed was to discuss uranium sales.
Because CIA analysts did not believe that the report added any new information to clarify the issue, they did not use the report to produce any further analytical products or highlight the report for policymakers. For the same reason, CIA's briefer did not brief the Vice President on the report, despite the Vice President's previous questions about the issue.

The story Wilson told Nicholas Kristof that May morning in Washington? Wilson made it up.

And he got away with it. And he began to talk more frequently with reporters. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, for one. Here is an excerpt from a Pincus article published on June 12, 2003:

During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.
After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.

During the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation, someone asked Wilson how he could have told Pincus the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," as he never saw the forgeries in the first place. Wilson was nonplussed. According to the report, "The former ambassador said that he may have 'misspoken' to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were 'forged.'" Also, he said, "he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself."

Maybe Wilson was confused, too, when he talked to Spencer Ackerman and John B. Judis for a June 30, 2003, New Republic cover story, "The First Casualty":

Cheney's office [in early 2002] had received from the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq's purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September [2002] detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the [2003] State of the Union. "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former ambassador tells TNR.
Once again, the Senate Intelligence Committee report refutes all of this. The forged documents first showed up in October 2002, when an Italian journalist gave them to the U.S. embassy in Rome, which forwarded them to the CIA. Why did Cheney query the CIA in February 2002 about Niger? Because of a Defense Intelligence Agency report that same month titled Niamey [the capital of Niger] signed an agreement to sell 500 tons of uranium a year to Baghdad. This report was thinly sourced, the CIA would later inform Cheney, which is one of the reasons they sent Wilson to investigate.

With the Kristof column, the Pincus piece, and the Judis/Ackerman article, however, Wilson was just getting warmed up. On July 6, 2003, Wilson went public with his story in three venues: an op-ed in the New York Times, an appearance on Meet the Press, and a front-page story in the Washington Post. In all three places Wilson told a yarn riddled with inaccuracies and, in some parts, constructed out of whole cheesecloth.

Records of his trip, he wrote in the Times, "should include" a "specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally)." Wilson had "every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government." Well, that depends on the meaning of appropriate. It certainly didn't get circulated to the vice president.

The exaggerations and falsehoods continued on that day's Meet the Press. His trip, Wilson told guest host Andrea Mitchell, "effectively debunked the Niger arms uranium sale." In fact, as the report details, it did no such thing. In his addendum to the Intelligence Committee report, Pat Roberts regrets that, while not disputing the facts, his "Democratic colleagues refused to allow" several "conclusions" about Wilson to appear in the report. Among them: "The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal."

WILSON FURTHER TOLD MITCHELL that Vice President Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice lied when they said they had not heard of him before his New York Times op-ed. He said, "If you are in the vice president's office, or you're a senior director at the National Security Council, you are senior enough to ask the question, you will get a specific response." He said, "The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there."

Or not. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that Wilson didn't know what he was talking about. He repeated the same bogus charges to Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby, who included them in their sympathetic profile the same day.

Similar credulity dominated coverage of Wilson's accusations. What's puzzling is that at times intelligence officials, quoted on background, also supported Wilson's claims. In a July 9, 2003, Newsday story by Timothy M. Phelps, for example, a "senior intelligence official" agreed with Wilson that his report "was widely disseminated" throughout the Bush administration. This wasn't the case.

By last October, when Wilson accepted the "Truth-Teller" award, the Niger scandal had taken an unusual turn. The Justice Department was investigating whether an administration official or officials had broken the law by telling columnist Robert Novak in July 2003 that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. The Justice Department investigation afforded Wilson further media opportunities. He seized them. Appearing for a second time on Meet the Press on October 5, he was asked by Tim Russert, "Was there a suggestion that this was cronyism, that it was your wife who had arranged the mission?"

"I have no idea what they were trying to suggest in this,"Wilson said. "I can only assume that it was nepotism. And I can tell you that when the decision was made, which was made after a briefing and after a gaming out at the agency with the intelligence community, there was nobody in that room when we went through this that I knew." He makes a similar claim in his memoir, The Politics of Truth, published earlier this year: "Valerie could not--and would not if she could--have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey." And Wilson told liberal blogger Joshua Micah Marshall the same thing, at greater length, in a September 2003 interview:

For those who would assert that somehow [my wife] was involved in this, it just defies logic. At the time, she was the mother of 2-year-old twins. Therefore, sort of sending her husband off on an eight-day trip leaves her with full responsibility for taking care of two screaming 2-year-olds without help, and anybody who is a parent would understand what that means. Anybody who is a mother would understand it even far better.
And yet here, too, the Senate Intelligence Committee found problems with Wilson's story. "Some CPD [Counterproliferation Division] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact [Wilson]," its report says. "However, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip." There's more: "The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name,' and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife, says, 'my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.'"

Wilson continued to receive uncritical press. Walter Pincus wrote up his October 5 Meet the Press appearance for the Washington Post the next day, and two days after that, Wilson and his wife were the subjects of another gauzy Washington Post profile by Richard Leiby and Dana Priest. In January 2004 came Vicky Ward's 7,000-word profile of the couple in Vanity Fair. In May 2004, when Wilson's book was released, he appeared once more on Meet the Press, where he scolded Tim Russert:

"Remember," he said, "when you talk about [being] partisan, what I did was my civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said, a pattern of deception to the Congress of the United States and the American people, including these 16 words in the State of the Union address"--in which the president said Iraq had been seeking uranium for its weapons program in Africa. He paused. "I did not put those 16 words in the State of the Union address. Indeed, had the president heeded the report that I and others had submitted, had the vice president heeded what the CIA briefer had told him, had the national security adviser and her deputy remembered the two memoranda and the telephone call relating to this particular subject, that line might not have been in the president's State of the Union address."
His eyes grew wide with fury.

"Either they were derelict or they were deceptive."

According to the conclusions of Sen. Pat Roberts, the words "derelict" and "deceptive" might better describe Joe Wilson:

During Mr. Wilson's media blitz, he appeared on more than thirty television shows including entertainment venues. Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had "debunked" the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. As discussed in the Niger section of the report, not only did he NOT "debunk" the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true. I believed very strongly that it was important for the Committee to conclude publicly that many of the statements made by Ambassador Wilson were not only incorrect, but had no basis in fact. . . . .
The former Ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading. Surely, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has unique access to all of the facts, should have been able to agree on a conclusion that would correct the public record.

However, committee Democrats, Roberts writes, "would not agree" to conclude publicly that much of Wilson's story was fabricated. Perhaps they were embarrassed. Many of them had grown to know Wilson socially over the last year, and many had adopted his cause as their own. Perhaps they did not want to embarrass the Kerry campaign, for which Wilson remains an unpaid adviser. Perhaps they did not want to embarrass media outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New Republic, which published Wilson's falsehoods and have not yet retracted them.

Wilson, for his part, has laid low since the committee released its report. He has not done any television interviews. He has refused most requests for interviews, period. On Thursday, July 15, Wilson sent out an email to a host of reporters--including many whom he had snookered months ago. Attached was a long, rambling letter to Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, in which he disputes the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings. The idea his wife had suggested him for the Niger trip "is not true," Wilson wrote, adding that his wife's memo touting his credentials contains "no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip."

Wilson's letter is mainly notable for what it does not mention. He does not dispute the committee's finding that he was wrong to say he knew his report had reached the vice president's office, when he had no way of knowing whether it had or hadn't. He does not admit he was wrong to tell reporters that he knew the forged documents were bogus, when he had not seen them at the time of his trip. He does not leave the door open for future discussions about his trip, either with Congress or with the press.

Which is telling. Until now, Wilson had shown himself eager to talk to anyone who would listen--including this magazine. He was an engaging interview subject. In July 2003, when he sat down with Post reporters Richard Leiby and Walter Pincus for his first on-the-record interview, Wilson waxed philosophical. "It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war," he said. One likes to think he was smoking one of his favorite cigars at the time--Romeo y Julietas, perhaps.

And then, turning to the two sympathetic journalists, Wilson, a curious expression on his face, asked, to no one in particular: "What else are they lying about?"

As it turns out, that was a question better put to the administration's critics.

source

roachboy · 07-16-2005, 11:12 AM

attacking wilson is relevant how exactly?

powerclown · 07-16-2005, 11:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

attacking wilson is relevant how exactly?

What do you mean? Who is attacking Wilson? I was answering host.

roachboy · 07-16-2005, 12:05 PM

Quote:

Just a few reasons why Wilson is a sleazeball

i dunno, powerclown: maybe i mistunderstood the above sentence and the entire argument outlined in what you posted after that and took it as an attack on wilson.

surely you will indulge me this misunderstanding, which i got from reading what you posted--but now i am confused--if articles entirely about his credibility are not in fact about his credibility, then what are they about?

if it is something else entiely, you really ought to post a deciphering link so that the rest of us can participate in that special zone of language the right has created for itself. if the statement "wilson is a sleazeball" should be read by picking every 4th letter and then working out an acrostic, you should warn us so that we dont get confused.

but let's assume that your post is not in fact in somekind of private code.....i dont see where wilson's personal credibility or the accuracy of statements he made about the uranium purchase charade in niger are relevant. particularly since a few days ago i remember you towing the line of the moment that this was all old news...suddenly, you are shifting gears and speaking in tongues. interesting stuff.

i now that this attack the critic game can make all kinds of shit appear relevant in the vast cesspit that is rightwing attack politics....but logically, it isnt..... so either a decoder ring of some type (or its equivalent), or an explanation of your point in posting that material please....?

MoonDog · 07-16-2005, 08:54 PM

Host asked powerclown about the sources that he used to form his opinion that Wilson had done something sleazy.Powerclown replied with some good material. I hardly think that he is deserving of such a response because of his respectful answering of host.

host · 07-26-2005, 01:04 AM

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.

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.

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?

host · 10-02-2005, 11:30 AM

Just so you will not be too surprised if Bush (or Cheney) makes a speech in a few weeks, directed at Patrick Fitzgerald, similar to the one that Delay made in reference to his indictment by Ronnie Earle.

Quote:

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/10/02/...ectly-involved
Near the end of a round table discussion on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this bomb:

Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions.

host · 12-18-2007, 09:58 AM

Meet the "new" "BOSS" at the DOJ, ....same as the "ole boss".....

Quote:

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t...cid=1125117105
Dear Mr. Attorney General:

On December 3, 2007, I wrote you to request documents from the Department of Justice from Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak of the covert identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. <h3>I have not received a response from you to my inquiry.</h3>

Since I wrote you on December 3, Lewis I. “Scooter” Libby has dropped the appeal of his criminal conviction arising from the Fitzgerald investigation. With that action, there remains no further pending litigation associated with the Fitzgerald investigation.

I do not regard the existence of an on-going investigation or pending litigation as a sufficient reason to withhold information from Congress. Now that Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation and Mr. Libby’s appeal have both ended, however, there should be no basis for further delay in responding to the Committee’s request. Thus, I request that you provide the Committee by January 3, 2008, with the documents requested in the Committee’s July 16 letter to Mr. Fitzgerald,<h3> including the reports of interviews with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other White House officials.</h3>

Last week, you wrote several congressional committees about the investigation into the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes. You resisted providing information to the committees because of your concern that providing information could undermine the Justice Department’s on-going investigation. In the Plame matter, there is no pending Justice Department investigation and no pending Justice Department litigation. Whatever the merits of the position you are taking in the CIA tapes inquiry, those considerations do not apply here.

There remain important questions about the leak of Ms. Wilson’s identity and the White House response that have not been answered by the prosecution and conviction of Mr. Libby and the commutation of his sentence. I urge you to cooperate with Congress’ investigation into these unanswered questions

If you have any questions regarding my request, please contact me personally or ask your staff to contact David Rapallo or Theodore Chuang of the Committee staff at (202) 225-5420.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman
Chairman

It would seem, if the "new boss" affords Rep. Waxman the courtesy of an actual reply to his second request letter, and if Mukasey falls on the same "dodge" that the white house did about Plame's civil trial, that all Plame would have to do is drop her civil suit appeal, and we can "exercise" our "right to know"....right?....right?....right.....

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...1201438_4.html
The Stonewall Continues

.....When it comes to the leak of Valerie Plame's identity and the ensuing cover up, Perino is still telling reporters that she can't talk -- even though I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has dropped his appeal.

I wrote in Monday's column that, now that Libby has decided not to appeal his multiple convictions in the leak case, there is no longer any excuse for the White House to stay silent. I chronicled some of the many instances in which Bush, Cheney and various press aides had made clear that once Libby's legal process was over they would answer questions.

But here's what happened in yesterday's early-morning gaggle:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...1201438_5.html

fastom · 12-19-2007, 02:11 AM

Gannon still around? I'd have thought Bush would try and hide him in a closet. No pun intended

07-10-2005, 03:01 PM	#2 (permalink)
djtestudo Baltimoron Location: Beeeeeautiful Bel Air, MD	I'm not exactly sure what the problem is here. Bush consulted an attorney, who also represented Ken Lay and someone from Iran-Contra? __________________ "Final thought: I just rented Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Frankly, it was the worst sports movie I've ever seen." --Peter Schmuck, The (Baltimore) Sun

07-16-2005, 11:12 AM	#11 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	attacking wilson is relevant how exactly? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

07-16-2005, 08:54 PM	#14 (permalink)
MoonDog Psycho Location: Buffalo, New York	Host asked powerclown about the sources that he used to form his opinion that Wilson had done something sleazy.Powerclown replied with some good material. I hardly think that he is deserving of such a response because of his respectful answering of host. Last edited by MoonDog; 07-17-2005 at 07:21 PM..

07-10-2005, 03:09 PM	#3 (permalink)
Elphaba Deja Moo Location: Olympic Peninsula, WA	The articles in sum would paint Sharp as a shady character that defends criminal conduct. Why would Bush choose him vs. his own legal counselor if he didn't anticipate criminal charges being made? Very fishy, indeed. Host, I won't be holding my breath for the "liberal" press to pursue this.

07-14-2005, 07:41 AM	#7 (permalink)
powerclown Junkie Location: Detroit, MI	I don't think there's an over-reliance here on the fact that Wilson's wife sent him to Africa. Stand back for a moment and look at all the evidence, try to see in people's statements what their motivation is. Wilson has already made clear his motive when he said he wanted to see Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Now Howard "The Cannibal" Dean, John Kerry, and Hilary "I Burned All My Blue Dresses" Clinton are clamoring for Rove's head. It's pretty clear what's happening here. Did Rove do something sleazy? Yes. Did Wilson do something sleazy? Yes. Did Robert Novak do something sleazy? Yes. Did Valerie Plame do something sleazy? Most likely. Did TIME magazine do something sleazy? Most likely. The dems know that can't pin anything on Rove (lord knows they've been trying for the past 2 years) so now they're dragging him through the court of Public Opinion, praying that something - ANYTHING - will pressure Rove to resign.

12-19-2007, 02:11 AM	#18 (permalink)
fastom Psycho Location: way out west	Gannon still around? I'd have thought Bush would try and hide him in a closet. No pun intended