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Vice President Lied As White House Sought To Defuse Leak Inquiry
By Jason Leopold
11/08/05 "ICH"
-- -- Did Vice President Dick Cheney help cover-up
the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson in the
months after conservative columnist Robert Novak first disclosed her
identity?
That’s one of the questions Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is
likely trying to figure out. It’s unclear what Cheney said to
investigators back in 2004 when he was questioned—not under
oath—about the leak, particularly what he knew and when he knew it.
The five-count criminal indictment handed up by a grand jury last
month against Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter”
Libby, sheds new light on a pattern of strategic deception by the
Vice President and the White House to defuse an inquiry into who
leaked the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to the
press. Months after Plame’s identity was disclosed by conservative
columnist Robert Novak, Cheney continued to hide the fact that he
and his aides were intimately involved in disseminating classified
information about her to journalists.
What the Vice President denied knowing
The indictment against Cheney’s Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter”
Libby, clearly states that Cheney and Libby discussed Plame’s
undercover CIA status and the fact that her husband, former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, traveled to Niger to investigate claims
that Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from the African
country in early June of 2003.
Yet the following month, Cheney and then-White House press secretary
Ari Fleischer asserted that the vice president was unaware of
Wilson’s Niger trip, who the ambassador was, or a classified report
Wilson wrote about his findings prior to the ambassador’s July 6,
2003 op-ed in the New York Times.
We now know, courtesy of the 22-page Libby indictment, that Cheney
wasn’t being truthful. Cheney did see the report; he knew full well
who Wilson was. He also knew that the CIA arranged for Wilson to
travel to Niger, and he personally sought out information about
Wilson’s trip to Niger, was briefed about the fact-finding mission,
and even obtained classified information about Plame’s covert CIA
status. He also came to know one other important nugget: that Plame
may have recommended her husband for the trip.
Cheney’s public campaign and that of other White House officials to
discredit Wilson and strategically lie about the Plame leak started
on Sept. 14, 2003, during an interview with Tim Russert of NBC's
“Meet the Press.”
During the interview, Cheney maintained that he didn’t know Wilson
or anything about his trip.
“I don’t know Joe Wilson,” Cheney said, in response to Russert who
quoted Wilson as saying there was no truth to the Niger uranium
claims. “I’ve never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson—I don’t who sent
Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came
back... I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him. I
have no idea who hired him and it never came...”
“The CIA did,” Russert said, interjecting.
“Who at the CIA? I don’t know,” Cheney said. “He never submitted a
report that I ever saw when he came back.”
What happened once Cheney received information on Plame and Wilson
in June 2003 remains unclear. But the indictment illustrates—in no
uncertain terms—that the vice president’s office staged a concerted
effort to undermine Wilson for questioning the veracity of the Niger
claims.
Fitzgerald has eyed Cheney in seeking to ascertain who ordered the
leak, as previously reported. While the Vice President stands
accused of no wrongdoing, his role may come into greater focus
during a trial.
In an interview with the syndicated radio program “Democracy Now,”
Wilson argued that Cheney may have been lying to Russert when he
said he didn’t know about the ambassador’s Niger trip.
“While we've never met, he certainly knows who I am and should know
unless his memory is flawed and faulty,” Wilson said during the
Sept. 16, 2003 interview. “There were at a minimum three reports
that had been generated shortly after the Vice President had asked
the question, ‘what do we know about this?’”
The Vice President certainly must have known Wilson during his
tenure as secretary of defense during the first President Bush’s
administration. In the weeks leading up to the first Gulf War,
Wilson served as the acting U.S ambassador on the ground in Baghdad.
In fact, Wilson was the only line of communication between
Washington and Saddam Hussein. The White House held daily briefings
with Wilson, and Cheney sat in on a majority of those briefings.
White House suggested investigation was waste of time
In hindsight, it now seems that the White House, including President
Bush, attempted to steer reporters away from covering the Plame leak
by saying the “leaker” would never be found.
On October 7, 2003, Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said
that the White House ruled out three administration officials -
Rove, Libby and Elliot Abrams, a senior official on the National
Security Council, as sources of the leak - a day before FBI
questioned the three of them - based on questions McClellan said he
asked the men.
The very next day, however, Rove was questioned by FBI investigators
and said that he spoke to journalists about Plame for the first time
after Novak’s column was published - a lie, it appears - based on
Time reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails which stated that Rove told
Cooper about Plame.
Bush told reporters the same day he doubted that a Justice
Department investigation would ever turn up the source of the leak,
suggesting that it was a waste of time for lawmakers to question the
administration and for reporters to follow up on the story.
"I mean this is a town full of people who like to leak information,"
Bush said. "And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior
administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and
there's lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea.”
Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) responded to the president’s
statement in the New York Times.
“If the president says, 'I don't know if we're going to find this
person,' what kind of a statement is that for the president of the
United States to make?” Lautenberg asked. “Would he say that about a
bank robbery investigation?”
Facing a deadline on turning over documents, emails and phone logs
to Justice Department officials, Bush said that the White House
could invoke executive privilege and withhold some “sensitive”
documents related to the leak case. Democrats speculated that the
White House had something to hide.
Classified leak or truthful rebuttal?
Unable to keep emails from investigators, the White House mounted a
defense. They would seek to distinguish between “unauthorized leaks”
and something perfectly legal: “setting the record straight.”
On Oct. 6, 2003, in response to questions about whether Rove was
Novak’s source, McClellan tried to explain the difference between
unauthorized disclosure of classified information and "setting the
record straight" about Wilson’s public criticism of the
Administration’s handling of intelligence on Iraq.
“There is a difference between setting the record straight and doing
something to punish someone for speaking out,” McClellan said.
"There were some statements made (by Wilson) and those statements
were not based on facts," McClellan said. "And we pointed out that
it was not the vice president's office that sent Mr. Wilson to
Niger.”
Wilson, it turned out, had never said that the vice president’s
office had sent him to Niger.
Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to
be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books.
Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.
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