The Discerning Texan

The WaPo gets some dish from a "former Armitage colleague at the [State] department" and rehashes the Newsweek story, giving us an excuse to engage in some unseemly gloating:

The leak of information about an undercover CIA employee that provoked a special prosecutor's investigation of senior White House officials came from then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, according to a former Armitage colleague at the department.

Armitage told newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak in the summer of 2003 that Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent critic of the Iraq war, worked for the CIA, the colleague said. In October of that year, Armitage admitted to senior State Department officials that he had made the remark, which was based on a classified report he had read.

Let me toss in one belated "They told you so", based on this - although the report Armitage read was classified, "Armitage did not know at the time that Plame's identity was considered secret information...".

I am still fuming that a prosecutor can so abuse his position that he lets two innocent people become smeared by innuendo while he (and Armitage and Powell and Taft) knew the truth and hid it from the public. So now it is time to investigate Fitzgerald based on his lying at the press conference for his Libby indictment. I am going to really enjoy this Fisking (or is it a Fritzing?). In Fitzgerald’s own words:

The grand jury’s indictment charges that Mr. Libby committed five crimes. The indictment charges one count of obstruction of justice of the federal grand jury, two counts of perjury and two counts of false statements.

Before I talk about those charges and what the indictment alleges, I’d like to put the investigation into a little context.

…

Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified.

…

The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It’s important that a CIA officer’s identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation’s security.

Valerie Wilson’s cover was blown in July 2003. The first sign of that cover being blown was when Mr. Novak published a column on July 14th, 2003.

But Mr. Novak was not the first reporter to be told that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Wilson, Ambassador Wilson’s wife Valerie, worked at the CIA. Several other reporters were told.

In fact, Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson.

We know that Miller has testified that Libby did NOT pass the name Valerie Wilson or Valerie Plame to Miller in June (or possibly in July) but that she recalls getting that name from someone else (whom she cannot recall, conveniently). So we know Fitzgerald is lying, because Miller testified that the name was not coming from Libby. But what is criminal - and deliberately misleading - is to jump from all this concern about a CIA’s agents identity to Libby and Miller, when Fitz KNOWS it was Armitage.

So let me tell you a little bit about how an investigation works.

Investigators do not set out to investigate the statute, they set out to gather the facts.

It’s critical that when an investigation is conducted by prosecutors, agents and a grand jury they learn who, what, when, where and why. And then they decide, based upon accurate facts, whether a crime has been committed, who has committed the crime, whether you can prove the crime and whether the crime should be charged.

…

That’s the way this investigation was conducted. It was known that a CIA officer’s identity was blown, it was known that there was a leak. We needed to figure out how that happened, who did it, why, whether a crime was committed, whether we could prove it, whether we should prove it.

Who is this clown kidding? He knew how it happened, who did it, why and whether there was a crime within weeks (if not days) of taking on the job and being briefed! In fact, he knew it was NOT Libby or Rove. Here he is again conflating the act of Armitage leaking with his witch hunt on Libby.

But as important as it is for the grand jury to follow the rules and follow the safeguards to make sure information doesn’t get out, it’s equally important that the witnesses who come before a grand jury, especially the witnesses who come before a grand jury who may be under investigation, tell the complete truth.

It’s especially important in the national security area. The laws involving disclosure of classified information in some places are very clear, in some places they’re not so clear.

Why is Fitzgerald prattling on about the exposure of classified information - a CIA agent’s identity - when he knows Libby was not the leaker? Why is Fitzgerald talking about this at the Libby indictment when he knows it was Armitage who exposed the agent? The only conclusion is he is deliberately misleading the public. He is LYING. If he were in front of his vaulted grand jury he would be open to real perjury and obstruction of justice charges. Trying to tie this back to the leak was bad enough, but knowing the leak that launched the inquiry was from Armitage, yet implying it was Libby, is tantamount to lying.

And, in fact, we now know that Mr. Libby discussed this information about Valerie Wilson at least four times prior to July 14th, 2003: on three occasions with Judith Miller of the New York Times and on one occasion with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine.

FITZGERALD: The first occasion in which Mr. Libby discussed it with Judith Miller was back in June 23rd of 2003, just days after an article appeared online in the New Republic which quoted some critical commentary from Mr. Wilson.

And all these times the mention of Valerie was instigated BY THE REPORTER! Note he says ‘discusses’ not Libby passed it on. He is being too clever by half here. If the reporter brings it up, then Libby “discussed it”. Except the first time with Miller, where Fitzgerald has admitted there is no evidence of talking about Wilson by name - let alone his wife. But so what? Is Fitz investigating a leak or testing the accuracy of memory? All I can say is he is being deliberately dishonest.

At the end of the day what appears is that Mr. Libby’s story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true.

It was false. He was at the beginning of the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And then he lied about it afterwards, under oath and repeatedly.

Again, the testimony is clear. There was no phone call to Russert (supposedly). Cooper admits bringing up Wilson’s wife and Miller admits using Libby to confirm her leads. libby is at the ‘end of events’. As someone pointed out, we cannot eliminate the possibility that Miller ALSO learned of Valerie “Flame” from her good buddy Armitage. If Miller met with anyone at the State Department during this time, then Libby can make the case Miller may have learned all about Valerie (and Joe’s phone number) from Grossman and/or Armitage. This is why Libby wanted Miller’s calendar and notes - to see if she was meeting with Armitage. My guess is there may be another shoe to drop here. And recall that Fitzgerald has seen the calendar and notes. Someone should ask him point blank did Miller have contact with State Dept officials during this time period. Her notes seem to indicate it was possible.

At this point in the press conference Fitzgerald gets bizzare

Well, why is this a leak investigation that doesn’t result in a charge? I’ve been trying to think about how to explain this, so let me try. I know baseball analogies are the fad these days. Let me try something.

If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fastball and hit a batter right smack in the head, and it really, really hurt them, you’d want to know why the pitcher did that. And you’d wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, “I’ve got bad blood with this batter. He hit two home runs off me. I’m just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can.”

OK, the batter is Valerie Wilson and the pitcher is Armitage - as we all now know.

You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter’s head. And there’s lots of shades of gray in between.

You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back and it hit him in the head because he moved. You might want to throw it under his chin, but it ended up hitting him on the head.

The first line implies and accidental leak. The contains various nefarious excuses to mame, not kill. What this has to do with Libby is not clear. It is all about Armitage’s motives. Is he hinting Armitage did expose Valerie for less than honorable reasons? Like protecting State and himself? Isn’t that exactly what the left has been saying - someone exposed Plame to protect themselves?

And what you’d want to do is have as much information as you could. You’d want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you’d want to know.

Well, no Fitz didn’t want to know. If he had he would have learned about Armitage’s talk with Woodward! But Fitzgerald is implying Libby did the leaking when he knows damn well it was Armitage (and had known for years).

And then you’d make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, “Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it.”

In this case, it’s a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn’t to one person. It wasn’t just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us.

Yes indeed, the damage was done to Valerie and all of us - by Armitage! This is where Fitzgerald got out ahead of himself and was discussing Armitage in reality but implying it had all to do with Libby. No wonder Fitz-Magoo looked so uncomfortable during his presser - he was knowingly misleading everyone.

Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused?

Here Fitzgerald knowingly ties all this to Libby when he KNOWS Armitage was the source for the actual news story. He is not being honest at all here. Fitzgerald is applying a double standard when he should be weighing all participants equally:

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

The only one who threw sand, who hid what was happening was Armitage. He hid the Woodward talk that was prior to the Novak talk. And clearly Miller had a contact prior to Libby, but that sand did not bother Fitz-Magoo. It did not matter that Miller had to correct her accounts per her notes, as did Libby, Rove and Armitage and Woodward. All of them had to correct the record. But only Libby’s correction was nefarious? The original leaker did not mention the original leak! Libby claimed he TALKED to reporters. Not that he DIDN’T talk to them!

As you sit here now, if you’re asking me what his motives were, I can’t tell you; we haven’t charged it.

So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.

I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge.

This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.

I believe that includes prosecutors misrepresenting the facts. National security is serious and it may have been compromised, but it had nothing to do with Libby and everything to do with Armitage. But Fitzgerald is clearly sending the message that the national security breach was related to Libby - even though he was only used to confirm Armitage’s exposure of Val’s identity. Fitzgerald is truly shading the truth here.

QUESTION: For all the sand thrown in your eyes, it sounds like you do know the identity of the leaker. There’s a reference to a senior official at the White House, Official A, who had a discussion with Robert Novak about Joe Wilson’s wife.

QUESTION: Can you explain why that official was not charged?

FITZGERALD: I’ll explain this: I know that people want to know whatever it is that we know, and they’re probably sitting at home with the TV thinking, “I’m want to jump through the TV, grab him by his collar and tell him to tell us everything they figured out over the last two years.”

We just can’t do that. It’s not because we enjoy holding back information from you; that’s the law.

And one of the things we do with a grand jury is we gather information. And the explicit requirement is if we’re not going to charge someone with a crime; if we decide that a person did not commit a crime, we cannot prove a crime, doesn’t merit prosecution, we do not stand up and say, “We gathered all this information on the commitment that we’re going to follow the rules of grand jury secrecy, which say we don’t talk about people not charged with a crime, and then at the end say, well, it’s a little inconvenient not to give answers out, so I’ll give it out anyway.”

This is the biggest bunch of BS I have ever seen. Special prosecutors were required to generate a report on all aspects of their investigation. There is NOTHING against Fitzgerald saying “the original source for Novak’s column was Armitage, Rove provided a weak confirmation and the CIA provided a strong confirmation, but in the end no crime was deemed to be committed”. Fitzgerald is lying or misrepresenting again. First he implies Libby is the root of the leak and then he claims he cannot discuss the root of the leak per grand jury rules? Which mail order college did he get his law degree from?

Lost in all the excitement over Jon Benet and Katrina flagellation could be one of the most pernicious acts of political backstabbing in a generation. It occurred to me this morning that the Plame kerfluffle may very well have been a kind of conspiracy-or at least a little payback from one Cabinet member to his President.

It is clear that Richard Armitage did not deliberately tell Robert Novak about Plame's status as a CIA employee in an effort to destroy Joe Wilson's credibility, but it is likely that once the information got into the political bloodstream as a story damaging to President Bush, he intentionally did nothing that may have helped explain the situation. Armitage is well known as someone who is not a "political gunslinger" in Novak's parlance, but he was also a well known opponent of the Iraq War. So was his boss-Colin Powell.

Powell of "you break it, you buy it" fame with respect to Iraq was convinced by the President and ostensibly US Intelligence information that Iraq did have WMD notably made the case for war in a speech to the UN. As a man of stature (or who believes he is of stature in any case) I doubt he would have made that case at the UN just because the President said so-in the absence of credible evidence. But perhaps he did do the speech over his own objections-and when he felt burned, he decided to get some payback.

The first major objections to what was initially a popular war arose with Joe Wilson's infamous op-ed in the NY Times. The media-still shellshocked by 9/11-was looking for an excuse to turn on a Republican President and war and took Wilson's ball and ran with it. Then the Plame allegations dropped into their laps and they finally had something to sink their teeth into.

Armitage had inadvertantly been the progenitor of a big story that was hurting the President and discrediting a war that he didn't support-so he sat on it. From recent reports we know that he told a few fellow State Department colleagues that he was the leaker so it seems logical that he mentioned it to Colin Powell at some point as well. This morning's Washington Post confirms that Armitage told Powell:

Armitage and two officials he later briefed on his role -- State Department legal adviser William Howard Taft IV and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- each discussed the matter with the FBI and testified before the grand jury, the former colleague said. But Fitzgerald told Armitage in February that he would not be charged with a crime, he said.

While Armitage and Powell were busy enjoying their just desserts, the nation began to turn against the war and our troops. And they said nothing. Fitzgerald continued with the case knowing that there was no intentional disclosure of a secret agent. And they said nothing. A reporter went to jail to protect a source. And they said nothing. Scooter Libby was indicted. And they said nothing. WMDs were found in Iraq. And they said nothing.