White House adviser Karl Rove told the grand jury in the CIA leak case that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, may have told him that CIA operative Valerie Plame worked for the intelligence agency before her identity was revealed, a source familiar with Rove's account said yesterday.
In a talk that took place in the days before Plame's CIA employment was revealed in 2003, Rove and Libby discussed conversations they had had with reporters in which Plame and her marriage to Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV were raised, the source said. Rove told the grand jury the talk was confined to information the two men heard from reporters, the source said.
Rove has also testified that he also heard about Plame from someone else outside the White House, but could not recall who.
The account is the first time a person familiar with Rove's testimony has provided clues about where the deputy chief of staff learned about Plame, and confirmed that Rove and Libby were involved in a conversation about her before her identity became public. The disclosure seemed to further undermine the White House's contention early in the case that neither man was in any way involved in unmasking Plame.
Can you see where this is going? Rove claims that he learned of Valerie Plame's name through Scooter Libby. Libby will probably claim that he learned of Valerie Plame through someone else lower down the White House totem pole. The president's men are starting to craft their stories of deniability, out of fear of Fitzgerald's up-coming indictments. And when this happens, you can bet the top people will blame the lower underlings for being overzealous in their jobs. The rats are leaving the sinking ship. But there's more:
John Hannah, an aide to Cheney and one of two dozen people questioned in the CIA leak case, has told friends in recent months he is worried he may be implicated by the investigation, according to two U.S. officials.
It is not clear whether Hannah had any role in unmasking Plame, or why he should fear Fitzgerald's probe. But the eleventh-hour emergence of another possible target shows how Fitzgerald has cast his net so widely over the past two years that it is impossible to know who, if anyone, it might ensnare.
Fitzgerald and his team have interviewed or taken before the grand jury at least two dozen officials or staffers from the White House, the vice president's office, the State Department and the CIA, according to people involved in the case.
That is a pretty wide net that Fitzgerald has cast in this probe. Not only is Fitzgerald looking at NY Times reporter Judith Miller, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby, but he's also interviewed John Hannah, Vice President Dick Cheney, "Mary Matalin, a former top Cheney adviser; Catherine Martin, his former communications adviser; and Jennifer Millerwise, his former spokeswoman." But there's more:
Fitzgerald has dug into the deepest corners of the administration, pressing for information about everything from the mechanics of a secretive group of officials tasked with selling the Iraq war, to the State Department officials who assembled information on Wilson, the diplomat-turned-Iraq war critic, according to people familiar with the case. The focus has been on who leaked Plame's name, and who else knew about it.
Fitzgerald is looking into the entire Bush PR team that was charged with selling the war to the American public. These are the people who demanded that the CIA produce intelligence reports that were favorable to their arguments for invading Iraq. And any dissenters in the intelligence agency would be harshly dealt with--such as Joe Wilson. Cheney's office was central in this PR effort. According to the Post:
Fitzgerald's interest in the vice president's office became clearer as the case continued: Cheney was central to building the case that then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought nuclear weapons-grade material in Niger and Libby helped discredit Wilson in part by talking about his wife, according to lawyers in the case.
There's still more. Any dissenters who were critical of the Bush policy of invading Iraq were not only vilified by the administration, but had to be quashed and destroyed. Joe Wilson went to Niger to investigate the claims of Iraq purchasing uranium yellow-cake. He didn't find any proof to those claims, and yet President Bush used that argument to make the case for going to war with Iraq in his State of the Union address. When Wilson criticized Bush in a Times editorial, the Bush White House had to strike back.
[Time Magazine's Matt] Cooper, after receiving permission from sources, testified before the grand jury and later said publicly that Rove and Libby had talked to him about Plame. But other reporters were contacted by other White House officials about Plame during the crucial week in July 2003 after Wilson's views became public, according to government officials and people involved in the case.
This leaves open the possibility of a broader leak campaign. In September of 2003, a senior administration official told The Post that at least six journalists were contacted about Plame by two top White House officials.
And now the memo.
[On the July 2003 presidential trip to Africa,] then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had a memo that mentioned Wilson's wife, in a section marked "S" for secret, according to some administration officials.
According to people involved in the case, prosecutors believe a printout of that memo was in the front of Air Force One during the July 7-12 trip Bush took to Africa, but investigators are unsure who saw it.
The memo was on Air Force One for all those in the Bush White House to see. Continuing on:
One person in the probe said Fitzgerald showed considerable early interest in the White House Iraq Group, a task force created by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. in August 2002 and charged with "marketing" the war in Iraq to the public.
The group met weekly in the Situation Room. Its regular participants were Rove, Libby, Hadley, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, adviser Karen Hughes, Matalin, and White House director of legislative affairs Nicholas Calio.
The White House Iraq Group. There's the PR group that Bush used to market the war in Iraq. And look at the names in that group--Rove, Libby, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, Condi Rice--how much do you want to bet that Dick Cheney attended a couple of those meetings? Any one of these people--who may have been on Air Force One--could have viewed the contents of this memo. They could have made copies for their own files. The big problem here is that Valerie Plame's name is totally out in the open for the Bush White House. Also remember, there was a document circulating at the State Department which also mentioned Valerie Plame's name that was written for Under-Secretary of State Marc Grossman, who was going to use that letter as background material in a White House meeting regarding the criticism of including the yellow-cake intel in Bush's State of the Union speech. This memo was also drafted in June. How much do you want to bet that the meeting was with the White House Iraq Group?
The scandal continues on.
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