"If you're one of the people who made those calls from the White House -- or the President who has shielded them -- today has been a very, very bad day for you."
needlenose.com
White House mole to Plame leakers: Drop dead
I'm glad that I posted my analysis of Newsweek's attempt at reframing the Valerie Plame Wilson scandal -- identifying the article as more a combination of spin and a coded message than a serious effort at explaining what happened -- before this morning's Washington Post stepped up to demolish the Newsweek piece completely.
In response to the Newsweek reporters' contention that "There were indeed White House phone calls to reporters about Wilson’s wife. But most, if not all, of these phone calls, were made after the Novak column appeared" (on July 14), the Post constructs a timeline to show the opposite:
On July 6, Wilson went public. In an interview published in The Post, Wilson accused the administration of "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war." In an opinion article the same day in the New York Times, he wrote that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
On "Meet the Press" that day, Wilson said: "Either the administration has some information that it has not shared with the public or, yes, they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to bolster a decision in the case that had already been made, a decision that had been made to go war."
On July 7, the White House admitted it had been a mistake to include the 16 words about uranium in Bush's State of the Union speech. Four days later, with the controversy dominating the airwaves and drowning out the messages Bush intended to send during his trip in Africa, CIA Director George J. Tenet took public blame for failing to have the sentence removed.
That same week, two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to least six Washington journalists, an administration official told The Post for an article published Sept. 28.
I wrote yesterday that the Newsweek article was meaningless if the Post's source stood by his claims, and so it only made sense to me as an invitation to the Post's source to recant. The big news in this morning's Post story is that their source did exactly the reverse:
The source elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson.
"It was unsolicited," the source said. "They were pushing back. They used everything they had."
Don't get hung up on the specific motivation the source is describing here. The important thing is that (as I pointed out yesterday, and first brought up nearly two weeks ago) he or she was in a position to describe the motivation -- in other words, he or she was there when the calls were being made. And now the same person is talking to the press. And almost certainly will talk, if he or she hasn't already, to the FBI.
If you're one of the people who made those calls from the White House -- or the President who has shielded them -- today has been a very, very bad day for you. |
