BREAKING NEWS:Slow response to CIA leak inquiry
Ahead of Tuesday deadline, 10 percent of White House staff turn over documents
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WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — A day before the deadline to turn over documents related to the CIA leak investigation, 10 percent of White House staffers have turned in material, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Monday. President Bush later reiterated his promise of full cooperation, adding that he expected all data “to be delivered on a timely basis.”
MORE THAN 2,000 White House staffers had been asked on Friday to review if they had any information that may be relevant to the Justice Department investigation.
By Monday, some 200 had turned in a signed memo and documents, McClellan told reporters Monday morning. Many of those were staff members who simply certified they had no relevant documents, he added.
The president, speaking to reporters at midday, said his administration takes the investigation seriously. “I’d like to know who leaked,” he said.
In a memo obtained by NBC News, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales told employees that all materials had to be turned in to his office by 5 p.m. Tuesday.
The order covers all electronic records, correspondence, computer records, notes and calendar entries that could relate to the investigation of who disclosed the CIA officer’s identity to syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who identified the woman on July 14. Employees must sign a form saying they have turned in materials or did not have any items related to the investigation.
The CIA officer’s husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, expressed concern Sunday that the leak may have put her life in danger.
“There have been a number of other people who’ve come out and suggested that perhaps this does make her a target,” Wilson said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“We, of course, as a consequence of that, have begun to rethink our own security posture,” he said.
Wilson complained that “nobody has offered security from the government, although my wife is a long-standing U.S. government employee.”
Sen. Chuck Hagel, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked on CBS whether the government should provide protection for the Wilsons.
“If there is the least possibility, most remote possibility of her life being in danger, then the government owes that person protection and security,” said Hagel, R-Neb.
DAMAGING ‘THE MESSENGER’
Wilson repeated his belief of administration complicity in the disclosure of his wife’s name — that officials in the Bush administration either approved or condoned the disclosure of his wife’s name as retribution for his questioning of President Bush’s rationale for going to war with Iraq and as a way to intimidate other administration critics.
Wilson’s problems with the Bush administration began last year after he was sent to Niger, a major exporter of uranium, to investigate a report that Iraq had sought uranium from that country to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s program to develop nuclear weapons.
Wilson reported that he found no evidence to support the allegation, but a 16-word reference to such evidence appeared in Bush’s State of the Union address in January.
“At that time, there were a lot of analysts who were speaking anonymously to the press about any number of issues related to the intelligence that undergirded the decision to go to war,” Wilson said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I felt that, however abominable the decision might be, it was rational that if you were an administration and did not want people talking about the intelligence or talking about what underpinned the decision to go to war, you would discourage them by destroying the credibility of the messenger who brought you the message,” he said. “And this administration apparently decided the way to do that was to leak the name of my wife.”
BROADER PROBE
The Justice Department has expanded the scope of its investigation beyond the White House, sending letters Thursday night to the State and Defense departments requesting that they also preserve telephone logs, e-mail messages and other documents that could become evidence in the inquiry, U.S. officials told NBC News.
A senior administration official told NBC News that both departments were given until Oct. 10 to comply.
Democrats stepped up their calls for an independent investigation, charging that political ties between Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House senior political adviser Karl Rove represented a serious conflict of interest.
A company controlled by Rove, whom the CIA officer’s husband has accused of at least condoning the leak, was paid more than $300,000 by Ashcroft’s 1994 Senate campaign in Missouri for direct mail work and other services, The New York Times reported Friday, citing campaign finance data.
Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, also played a role in two earlier Ashcroft campaigns for governor.
‘SEEKING PARTISAN POLITICAL ADVANTAGE’
The White House responded by saying the accusation that Bush administration officials were responsible for leaking the officer’s name was based on “unsubstantiated rumors.”
“Unfortunately, there are some that are looking through the lens of political opportunism,” McClellan said Thursday. “There are some that are seeking partisan political advantage.”
The FBI team assigned to the case has already begun conducting interviews of CIA officers, other U.S. officials told NBC News on condition of anonymity. The officials declined to say whom the agents had interviewed.
ACCUSER’S CREDIBILITY CHALLENGED
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie accused Wilson last week of being a “partisan Democrat” and noted that Wilson had donated money to the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
But Wilson also contributed $1,000 to Bush’s 2000 campaign in May 1999, and also contributed $1,500 to the campaign of Ed Royce, a California Republican Congressman, between June 2000 and June 2002.
The Justice Department has indicated that it has not ruled out the option of naming a special counsel to investigate the leak independently, while the president has said it wasn’t necessary.
Law enforcement experts said the investigators’ first task would be to narrow the list of government officials who were aware of the agent’s identity — a number believed to be in the hundreds. That was expected to be a difficult task.
The investigation could also be hampered by the increasingly apparent tension between the CIA and the administration. U.S. officials told NBC News on condition of anonymity that Bush’s senior advisers were angrily accusing the CIA of leaking word of the probe last week to embarrass the White House.
Relations between the agency and the White House have been described as difficult ever since CIA Director George Tenet, under pressure from the White House, publicly accepted responsibility this summer for allowing Bush to make the since-discredited claim in his State of the Union address, even though the CIA itself had more than once warned the White House against using the material. |
