Sunday :: Jul 10, 2005
What's Really Going On With The Plame Inquiry?
Sorry for being AWOL for most of the weekend. By the way, why hasn't John Bolton gotten that recess appointment yet?
While many of us focus on the Rove-Plame connection we may be missing a larger issue unfolding in front of us. But first...
Thanks to a tip from Judith and my own searches around the blogosphere today, there are a few more nuggets for you to chew on regarding the Plame story today. Mike Isikoff in Newsweek is running a story that confirms that Rove was Matt Cooper’s source who first tipped Cooper off to the fact that Plame worked at the CIA on WMDs. According to Cooper’s email, Rove had a two-minute phone conversation with Cooper several days before Bob Novak outed Plame in his column.
Even though Rove’s attorney continues to insist that Rove didn’t out Plame to Cooper, Robert Luskin did confirm to Isikoff that it was Rove who gave Cooper a personal waiver and release from confidentiality last week to testify to the grand jury. But remember what it was that Cooper said on the day that he agreed to testify. He said that up until that morning, both he and Judith Miller had not trusted the special prosecutor’s claims that their sources were waiving confidentiality, because they assumed that such waivers were being coerced from the sources by their government bosses.
So with this admission by Rove that it was he who gave Cooper a personal waiver so that Cooper could testify, are we to believe that Rove’s bosses until that personal contact were coercing Rove to waive confidentiality? Or is this just another smokescreen that stiffs like Cooper fall for with this White House all the time?
And you should take note that it is Mike Isikoff, fresh from his White House humiliation over the “Korans in the toilets” story who is the bulldog that Newsweek assigned to this story. That can’t be good for the White House.
For those of us who think that what Patrick Fitzgerald has uncovered goes far beyond just Rove and Plame, I give you this great piece of work by Kant of the Daily Kos, where we find out that Lawrence O’Donnell has focused on what the federal court authorized Fitzgerald to go after, based on the evidence he gave them. And in looking at the three judge-panel’s decision, and the eight pages of redaction that are in the court’s decision, O’Donnell and others are thinking that Fitzgerald is onto something far bigger than just the outing of a covert operative, and in fact may be pursuing a prosecution under espionage laws.
And how deep may all of this be? Well, Paul Lukasiak over at Josh Marshall's TPM Cafe noted today that Walter Pincus of the Post, who is the best connected reporter inside the Beltway to the CIA, revealed that the White House told him they had in fact known about Wilson's trip to Niger very early and had apparently set about to build a false story about Plame's role in setting the trip up. This suggests an ongoing and early effort to discredit Administration critics going back as far as early to mid-2002, which happens to be about the same time as the creation of the Iraq Group inside the White House (with none other than Karen Hughes) and the same time as the Downing Street Memos.
theleftcoaster.com |
