Have they done this sort of thing? Send an Amb to answer a question?, Part One
This is going to be a two part post. In this post, I’m going to show a key discrepancy between Libby’s testimony about the questions he asked Addington on July 8, and Addington’s. Addington’s testimony suggests that (contrary to Libby’s claims), Libby was looking for general details about the paperwork behind Wilson’s trip, which would have exposed Valerie’s role at the CIA, potentially her status, as well as prior trips Joe Wilson had made for the CIA. In a following post, I’ll show that this question was probably asked in response to a conversation with Cheney based on Cheney’s scribblings on Wilson’s op-ed.
The Discrepancies between Libby’s and Addington’s Testimony
There are three pieces of testimony regarding the conversation that Scooter Libby and David Addington had on July 8, 2003, about insta-declassification and paperwork on a CIA spouse’s travel to the CIA:
- Libby’s notes recording both what he wanted to ask Addington and what Addington responded
- Libby’s grand jury testimony
- Addington’s trial testimony
However, there are significant discrepancies between Addington’s testimony and Libby’s–and Libby’s own notes only confuse the issue.
I’ve been reading/lurking your stuff for a while and trying to understand this really complicated case, as well as the other complicated issues going on w/ this administration. I just have to tell you that I think you are one of the smartest people around, with an amazing ability to comprehend/connect all the details. Thank you for all of your hard work! I really appreciate it and I always learn a lot when reading your stuff!
Thank you again!
Marcy, in another comment thread long ago, I mentioned that I thought that the page of notes containing the “Khan Wilson†(Bates 1746) notation is the most significant. Once you get past the first 6 items, which appears to be Libby’s notes to himself as to what he needed to brief and/or mention to the Cheney, the remainder seems to be instructions to Libby from Cheney.
Now examine all the remainder of the notations and some are quite obviously about Wilson
•Khan Wilson
•The CIA reference
•MM (Mary Matalin)
•Harlow
•Miller
•Procure Uranium from Niger
So why shouldn’t we also assume that two of the more cryptic items also refer to Wilson/Plame.
Specifically:
•V (with a line through one leg) F SAP (soon as possible) K-overscore
•Y-overscore (VP) illegible, illegible to be sure K-overscore M get info to Citizen
•R (scratched out) on story (slary)?
The V (score) F notation shows up on Bates 1747 immediately adjacent to the “Rove quote†in the staff meeting so I think we can infer that V score F somehow refers to the Wilson story. Is it a notation for Valerie Flame (sic)?
I am much more curious on the CITIZEN note, and the R (scratch out) note.
Regardless, one could make the argument that Bates 1746 is almost entirely on Wilson/Plame.
Yet, Fitzgerald did not ask for a complete explanation in Libby’s deposition on all the items. There was no reason not to ask, so I’ve always assumed that he (Fitz) was holding cards close to the vest. Amplifying that point, the obvious questions Fitz did not ask in Libby’s depos has always been indicative to me that his intention was to flip Scooter once he had a conviction, but not telegraph the state of his knowledge.
Don’t you ever sleep woman? Thanks again for connecting the dots, this is fascinating stuff. Wasn’t what Libby was doing/asking for the same thing as leading the witness? Only thing I don’t get is why you think Judith may be patient zero in this. And I get that he met her later that morning and fed this stuff to her. But why did he expect she was going to be able to get this info out of the CIA and into his and Cheney’s hands. Was this an FOI thing? Or Judith getting her contacts to tell her the answers? Sorry, it’s late and I’m in touch with my inner blonde. Great job.
Marcy thank you. This post explain from far away how Christopher Hitchens appears so certain of Khan connection…it may be he also receives collateral leaks.
emptywheel,
so do you have a purpose with all this effort, reading, and writing?
Or is it just Zeigarnik ~the tension toward the incomplete task.~
(You just can’t let go of your favorite toy.)
[ahem]
oh gawd please make it stop.
can we vote on a ban of thecommentatorthatshallnotbenamed ???
puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze ?????
totally ruins every single comment thread and it is really annoying and irritating.
DCGaffer
First, the line before is on Charles Taylor–makes sense–that’s what POTUS was focused on in African.
But the TK is almost certainly Turkey. The US had taken some Turkish soldiers captive that week and Libby and Cheney were heavily involved in negotiating their turnover. What you read as â€Citizen,†I’m fairly certain is Erdogan, the leader of Turkey.
But yes, most of those are Plame related.
ew, your interpretation makes the most sense especially if one reads the K- overscore as Turkey and M equals Ambassador. However, I would call your attention to the fact that the Turkish soldiers were released on Sunday (7-06).
http://www.hri.org/news/turkey…..lu.html#18
Also compare the script E (assuming it is Erdogan) to the block E below in “Evan Thomas on Imus.â€
Enough hieroglyphics for now…
Contempt of TNH
After hundreds of posts on the topic, which you allege to learn from and which you claim is your motive for coming here, that you don’t understand what EW’s purpose might be, and that you question EW’s motives, settles it for me. You’re a boil on the ass of this blog. You are in contempt of TNH. I move to bring contempt proceedings.
EW – I’m going through this post again. Question: Why would Libby ask Addington about a paper trail at the CIA? Let’s assume that the Vice President has seen all of the documents (and possibly more we do not know of). I see two reasons for Libby to have had this conversation with Addington.
1. Cheney has not told Libby that he (VP) has gained access to all the CIA documents. Cheney wants to keep that to himself, so he instructs Libby to ask Addington about various paper trails at CIA. Once Libby has enough information to connect the dots for Judy (this is how the CIA works, this is where you’d find out about how Wilson’s wife would send him out on a mission) there’s no risk that Libby will out Cheney.
2. Libby and Cheney are both reading the same documents (the VP has copies) and conspire together to use Addington as plausible deniability. Addington tells him what a CIA guy would know about paper trails and that conversation will be used if these two look like they’re getting caught.
Right now, I see a good case can be made for either. Because so many people think so highly of Libby’s character, the VP may have reasoned that Libby wouldn’t have liked spying on CIA operatives, so he kept it to himself.
Is the substance of the classified information Cheney â€asked†Bush to (insta-)declassify for Libby to blab to Miller relevent to Fitz’s case of perjury and obstruction? In other words, did it matter to Fitz whether Bush declassified the NIE or a covert agent’s identity?
I’m curious why Fitz didn’t drill down on this with Addington at trial or Libby during his grand jury testimony. Since the information had been declassified, I can see no reason why the question would not be asked unless it was immaterial to his case or he hadn’t recognized the issue. …just trying to wrap my head around it.
Boston1775,
I like your theories, but theory 1 does not seem likely. If your theory 1 was correct, then Cheney must be so pleased and surprised that Libby has been so reticent make a plea deal with Special Prosecuter Fitzgerald after Libby figured out he had helped â€unwittingly†to out one of our spies.
Boston
My theory is slightly different, and I’m not sure what Libby’s motive was (it may have been two-fold). In any case, I don’t assume that Cheney showed these documents to Libby; he may heve been shown them–but not kept them–by someone like David Shedd.
If his motive was to find a description of these documents so he could tell Judy waht to look for, knowing that it would reveal Plame was covert, then he’s just looking for all the pieces in the paper trail.
If is his motive is to figure out more about the 1999 trip, then he’s just trying to find out what should be there, since they can’t find documentation of thetrip.
I’ve almost finished Murray Waas’s book, and I’m struck, once again, with how much trouble those crooks in the WH and the Executive Office Bldg went to in regard to Wilson and Plame….the sheer man and woman hours, if you think of Cathy Martin, et al, spent, trying to keep the charade going. Even when Libby is testi-lying in the Grand Jury, he is still pushing the myth of WMD’s.
Plame was the big threat to those crooks (see above), and Wilson, as her helper. There are signifiers that can only lead to the conclusion that the truth, if revealed when it would have mattered…before the war started….would have led to Impeachment: lying to Congress and the American people. Any reasonable person would not deny the depth of crime committed, here. I wonder, in fact, that the VP, and Co. even allowed her and her husband to remain alive, but, maybe, it was just too late, once the truth was out. I still believe that this crime will be the one that the Administration will be convicted of, ultimately.
Cheney may keep a Nero Wolfe-size safe near him at all times, to protect his family jewels. But it’s hard to imagine his note on the newspaper surviving the shredder for very long if it were not intended as evidence of the spin – outing govt waste – that Cheney intended to use in order to cover his tracks.
Addington, the banal bureaucrat, describes the CIA paper trail discussion in terms of what sort of documentation might exist for a routine foreign assignment for a contractor. Presumably, that told Libby or his surrogates, such as Judy Miller, what to look for.
Libby, on the other hand, a senior partner-level white collar crime defense lawyer, in his public testimony casts himself in that discussion as a protector of govt. He’s looking into whether a govt contractor (Wilson) breached an obligation of confidentiality to keep info from his trips confidential. (Never mind that it wholly contradicted govt claims for why we went to war, at a cost of hundreds of billions of money and hundreds of thousands of lives.) Which is consistent with the spin in that Cheney newspaper note. [Again, it seems odd that none of this chatter is about a failure of the process or of the intel; it’s all about attacking a bureaucratic enemey.]
But Libby’s cloak of invisibility seems a bit tattered; what he’s doing has all the earmarks of classic oppo research, looking for reasons to justify an attack on Wilson and paint him as a long-time political enemy.
One imagines the OVP does that every day on large and small matters. Except that here, the stakes were the whole farm. Not the war in Iraq, but the then as yet unacknowledged role of the OVP in the White House generally, and the OVP’s role specifically in pushing the Iraq war on evidence only Kneepads Lieberman could find credible.
Perhaps the reason for Libby’s interest in A.Q. Kahn is the potential ties that Cheney had to the network as reported by WMR about a year ago. Valerie Plame, in her role at Brewster Jennings, may have been getting too close to the network for Cheney’s pleasure. Her outing essentially destroyed any further danger to the network from its biggest threat – Brewster Jennings.