Why Did Terry O’Donnell Tell Michael Isikoff What Cheney Refused to Tell Fitzgerald?

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It’s time, I think, to compare what Terry O’Donnell told Michael Isikoff about the declassification of what was purported to be the NIE with what Dick Cheney said to Patrick Fitzgerald.

First, here’s how Cheney responded to Fitzgerald when asked about insta-declassification.

When asked if he ever advised Libby that the President had decided to declassify the NIE, the Vice President declined to answer in view of his concerns about sharing potentially privileged conversations between himself and the President. It was clarified for the Vice President that he was not being asked to comment on the substance of his conversations with the President, but rather, only whether he ever told Libby that he had had such a discussion with the President. In response, Vice President Cheney repeated his assertion that he must refrain from commenting to the investigators about any private/or privileged conversations he may have had with the President.

And here’s what Terry O’Donnell, a fine upstanding member of the bar, told a mere reporter, under the cover of anonymity, at a time when O’Donnell’s client was feeling the heat.

A lawyer familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, told NEWSWEEK that the “president declassified the information and authorized and directed the vice president to get it out.” But Bush “didn’t get into how it would be done. He was not involved in selecting Scooter Libby or Judy Miller.” Bush made the decision to put out the NIE material in late June, when the press was beginning to raise questions about the WMD but before Wilson published his op-ed piece.

So Cheney, after having told Pat Fitzgerald to go fuck himself in the name of presidential communication privilege, trotted out his defense lawyer at a time when he needed to put out a nice cover story, and provided an answer.

I will have far more to say about this in the coming days. But for the moment, this little kabuki really exemplifies what this whole story is about.

34 replies
  2. MadDog says:

    I wonder if Cheney then told Bush about Cheney’s refusal to answer the NIE declassification questions, because Fitzgerald surely brought it up again when questioning Bush a month later on 24 June 2004 – per Murray Waas:

    President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president’s interview.

    Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said…

    Did Bush and Cheney then cook up a cover story before Bush’s interview that Bush himself did the declassification instead of Cheney?

    • emptywheel says:

      Yes. That’s one of the places I was going with this.

      Fitz stipulated that the NIE had been declassified in May 2006. So he had to have been told by someone that it had been. Well, he sure as hell wasn’t told by Cheney. So he must have been told by Bush.

      Now, the delectable thing is that means AT THE LEAST Bush is now complicit in Cheney’s NIE cover story business.

      Also note that if O’Donnell’s leak resembles reality AT ALL, it means he was leaking what Bush said, not what Cheney said. Well then, THAT’s going to be hard to declare privilege over, if you’ve told your colleague’s defense attorney what you said. And for that matter, who DID tell O’Donnell?

      See how fun this is going to get?!?!?!?

      • MadDog says:

        Man o’ man (or to be gender neutral *g*, person o’ person), what is the going bet that Cheney crawls into his bunker now to never again appear in daylight?

        I’m betting he and the Lizard will still refuse to bend before truth and instead start spinning even more lies about the lies Cheney has already been caught on.

        And Junya, he’s still so out of it that he’s bragging about picking up doggy-do as a motivational technique he’s particularly fond of.

    • stryder says:

      Was this a declassification of a portion of a NIE that was done to evaluate the situation with Irac or a special report that pertained only to Wilson ?
      Since it’s been declassified is it available?

      • Mary says:

        @11 etc.

        You really ought to read EW’s book, but it’s been a long time for me and I don’t remember all the details – she’s a font of knowledge on the whole thing.

        Here’s the deal, though. Wilson’s op piece had basically been to the effect that there is/was no reason to go to war with Iraq, they didn’t have WMDs, and he knew that the President was fibbifying in his State of the Union speech earlier where he had the “16 words” saying that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake from Niger.

        There is/was an NIE that had been massaged and massaged to make it as supportive of the Bush/Cheney decision to anhilate civilians in Iraq (something that always happens with war) as possible. Even so, it had some distinct references to the possible unreliability of “intel” about Iraq WMDs. The NIE is highly classified.

        So, before the Novak piece that outed Plame, there was a meeting between Bush and Cheney where supposedly Bush “insta-declassified” some or all of the NIE (it hasn’t ALL been released even yet IIRC), but made that “insta-declassification” a secret declassification (his staff and appointments, including Hadley and Rice etc. were supposedly working on trying to come up with some info from the the NIE to make public, given the public push at the time to know what was in the doc that led to the decision to go to war).

        The only members of Congress that got to see the NIE before the war AUMF vote were on the Intel committees, and in particular Durbin wanted very much to be able to share info in that NIE with Congress so that they could discuss the parts of the NIE that questioned whether Iraq had a WMD program. But bc of the classified nature of the NIE, he wasn’t able to mention any of that to anyone, including members of Congress getting ready to vote on sending American soldiers to their death.

        However, even though the classification was important enough to end Iraqi and American lives over, once Wilson’s op ed piece came out and Bush/Cheney’s ego was tweaked, suddenly the classification became of less importance that getting back at Wilson. So Bush apparently told Cheney they could go through and cherrypick out the “good” bits of the NIE that made their decision look correct, and use those to counter-attack Wilson’s allegations that there was no basis to go to war.

        EW has pretty much always claimed and supported that, as bad as Bush becoming leaker in chief is/sounds, that part of the story has always only been a cover story for the decision to also out Plame in the press to get back at Wilson. She has a lot of pieces of evidence that Cheney in particular seems to have used the story that he was letting Libby know to “get out” the classified (oops, insta,secretly, declassified) info as a cover for him telling Libby to burn Plame. To a lesser extent, there may be evidence of Bush being involved in that decision.

        So Libby has now “admitted” that, while the rest of the world (other than Bush, Cheney and Libby) believed all of the NIE to be classified, Libby met with Miller to covertly give her cherrypicked NIE info for her to plant in the NYT.

        I believe that assessment. [Going OT here – OTOH, I also belief that the NIE handling itself was a violation of the National Security Act and that at one point the Spec Pros may have thought the same. There was a lot of back and forth about NIE prior to the trial and one thing that was decided definitively was that the Spec Pros had a very narrow scope of what he could pursue and the NIE was not part of what his mandate allowed him to pursue. The Nat Sec Act prohibits the Exec branch from planting info without attribution in the domestic press for the purpose of influencing domestic opinion i.e., for domestic propaganda.]

        I don’t remember, how EW tied down the Isikoff leak to O’Donnell, but it makes a lot of sense.

        • Leen says:

          EW’s “Anatomy of Deceipt” is the bible of the Plame outing. Joe and Valerie Plame Wilson said something like “Marcy knows more about the investigation and trial than they do”

          Ew sure points out that Isikoff seems to have an agenda. Isikoff sure dug deep on the Clinton Bj’s not so much with insta declassifications. They have to have a date for when they declassified don’t they? That would seem like something that would have to be documented with one of the intelligence muckety mucks. Why was it that Fitz could not get a date verified?
          Do you think they insta-declassified or retroactively declassified?

          Was Hadley the one who pushed to put the 16 words back in Bush’s speech?

          And Durbin voted against the 2002 war resolution. One would think a few others would have followed his lead…since he was in the know. I rememeber being stunned by the timing of that vote. Just stunned that the Dems were allowing themselves to be so fucking manipulated.

          I kept thinking our Reps needed to be listening to Diane Rehm, Neil Conan and Amy Goodman who were all having folks like Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern, etc etc (people in the know) on seriously questioning the validity of the intelligence. Hell I even heard Robert McNamarra question the validity of the pre war intelligence on one of those shows .

          When El Baradei came out in early March and said the “niger documents are forgeries” I kept expecting the war train to halt.

  3. timbo says:

    Precisely. The VP responded that he couldn’t recall discussing things that he also, at the same time, claimed were privileged. How would he know that he had had privileged communications…if he could not recall having them? There is a very good point to make here that lawyers and politicians both conspired to cover up how the leak occurred. Oh, and I forgot to mention how Bill Woodward also decided it was in the best interest of the nation to obstruct the investigation as well. It was and is a sad indictment of how badly the moral compasses of the national administration and the general culture that surrounds it, a culture more interested in self-interest, and a personal thirst for power and connectedness, has ruined the ability of the nations intelligence services to have faith in the same system…again, the undermining of confidence in the whole system of government is greatly damaged by not following up legally in reining in the criminality that is demonstrated by the logic that anyone can hide behind a supreme leader (in this case, the Presidents so-called executive privilege of communications, the privilege of reporters to protect sources, etc).

  5. person1597 says:

    CHORUS:
    Big wheel keep on turning,
    Proud Mary keep on burning,
    Rolling, rolling, rolling on the river.

    It’s ok if you substitute “lake” for “river”… And Mary deserves a little recognition too. While we’re at it… how’s about some more bumpage in the people-thermometer numbers…(C’mon lurkers, You KNoW yOU WaNT tO!)

    Hear the fans roar!

  6. orionATL says:

    ew writes:

    “… president declassified the information and authorized and directed the vice president to get it out.” But Bush “didn’t get into how it would be done. He was not involved in selecting Scooter Libby or Judy Miller.” Bush made the decision to put out the NIE material in late June, when the press was beginning to raise questions about the WMD but before Wilson published his op-ed piece…”

    there are some things here that are not clear to me.

    was the NIE (national intelligence estimate) invoked here a document that named plame as a cia agent?

    and

    “…but before Wilson published his op-ed piece…”

    could this mean that releasing plame’s identity was a decision made previous to the joe wilson op-ed (a favorite theme of mine)?

    • MadDog says:

      …was the NIE (national intelligence estimate) invoked here a document that named plame as a cia agent?

      First, I can’t imagine that any individual Intelligence Community names ever are in an NIE. Not even at the “footnote” level.

      The only identification I suspect would be organization (i.e. CIA, State’s INR, DoD’s DIA, etc.) and then component-level within an organization (i.e. Winpac, CTC, etc.)

      Secondly, I can’t imagine that any covert intel person would ever be named in an NIE.

      Last, I doubt Valerie Plame was much involved with Iraq, and therefore the Iraq NIE at that stage of her CIA work. I could be wrong on this point, but I think not.

  7. earlofhuntingdon says:

    That leak could have come from Bush or Bush’s lawyer. Right. It seems far more likely that it came from Cheney’s lawyer. The “word” that O’Donnell got out purports to exonerate Cheney, because it casts him as only following Bush’s orders. That’s the only characterization that might legally exonerate Big Dick.

    That leak, however, means that O’Donnell either violated attorney-client privilege or he released information favorable to his client with permission from his client. Which means that Cheney either violated the president’s privilege or the leak issued on Bush’s approval.

    Either way, it seems that the “journalist” violated his responsibility to his readers by not disclosing the source of the leak and investigating why it might be a false story. Or worse, why it might be entirely accurate.

  8. emptywheel says:

    Several things.

    1) There are MANY reasons to believe the entire NIE story was at least partly, if not entirely, a cover-up for the leak itself. Libby had evidence he had been told to leak something. In 2004, it was a lot less risky to say they were leaking the NIE to Judy than Plame. But Judy reported that Plame was part of it as well, and that would merit all Libby’s concern about leaking classified info.

    2) O’Donnell’s comment is designed to cover up some holes in Libby’s story–notable the “before the oped” He has to spread a story that says the NIE was declassified before Libby leaked it to Judy in June, but also describe it in a way thta makes sense to explain his panic in July.

    3) Plame was not mentioned in the NIE. But it’s possible the NIE is a complete distraction. When it says “leak” or “declassify,” simply imagine Cheney’s replaced Plame with NIE.

  9. stryder says:

    According to wiki,for what it’s worth
    under Plamegate
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame

    A couple of days after Libby’s meeting with Miller, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told reporters, “We don’t want to try to get into kind of selective declassification” of the NIE, adding “We’re looking at what can be made available.”[32] A “sanitized version” of the NIE in question was officially declassified on July 18, 2003, ten days after Libby’s contact with Miller, and was presented at a White House background briefing on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.[33] The NIE contains no references to Valerie Plame or her CIA status, but the Special Counsel has suggested that White House actions were part of “a plan to discredit, punish or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson.”[34

  12. powwow says:

    Speaking of kabuki… Or, at any rate, more venality from loathsome liars ensconced in our Congress and Executive Branch…

    I don’t know whether this has been picked up on yet or not, but I thought I better alert everyone to the latest (White House-prompted?) move by Jeff Sessions (and Joe Lieberman and Kit Bond) on the sunsetting PATRIOT Act provisions – which I just chanced to catch Sessions (somewhat defensively) spouting about on C-SPAN late Thursday (the same day the House Judiciary Committee was due for its classified briefing about these provisions, which EW raised the alarm about).

    The latest move is Thursday’s introduction (and referral to the Judiciary Committee…) of a new, standalone bill, S. 2336, which Sessions described this way:

    By Mr. SESSIONS (for himself, Mr. Lieberman, and Mr. Bond):

    S. 2336. A bill to safeguard intelligence collection and enact a fair and responsible reauthorization of the 3 expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Improvements and Reauthorization Act; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

    Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I sent to the desk earlier legislation that is cosponsored by myself and Senator Joe Lieberman and Senator Kit Bond. In essence, it reauthorizes certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act which expire, if we do not act, on December 31 of this year. It is an important matter and I am proud to be working with the distinguished chairman of the committee that has oversight over homeland security, and Senator Bond, who is the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee and has worked on these issues for quite a long time.

    […]

    I know Chairman Leahy has worked hard, as we all did, to try to come up with a PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill in the Judiciary Committee that could attract strong bipartisan support. I commend him for that effort. He really worked at that. [Yeah – remember “Oh, boy…” when Feingold called them all out…] We worked together at that. However, the bill that eventually emerged from the Judiciary Committee does not meet the key test for any national security legislation: first, do no harm. The bill reported by the committee would make the jobs of our national security officials more difficult. The Obama administration has raised serious misgivings about the legislation that passed out of the committee.

    So, I think we need to make a fresh start. Let’s go back and take the bill we voted so strongly for before, add the minor things that need to be added to it to make it better–to deal with recent court of appeals rulings–and then let’s move that forward to make sure we get that done before the legislation expires on December 31.

    The bill we introduced today represents the best parts of the legislation that emerged from the Judiciary Committee, the parts almost everyone agreed upon. I will go into some of these details later but would just say that I am honored to be able to participate in the filing of this legislation with two fine cosponsors, Senators LIEBERMAN and KIT BOND.

    And there was this from Lieberman:

    The FBI has created and beefed up a counterterrorism division that I think has become the best in the world. And it is what makes the arrests that have occurred, a series of events, the ones Senator Sessions mentioned, the Zazi case–Najibullah Zazi, Afghan from birth, came here, permanent legal resident–this is the nightmare case–becomes radicalized, commits himself to Islamist extremism, goes over to Pakistan and connects with the highest levels, allegedly, of al-Qaida, receives training. One presumes–we do not know–he was directed or encouraged to do the things he came back here to do and started to work to put together, to acquire, according to the indictment, the material to explode several bombs in New York City, which would have done devastating damage.

    The slightest bit of evidence–I am not compromising anything, but you might say metaphorically, Zazi appeared on one screen, a shred of evidence about him, and it alarmed some of our law enforcement people, and all of the resources of our government–foreign intelligence, American intelligence, CIA, DNI, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, local law enforcement–came together with that little piece to build a picture that helped us to follow him and find him and stop him before he was able to do terrible damage in New York City. Do you know what else helped with that? The PATRIOT Act. It has helped in so many of these cases we stopped.

    This link includes the end of Sessions’s extended remarks, and the text of the new bill:

    http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2009_record&page=S10934&position=all

  13. readerOfTeaLeaves says:

    Scott McClellan, “What Happened”, p. 169:

    “The NIE on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was still not formally declassified for public consumption (although, as I was later to learn, it had been secretly declassified for the vice president’s use.” (referencing first two weeks of July 2003.)

    p. 258, McClellan relates the tale of TIME reporter Cooper’s email on 11 July 2003 not to ‘get too far out in front on the [Plame] story because (according to Karl Rove, Tenet had not approved Wilson’s trip and Wilson’s wife had sent her husband as some kind of rogue operation).

    p. 293, “[McClellan] was boarding Air Force One in Charlotte, [NC] in the early afternoon of April 6, 2006… The president was sitting in his onboard office… “What was he shouting out?” Bush asked us.

    He was referring to a question that Geoff Morell, an ABC News correspondent who covered the WH had yelled out to Bush on the tarmac a few moments earlier….Morrell was eager to get the president’s response to the day’s major breaking story, about a court filing related to the trial of Scooter Libby by Gen Counsel Patrick J Fitzgerald.

    p. 294, ‘Dan [Bartlett explained to GW Bush] that [Morell] was asking about Libby’s grand jury testimony and the leak of the NIE that Fitzgerald had just disclosed in legal procedings.

    “He [i.e., Libby] asserted you authorized the leak of part of the NIE,” [McClellan] added.

    “Yeah, I did,” Bush replied simply. The look on his face said he didn’t want to discuss the matter any further.

    “…[Rice had] been asked whether the NIE could be selectively declassified so that the American people could judge the [yellowcake and WMD] evidence for themselves, Rice had replied — in keeping with administration policy — that the White House “did not want to get into [a] kind of selective declassification,” though she added that we were looking into whether parts of it could be shared publicly by declassifying it through formal channels.

    According to Libby’s grand jury testimony at the very time Rice asserted that the [WH] opposed ‘selective declassification’, President Bush had actually engaged in such selective declassification himself. He’d authorized the use of the October NIE in the effort to discredit Joe Wilson’s attacks on the credibility of the administration…

    Now, with the simple words, “Yeah, I did,” the president was telling me that Libby’s testimony on the NIE — which I would soon learn about in greater detail — was accurate, and his and my statements about the sanctity of classified intelligence rang hollow.”

    Scott McClellan’s book was published 18 months ago. So far, mostly only *crickets.*

  15. spoonful says:

    By Cheney lying as he did, he was able to postpone the inevitable exposure of Bushco as the criminals they really are until after the 2004 election. To date, the only retribution to him was Patrick Fitzgerald saying there is a “cloud” over his office. Yeah, maybe, but that cloud sure helped Cheney remain in that office.

  16. pdaly says:

    On Page 4 of the Cheney interview, Cheney dances around the date and place where he may have first read Wilson’s July 2003 NYT op ed

    “either 7/6/03 , the day it was published, either by personally reading it in Wyoming, or during the return flight to Washington. The Vice President explained that he had traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming for the holiday weekend and cannot recall if he read the New York Times editorial when he was on the ground in Wyoming, or returning on the flight to Washington on 7/6/03, or when he got back to Washington, in which case he may not have read the editorial until the next day.”

    I’ll bet the WH email system would have helped Cheney to remember. Too bad all the emails went missing.

  17. Leen says:

    “At one point, Libby described a frustrated Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley ordering him to leak the National Intelligence Estimate that Libby had already leaked on Cheney’s orders. So why didn’t he tell Hadley that? Libby replied that the vice president was at the meeting, too, and if Cheney wasn’t telling Hadley, well, certainly, Libby wasn’t either.”

    Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7234975

  18. pdaly says:

    Not sure if this is significant but the FBI transcript states Cheney both tore out the 7/6/03 Wilson NYT op ed and that he cut out the op-ed. It doesn’t say he tore it and then trimmed it with scissors.

    Does this imply Cheney read the op-ed twice? Once in a fit of rage (sham rage, I’d say, since the work up on Wilson and Wilson’s wife had already taken place by June 2003), and once in a cool collected manner with a plan in mind

    Page 5:
    “Returning to the 7/6/03 New york Times editorial by Wilson, the Vice president recalled that he tore it out of the newspaper. When shown a copy of the Wilson editorial with handwritten notes on it, the Vice president acknowledged that the handwriting was his. Though he has no specific recollection of when he wrote the notes on the upper margin of the editorial, the Vice president believed it was probably contemporaneous with the time he read the editorial. He stated that it was his normal practice to make such notes and underline relevant or important portions of news articles at the same time he read them, so he suspects that was the case with this article.”

    [snip]

    Page 6

    “Regarding the editorial which he cut out of the paper, Vice President Cheney advised that it was his normal practice to carry such documents around with him for a few days and then place them in his “out” box when he was finished with them. He cannot recall if he discussed the underlined portions of the editorial with anyone, but he probably did. After he placed the article in his “out” box, he does not know whatever happened to it, nor did he ask for any specific treatment or follow-up with respect to his handwritten questions on the newspaper.” [my bold]

    Do you suppose the NYT has printing presses on the east and west coasts so that it does not have to fly its papers too far each day? If yes, then testing the paper and ink could show the origination of this particular newspaper clipping.

    If it is east coast paper and ink (or Cheney fears it possible for the FBI to determine that it is east coast paper and ink), then Cheney would need wave his hands a bit when deciding where and when he possessed that damn Joe Wilson article.

    To claim that he read it ‘as if for the first time’ while on AirForce Two or when back in D.C. would be one way to protect himself from perjury.

  20. WilliamOckham says:

    Argggh! Why does this stuff always come out when I’m out of town with limited internet access? Not sure when I’ll be back here, but it’s time to dust of the “what happened to the OVP emails from the first weekend of Oct 2003?” analysis. Hint: lots of circumstantial evidence somebody deleted them and covered their tracks.

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