You think maybe someone should tell Republicans that the guy who outed and then called Valerie Plame "Fair Game" is not their most credible person to sow pout-rage over the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate torture?
I tried to say nothing when news of Novak’s announcement came. I had nothing good to say, though my own father died of brain cancer and I empathize with Novak and his family for that–it is a horrible way to die, particularly for someone whose identity was tied with his intellect.
But I couldn’t resist a snark on twitter:
Cue Woodward claiming he got deathbed confession about what really happened during the 7/9/03 conversation Novak & Libby hid.
Perhaps Woodward will–as he did with Reagan’s CIA Director and Iran-Contra co-conspirator, Bill Casey, who also died of brain cancer–make dubious claims about deathbed conversations with Novak.
But the fact is that Novak died with most of his role in the Plame outing still shrouded in secrecy. That’s partly true because of the significant changes in Novak’s story over time. All of the following Novak claims changed as the stage of the investigation suited:
On all those details, Novak’s story changed repeatedly. And then there’s one I’ve never heard anyone ask: from whom Novak got the talking point, "The White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, and not just Vice President Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it," a talking point that shows up in Libby’s note from Cheney on Plame’s identity and may appear in Judy Miller’s notes.
Yet today, most journalists assume Novak’s final answers–the ones that eventually shielded Rove and Libby and Cheney from most consequences–were truthful, and believe they know what happened.
Since there is still some confusion over the material from Dick Cheney’s interview with Patrick Fitzgerald that, DOJ says, cannot be made public, I decided to provide a more detailed description of what was in the interview with handy links for any media outlets that are too busy selling access to lobbyists to do their own work. What follows are the page-specific references in the DOJ FOIA response to material that appears in the FBI report of the interview. That document is 28 pages long, total, so this is a pretty good outline of what’s in the interview. I treat information that appears on the same page together, so a couple of these descriptions cover a number of separate issues raised in the filing.
Vice President’s discussion of the substance of a conversation he had with the Director of the CIA concerning the decision to send Ambassador Wilson on a fact-finding mission to Niger in 2002. (Page 3, lines 15-17, 21-28); The name of a covert CIA employee (Page 3)
As you recall, Libby first learned of Valerie Plame’s covert identity from a conversation with Dick Cheney some time during the week of June 9, 2003. He recorded his conversation with Cheney in a note which was a central focus of Libby’s grand jury testimony. When asked, Libby said Cheney may have learned of Valerie’s status from Tenet. And, when Fitzgerald was questioning Libby about Cheney’s notations on Joe Wilson’s op-ed, Libby explained that Cheney had asked Tenet earlier in June or July about the CIA sending ambassadors to gather information.
Q. When the Vice President asked you the question, "have they done this type of thing before," question to that effect, Vice — did the Vice President ever ask you has the Agency ever done this sort of thing before where an ambassador was sent out?
A. I think he may have at some point.
Q. And what did you do in response to that question, if anything?
A. I don’t know if I did anything particularly about it. I think he may have taken it up with, with Tenet rather than asking me.
[snip]
Q. What did he talk to the official that you do know he talked about?
A. About, you know, how this came about. I have a sense that he had talked to Tenet or somebody about, about that.
Q. And what time frame was that?
A. Summer, June, July, something like that.
In other words, this conversation appears to be the conversation Cheney had during the week of June 9 in which he learned of Plame’s identity. That makes the reference to "a covert CIA employee’s identity" all the more interesting. While that might be a reference to Valerie’s colleague who first suggested sending Joe, it might well be a reference to Valerie herself. While we know the CIA still wants to hide details of Plame’s career, it would be the height of absurdity if CIA tried to prevent us from seeing Fitzgerald ask Cheney about Plame.
In any case, DOJ is probably attempting to prevent us from learning of Cheney’s account of how he learned of Plame’s identity before he passed it on to Scooter Libby.
The WaPay2PlayPo’s Jeffrey Smith is usually a much better reporter than this. In his report on DOJ’s latest attempt to keep the materials from Cheney’s Fitzgerald interview secret–published right under a link to all the evidence released in the trial–Smith "reports,"
A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration’s public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations.
Which, if you take "new evidence" to mean "a new list summarizing many of the events described in evidence introduced two years ago at the Libby trial," would be factually correct.
But this isn’t.
Barron also listed as exempt from disclosure Cheney’s account of his requests for information from the CIA about the purported purchase; Cheney’s discussions with top officials about the controversy over Bush’s mention of the uranium allegations in his 2003 State of the Union speech; and Cheney’s discussions with deputy I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, press spokesman Ari Fleischer, and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. "regarding the appropriate response to media inquiries about the source of the disclosure" of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity. [my emphasis]
Smith gets that last bit from this language in the filing.
Vice President’s recollection of discussions with Lewis Libby, the White House Communications Director, and the White House Chief of Staff regarding the appropriate response to media inquiries about the source of the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a CIA employee.
Now, the language used there–"the source of the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity"–ought to be a pretty big clue to Smith that this conversation happened after Plame’s identity was actually made public. That is, after July 14, 2003, which happened to be Ari Fleischer’s last day, meaning it’s pretty clear that Ari Fleischer (who was White House Spokesperson, not Communications Director) isn’t the guy referenced here. But you don’t really need clues like that to figure out that Smith is wrong here. Had Smith only clicked that link above his article and actually looked at the evidence released at trial, he would have seen the famous "meat grinder note," a note Cheney used as a talking point document for conversations with Andy Card (correctly identified by Smith as Chief of Staff) and Dan Bartlett (in his role as "White House Communications Director," the position listed in the filing) in early October 2003 to get them to force Scottie McClellan to exonerate Scooter Libby publicly.
Has to happen today.
Call out to key press saying same thing about Scooter as Karl.
Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy
the Presthat was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others.
As I mentioned, DOJ did one crappy-ass job of trying to give Emmet Sullivan a better reason they can’t turn over Dick Cheney’s interview materials than that Jon Stewart would embarrass poor Dick. They trot out the same canard about needing cooperation from high level officials in the future. But there two big problems with their argument.
The Release of a Late-Investigation Interview of the Target of that Investigation Will Hurt Early Investigative Cooperation
First, they’re basically forced to argue that they won’t be able to get information early in an investigation if VPs and the like worry that their interviews with Special Counsels will eventually be made public.
For example, obtaining information through interviews early in an investigation “often assists law enforcement agents in obtaining important background information,” “help[s] law enforcement investigators determine where to concentrate or focus the investigation,” and may “obviate the need to convene a grand jury at all or circumscribe the focus of the grand jury’s inquiry.” Breuer Decl. ¶ 6. “A law enforcement investigation based upon interviews subject to an expectation of confidentiality also benefits from senior officials more inclined to provide identifiable leads, name percipient witnesses, offer credibility assessments of the accuser or other witnesses, and even articulate inferences, insight or hunches that can be invaluable to a law enforcement investigator.”
But of course this interview wasn’t about "obtaining important background information" about "where to concentrate or focus the investigation" that might "obviate the need to convene a grand jury." Neither Bush nor Cheney gave an interview at that early stage of the process. Rather, this was an interview conducted while there was an active grand jury, at a time when all major witnesses save journalists had already been interviewed.
This was an interview of the ultimate target of the investigation, not a mere bystander.
Meanwhile, the DOJ wants to pretend that a grand jury investigation of top White House officials might thwart an investigation.
Additionally, if a senior White House official were to require the investigators to go through the grand jury process, “[s]uch a decision could impose considerable practical difficulties and burdens upon investigators and prosecutors that at best could prolong investigations and at worst thwart investigations.”
Tell that to Karl Rove and his five grand jury appearances. Turdblossom couldn’t get enough of the grand jury (and he’s been before a grand jury since). Read more →
Mary pointed me to DOJ’s latest attempt to prevent CREW from accessing the materials relating to Cheney’s interview with Fitzgerald and the FBI. I’ll get into what a load of crap the DOJ argument is later. But first, I want to lay out what the FOIA declarations say about the Cheney interview itself.
First, the date. Rather than early June, as previously assumed, the CIA declaration included with this document reveals the documents were dated May 8, 2004–a month earlier in the investigation that we had known (and therefore a month and a half earlier than Bush’s interview).
Otherwise, the declarations reveal the following contents of the interview:
Now, as I’ll get into when I discuss what a load of crap this is, almost every single bit of this was already revealed at trial. Read more →
As BayStateLibrul pointed out in threads, SCOTUS denied the Wilsons cert today in their lawsuit against Dick Cheney and his band of leakers. As bmaz points out, the news is unsurprising.
The die was cast by John Bates’ exploitation (and to some extent contortion) of glaring and gaping holes in the pleading by Plame/Wilson. It is a shame, but especially in light of the subsequent Iqbal decision, there is no way to credibly call this a cover up. This case was over when it started.
But, as RawStory points out, it means Valerie Wilson will never get her day in court against the men who deliberately ruined her career in government service because she and her colleagues had proof of the Administration’s lies.
So unless Bob Novak has an illness-induced desire to come clean about what really happened in the leak–including the real details of the long-hidden conversation Novak had with Scooter Libby on July 9, 2003 (probably including Plame’s name and exact role in Counter-Proliferation, as well as still-classified details from Joe Wilson’s report to the CIA), or unless Scooter Libby gets tired of being a quiet felon, the only way we’ll find out the rest of the details of the case will be if Judge Sullivan orders Cheney’s FBI interview materials released. And even then, I think they won’t surprise any long-time reader of this site, though they might surprise the traditional press.
In that, the CIA Leak case feels like the rest of the Bush-Cheney tenure: it left the country far less safe, but no one will ever be held accountable for it.
Look on the bright side, though. Scooter Libby hasn’t gotten his inevitable Republican-as-felon radio show, yet.
Okay, now for the Hadley weirdness revealed in the White House email searches revealed in a document turned over to CREW.
On the morning of October 15, Karl Rove testified before the Plame grand jury for appearance number 3. He justified testifying to Fitzgerald by handing over the email Rove purportedly sent Hadley on July 11, 2003, just after he leaked Plame’s identity to Matt Cooper.
Either that day (the file searches appear to be dated October 15) or the next, someone did a series of searches, apparently looking for Hadley’s emails; these searches appear on pages 47-49. Here are the searches in the order of which they were last opened (here’s the spreadsheet if you want to play along).
| Search | File | Last opened | Time | File size |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 16, 2004_MA.pst | 10/16/04 | 2:12p | 1753302016 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 16, 2004_MA(2).pst | 10/16/04 | 3:26p | 1751270400 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 16, 2004_MA(3).pst | 10/16/04 | 4:51p | 1751270400 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 16, 2004_MA(4).pst | 10/16/04 | 6:17p | 1751270400 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 16, 2004_MA(5).pst | 10/16/04 | 7:07p | 1751270400 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 16, 2004_MA(6).pst | 10/16/04 | 8:15p | 1751270400 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 16, 2004_MA(7).pst | 10/16/04 | 8:22p | 270222336 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 23, 2004_MA(2).pst | 10/23/04 | 2:18a | 1865040896 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 23, 2004_MA(3).pst | 10/23/04 | 4:01a | 1751270400 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 23, 2004_MA(4).pst | 10/23/04 | 5:13a | 1751270400 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 23, 2004_MA(5).pst | 10/23/04 | 5:51a | 958940160 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Saturday, October 23, 2004_MA.pst | 11/4/04 | 12:46p | 1751270400 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Friday, October 22, 2004_MA(2).pst | 3/9/05 | 5:34p | 488177664 |
| 10-1504 HadleyInitial Search | 1st Hadley Results.pst | 3/9/05 | 5:34p | 38944768 |
| 10-1504 Hadley | NSC_2004_Friday, October 22, 2004_MA.pst | 3/9/05 | 5:34p | 1754644480 |
| 10-1504 HadleyInitial Search | Hadley Final.pst | 3/10/05 | 3:00a | 39166978 |
So here’s what appears to have happened.
Either the same day Rove testified or the next day, someone started doing searches for Hadley’s email. On that day they appear to have run the search at least 7 times, from 2:12 PM to 8:22 PM, until the file size had been shrunk significantly. That Friday, October 22, 2004, at 5:34 PM, someone did two more searches. Then, in the middle of the night that night (that is, from 2 AM to almost 5 AM on a Friday-Saturday night), someone did five more searches; the first one of these was opened again on November 4. The last of these searches–like the last of the searches saved on October 16, 2004, was significantly smaller than the rest of the searches done that day.
Then, finally, someone did a search under a slightly new name: HadleyInitial Search. We don’t know when this search was saved–the two runs of the search are titled simply 1st Hadley Results and Hadley Final. These files were both much smaller than any of the earlier searches.
On October 28, 2004 someone appears to have done a whole slew of searches in the NSC files, many of them date-specific (these aren’t in the spreadsheet, but appear in the PDF). Read more →
William Ockham made a really important discovery. One of the files turned over to CREW has search files from September and November 2004 relating to the Plame investigation. Look at pages 44-46 for Rove and Cooper searches and page 49 for Plame Wilson Novak searches.
Of particular interest, here are the days on which they were apparently searching for Plame Wilson Novak emails dated:
May 1, 2003
May 9, 2003
May 16, 2003
May 27, 2003
June 2, 2003
June 23, 2003
June 30, 2003
July 7, 2003
July 12, 2003
July 24, 2003
August 8, 2003
August 13, 2003
August 27, 2003
August 29, 2003
October 9, 2003
Now, I’m not entirely sure what these dates mean, but my guess is they were a search run overnight on September 23, 2004 for appearances of Plame, Wilson, or Novak on particular dates, and the search results came back the next morning–September 24, 2004. That timing makes sense–it was when Patrick Fitzgerald had strong suspicions that Novak had talked to people in the White House about Plame. And, it was certainly after Fitz developed suspicions he wasn’t getting all the email (he asked Libby about the dearth of email in his name in March 2004).
So that timing makes sense. As do most of the dates searched. On June 2, OVP was panicking about a Walter Pincus article. The June 23 date is when Novak probably set up his meeting with Armitage and its the day Libby first leaked Plame’s name to Judy. July 7, 2003 is the day when OVP decided to more aggressively leak Plame’s name, and also a day when Novak was purportedly reporting on his Frances Fragos Townsend story, almost certainly with OVP. July 12 is when the White House started leaking Plame’s name in anticipation of the Novak article, which was on the wire. The later days are all plausible dates of conversation with Novak. (Though note, they don’t include July 8 or 9, 2003, when we know Novak spoke with Rove and Libby respectively about the Wilsons.
But May 1, 2003?
Before the Nicholas Kristof column came out? The day before Wilson and Kristof first spoke?
We’ve been laughing about this in threads, but I wanted to share the joke(s). Greg Sargent got the letter from the CIA telling the Archives that Dick Cheney can’t have his propaganda.
As you are aware, a request for Mandatory Declassification Review is governed by Executive Order 12958, as amended, which was signed and executed by the President on March 25, 2003. Under section 3.5.(a)(3) of that Executive Order, a document is excluded from Mandatory Declassification Review if that document contains information that is the subject of pending litigation. This provision ensures that the Mandatory Declassification Review process is not used to disrupt simultaneous litigation proceedings that are already pending. In researching the information in question, we have discovered that it is currently the subject of pending FOIA litigation (Bloche v. Department of Defense, Amnesty International v. Central Intelligence Agency). Therefore, the requested document, which contains this information, is excluded from Mandatory Declassification Review.
There are two reasons I’ve been laughing my ass off for the last few hours.
First, those FOIAs? The CIA says Dick can’t have his propaganda until two liberal entities–some experts in bioethics wanting more details on the use of doctors in torture, and Amnesty International and Center for Constitutional Rights looking for more information on extraordinary rendition and ghost detainees–resolve their demand for these documents. But guess what? Cheney’s propaganda documents aren’t the only things that would be responsive under FOIA! So would the IG report, particularly the parts that describe how the CIA’s own IG didn’t think torture was all that effective and those that discuss the use of psychologist-contractors to conduct torture. So for Dick to get his documents, he may have to wait for these do-gooder torture opponents get a whole load of proof of just how ineffective and unethical Cheney’s torture program was.
I just can’t wait to see Dick Cheney asking the Center for Constitutional Rights nicely to give him his little propaganda documents.
And what’s better? That EO the CIA cites, saying it cannot turn over these documents? EO 12958, as amended? That amendment is EO 13292–an amendment Dick had Bush sign on March 25, 2003, just at the beginning of the Iraq War. It’s a special amendment in Dick’s little bureaucratic evil, because it’s the basis that Dick used to claim he could insta-declassify the identity of a CIA spy and have it leaked to Judy Miller! Read more →