[NYTr] Cheney, Bush named by McClellan as involved in outing Plame

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

CNN via Political Ticker - Nov 20, 207
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/11/20/ex-aide-points-finger-at-bush-for-deceit-in-cia-leak-scandal/


Ex-aide: Bush, Cheney involved in misleading media about Plame leak

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The White House is denying a claim in a new book by
former White House spokesman Scott McClellan that top administration
officials — including President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney —
were involved in his "unknowingly" passing along false information
about the involvement of Karl Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the
leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Amid a burgeoning controversy about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's
name, McClellan went to the White House podium in October 2003 and told
reporters that Rove, the president's top political adviser, and Libby,
Cheney's chief of staff, had not been involved.

"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes in his new
book, "What Happened," which is scheduled to be released in April. "I
had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest
ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so:
Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the
president himself."

Reacting to the release of an excerpt from McClellan's book, which was
posted Tuesday on the Web site of the book's publisher, PublicAffairs,
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said, "The president has not misled
his spokespeople, nor would he."

The portion of McClellan's book released by PublicAffairs did not give
any specifics about the actions of Bush, Cheney, Libby, Rove or
then-Chief of Staff Andrew Card with regard to McClellan's
dissemination of the false information.

There was no immediate comment from McClellan, who served as White
House press secretary from July 2003 until April 2006.

In the excerpt, McClellan writes that "the most powerful leader in the
world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore
credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White House briefing room podium
in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two
weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White
House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby."

In March, Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for
lying to investigators and a federal grand jury about his contacts with
reporters concerning Wilson, the wife of Joe Wilson, a former U.S.
ambassador who had accused the Bush administration of misrepresenting
intelligence on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Just before Libby was to report to a federal prison in July to serve 30
months behind bars, Bush commuted his sentence, although the president
stopped short of a full pardon and Libby still had to pay a $250,000
fine.

Rove, who left the White House staff at the end of August, was never
charged in the case. But his lawyer has acknowledged he was one of two
sources cited by syndicated columnist Bob Novak, who first reported
that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA in the summer of 2003.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has since
acknowledged that he was Novak's original source for the information
that Wilson worked at the CIA, although he insisted the disclosure was
not deliberate and he did not know at the time she was a covert agent.

Because deliberately leaking a CIA operative's name can be a federal
crime, a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed to
investigate the case. However, no one was charged in connection with
the leak itself; Libby's charges resulted from statements he made
during the investigation.


                               ***

Consortium News - Nov 21, 2007


Bush's Plame-gate Cover-up

By Robert Parry


In early fall 2003, George W. Bush joined in what appears to have been
a criminal cover-up to conceal the role of his White House in exposing
the classified identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

That is the logical conclusion one would draw from a new statement by
then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan when it is put into a
mosaic with previously known evidence.

McClellan says President Bush was one of five high-ranking officials
who caused McClellan to lie to the public in clearing Bush’s political
adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I.
Lewis Libby of any responsibility for the leak of Plame’s employment as
an undercover intelligence officer.

“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on
his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to
find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” McClellan said. “So I stood
at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the
klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated
two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter
Libby.

“There was one problem. It was not true.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the
highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my
doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of
staff, and the President himself.”

McClellan’s comments were part of a press release from his publisher
regarding McClellan’s memoir, which is scheduled to reach the book
stores next April.

Though the press release didn’t add more details about Bush’s role,
earlier evidence already had implicated Bush in the outing of Plame
after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had gone
public in July 2003, disclosing that Bush had used false information to
frighten the American people about Iraq’s alleged nuclear program.

To discredit Wilson, Bush administration officials began telling
reporters about Plame’s CIA job to suggest that an early 2002
investigation that Wilson undertook for the CIA into reports about Iraq
seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger was the result of nepotism.

Though several reporters balked at blowing Plame’s covert identity,
right-wing columnist Robert Novak revealed it in a column on July 14,
2003. It was later learned that Novak was relying on information from
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and his friend, Karl Rove.
Libby and other White House officials had been peddling the same
information to other journalists.

At the time, the smear campaign represented a classic dirty trick by
Bush’s White House, which was becoming famous for using hard-ball
tactics against political adversaries. However, this time, the
collateral damage included the destruction of a sensitive intelligence
network that Plame managed.

CIA Protest

The case took another serious turn in September when CIA officials,
angered by the damage done to Plame’s spy network, struck back. They
lodged a complaint with the Justice Department that the leaks may have
amounted to an illegal exposure of a CIA officer.

But the initial investigation was under the control of Attorney General
John Ashcroft, considered a right-wing Bush loyalist. So, the President
and other White House officials confidently denied any knowledge of the
leak. Bush even vowed to fire anyone who had leaked the classified
material.

“The President has set high standards, the highest of standards, for
people in his administration,” McClellan said on Sept. 29, 2003. “If
anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer
be in this administration.”

Bush personally announced his determination to get to the bottom of the
matter.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it
is,” Bush said on Sept. 30. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has
got any information inside our administration or outside our
administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the
information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are
true.”

Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone
with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he
had authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger
uranium issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be
given to reporters.

In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson
scheme got started – since he was involved in starting it – he uttered
misleading public statements to conceal the White House role.

Also, since the various conspirators knew that Bush already was in the
know, they would have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is
what they did. In early October, press secretary McClellan said he
could report that political adviser Karl Rove and National Security
Council aide Elliott Abrams were not involved in the Plame leak.

That comment riled Libby, who feared that he was being hung out to dry.
Libby went to his boss, Dick Cheney, and complained that “they’re
trying to set me up; they want me to be the sacrificial lamb,” Libby’s
lawyer Theodore Wells later said.

Cheney scribbled down his feelings in a note to press secretary
McClellan: “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy the
Pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of
incompetence of others.”

In the note, Cheney initially was ascribing Libby’s sacrifice to Bush
but apparently thought better of it, crossing out “the Pres” and
putting the clause in a passive tense. On Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan added
Libby to the list of officials who have “assured me that they were not
involved in this.”

So, Libby had a motive to lie to the FBI when he was first interviewed
about the case. He had gone to the mat with his boss to get his name
cleared in the press, meaning it would make little sense to then admit
involvement to FBI investigators.

“The White House had staked its credibility on there being no White
House involvement in the leaking of information about Ms. Wilson,” a
federal court filing later noted. For his part, Libby began claiming
that he had first learned about Plame’s CIA identity from NBC’s
Washington bureau chief Tim Russert after Wilson had gone public.

This White House cover-up might have worked, except in late 2003,
Ashcroft recused himself because of a conflict of interest, and Deputy
Attorney General James Comey picked Patrick Fitzgerald – the U.S.
Attorney in Chicago – to serve as special prosecutor.

Fitzgerald pursued the investigation far more aggressively. Over the
next three-plus years, the Plame-gate affair would become a
slow-growing infection eating away at White House credibility, despite
the best efforts of the President’s political and media allies to
confuse the issue or to shift the blame onto Wilson.

In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted Libby on five counts of lying to
federal investigators and obstructing an investigation. Libby was
convicted on four of five counts in March 2007 and sentenced to 30
months in jail, but Bush commuted Libby’s sentence to spare him any
jail time. That also eliminated any incentive for Libby to turn state’s
evidence against Bush and Cheney.

Now, however, McClellan has become the first White House insider to
acknowledge the original lies that senior administration told about the
Plame-gate affair – and to put the President in the middle of the
cover-up.

The next question might reasonably be: what are the Democrats in
Congress going to do about it?

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "Time to Apologize to
Wilson/Plame" or our new book, Neck Deep.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, "Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush," was written with two of his
sons.]