Yesterday I mentioned that Larry Littwin had been released from a gag order and was now free to testify at the Miers' confirmation hearings (for some context, see this post). I asked Tracy Schmaler, spokesperson for the minority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, whether any decision had been made on whether to call Littwin to testify. She told me that "the committee is aware of the allegations [regarding Miers' and Littwin] and is conducting its own investigation."
--Josh Marshall
Knight-Ridder ...
Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers' law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.
Kerik?
--Josh Marshall
There is a flood of articles appearing now on the conclusion of the Fitzgerald investigation and the accompanying guessing game about just how it will end. But with so much at stake right now and so many of the leaks with very immediate tactical significance, reading these articles can become less a matter of the taste of the dish than trying to figure the ingredients and recipe behind it.
Like this article on Scooter Libby in Friday's Los Angeles Times.
According to the article, Libby was something only slightly less than obsessed with Joe Wilson. Not only was he part of the original operation to push back against Wilson and discredit him. As the article describes it, long after the Plame matter had evolved into a full-fledged criminal probe by an outside investigator, Libby continued compiling detailed records of Wilson's public statements. He marked up a copy of Wilson's book highlighting what he regarded as false or anti-Cheney passages. And even though he was already at the center of an investigation he continued to recommend mounting new anti-Wilson press operations well into 2004.
That possibility only ended in April 2004, says the article, when Dan Bartlett ordered White House staff to stop engaging Wilson, figuring that more White House attacks on Wilson would only bring more press focus to his charges.
Now, I don't doubt that there's a good deal of truth in this story. Indeed, the point in what I'm about to say is not to cast doubt on the accuracy of anything in it. But if you read the LAT story closely you see that the authors were able to interview multiple White House staffers (seemingly all or most former ones) and were apparently provided with a sheaf of documents illustrating Libby's near-obsessive Wilson-monitoring.
If I read the article right it seems they were provided with a copy of this dossier ...
The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and television transcripts of Wilson's statements that were divided into categories, such as "political ties" or "WMD."The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney "a lying son of a bitch." It also highlighted Wilson's answers to questions from television journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.
The intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan or its rationale, former aides said.
So, a lot of access to former White House staffers in on key meetings and actual documentary evidence of what Scooter was up to, what his efforts produced. That sort of access ain't easy to come by and it's seldom accidental.
This certainly seems like an attempt to pin this whole thing on Libby.
Leaks like that won't affect Fitzgerald; they're not intended to. They're aimed at shaping perceptions of indictments if they come down. If Libby and Rove are indicted, then, yes Rove got caught up in it. And it shouldn't have happened. But the whole unfortunate mess was spawned by the bitter Libby-Wilson antagonsim. It wasn't something that involved the whole White House team, not something characteristic of how it functions.
That would be the argument.
And it's one everyone should have their eyes out for, since the key players in the White House appear to have decided that Libby is already a fatality in this battle.
Before leaving you, one other point to consider. Note Bartlett's alleged instructions to back off from Wilson in April 2004. Keep that in mind when considering possible coordination between the White House and the majority staff on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence while it was finishing up the Iraq WMD report in the summer of 2004. We'll return to that subject later.
--Josh Marshall
Earlier today, World Net Daily reported what it called a big development in the Miers story. That development involved a guy named Larry Littwin, a fellow who's been under a gag order and prevented from talking about his role in a scandal that took place on Harriet Miers' watch at the Texas State Lottery Commission.
Littwin wanted to investigate GTECH. And for that Miers allegedly fired him. For more detail on what this scandal was all about see this piece by James Ridgeway in the Village Voice.
According to WND, the Senate Judiciary Committee successfully pressured GTECH, the Rhode Island company which ran the state lottery.
The sourcing on the original story seem a little opaque to me. So I spoke to sources up on the Hill who confirmed that this is in fact true, that GTECH has agreed to allow Littwin to testify.
Late Update: The original story at WND was written by Jerome Corsi, co-author of last year's notorious Swift Boat book, Unfit for Command. Like I said, I wanted to verify myself.
--Josh Marshall
Yesterday I told you how the jackals at Sinclair Broadcasting (they of last year's attempted hour-long Swift Boat informercial) have now resorted to suing Jon Lieberman, Sinclair's former DC Bureau Chief whom they fired after he accused them of pushing "biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election."
The suit is a part of a year-long campaign of dingbat harassment of Lieberman by Sinclair, including attempts to deny him unemployment benefits and a failed attempt to block him from receiving a journalism award.
Yesterday's post sparked a flood of emails asking how readers can support Lieberman, whether he has a legal defense fund taking contributions and other related questions.
The simple answer is, I have no idea. I should also note that I'm not in touch with Lieberman. And I neither want to nor am I in a position to raise money on his behalf.
The last I've heard on this comes from an article in the Baltimore Sun. Reports the Sun: "The lawsuit says Leiberman, now a producer at America's Most Wanted, owes Sinclair almost $17,000 in so-called liquidated damages, equal to a percentage of his salary had he served out his contract." When they contacted Lieberman he hadn't yet been served with the suit and said he'd only heard about in news reports.
"I just want to get on with my life," Lieberman told the Sun.
Should we hear of any organized effort to assist Lieberman, we will of course pass on the information.
--Josh Marshall
I never know what to make of these things. But this morning I got yet another press release from intrade, a company that runs a futures markets on hot political questions, and others, I'm sure, too ...
Miers confirmation contract drops in heavy morning tradingAt approximately 8:30 EST this morning traders monitoring the Harriet Miers confirmation process becan selling aggressively contracts betting against her confirmation - probability drops from 62 to 20 in heavy trading.
"The Miers confirmation contract was trading at 92, meaning a 92% probability of confirmation last week. Early this week the contract slid to 64 then this morning with no warning droped to 20 in heavy trading", says Mike Knesevitch Communication Director at Intrade.
Here's the latest quote.
--Josh Marshall
Target letters, from the NYT: "Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have been advised that they may be in serious legal jeopardy, the lawyers said, but only this week has Mr. Fitzgerald begun to narrow the possible charges. The prosecutor has said he will not make up his mind about any charges until next week, government officials say."
--Josh Marshall
Murray Waas in National Journal: "New York Times reporter Judith Miller told the federal grand jury in the CIA leak case that she might have met with I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby on June 23, 2003 only after prosecutors showed her Secret Service logs that indicated she and Libby had indeed met that day in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, according to attorneys familiar with her testimony."
--Josh Marshall
Rep. George Miller (D-CA) seems to have found a way to force a floor vote in the House of Representatives on whether or not to overturn the President Bush's Gulf Coast Wage Cut. They've got fifteen days to bring it to a vote. And if it comes to a vote, a clear majority of the House is for overturning what the president did. Rep. Miller explains more details here.
--Josh Marshall
For shame.
Remember way back when (okay, only a year ago), Sinclair Broadcasting decided to run an anti-Kerry Swift Boat infomercial on its stations across the country. A popular outcry and a lot of truly spontaneous grassroots activism made them pull back, at least part of the way. But a big rock rolled into the road for them when their DC Bureau Chief, one Jonathan Lieberman took a stand, gave an interview to the Balitmore Sun, and called the effort "biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election ... For me, it's not about right or left -- it's about what's right or wrong in news coverage this close to an election."
The headline of our post, a year ago almost to the day, ran "Soon to join the jobless?" I make no claim for prescience when I tell you he was immediately fired.
Sinclair has continued to harass Lieberman ever since. And now comes word the sharks at Sinclair are suing Lieberman for giving the unauthorized interview. "Sinclair," this article reports, "is also asking the court to order an accounting of the wages Leiberman earned working for another news outlet after Sinclair fired him."
Now this is a while back, a time a lot of folks would like to forget. And most everybody's moved on. But clearly Lieberman is still stuck with the consequences of doing the right thing when it counted. By the letter of the law and the contract, Sinclair may have a case. But this guy's deserves everyone's support.
--Josh Marshall
Regional FEMA chief turns on Brownie, spills emails. It's even worse than you thought.
--Josh Marshall
So many leaks are coming fast and furious now in the Plame/Fitzgerald case that it's hard to know sometimes where they're coming from or what the leakers were trying to achieve. Perhaps the best example of this was yesterday's Daily News story by Tom DeFrank, which provided the first clear evidence that President Bush has known who the culprits were from the beginning and possibly failed to disclose that to Patrick Fitzgerald in their interview last year.
Why would White House officials sell the president out like that? The question becomes more pointed when you note that DeFrank, as we discussed yesterday, has long been close to people in the Bush world.
So what's the story?
According to knowledgeable sources, those White House officials behind that story were trying to help the president, not hurt him. The story, in their view, was about his unhappiness with what Rove had done but his loyalty to those who work for him.
Now, the first thing you have to say on this is that there are some folks in the White House who are pretty stupid. Even a cursory knowledge of where the live wires lay in this story would tell you that those bits of information would lead to someone getting a very big shock.
Ordinarily, such an elementary mistake just wouldn't happen.
This part is just inference, not reporting. But I suspect that what we're seeing here is an example of various players in the White House trying to manage damage control without central direction, perhaps without the requisite experience in some cases and even more likely without all the key facts at hand.
The limbs keep moving even after the head is severed, but not with the same coordination.
--Josh Marshall
Hillary Clinton's senate opponent next year, Republican DA Jeanine Pirro, told a Chemung County Republicans on Tuesday night: "That's a difference between Democrats and Republicans _ we don't want them next door molesting children and murdering women." Now on the defensive, Pirro's campaign manageer Brian Donahue says: "This quote is out of context."
--Josh Marshall
"I don’t think the voters care about this," Ralph Reed on his role on the Jack Abramoff gambling gravy train. "The reason why we didn't know every detail was because we were a subcontractor. And, by definition, a subcontractor is told only what they need to do to do their job."
--Josh Marshall
"What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.” -- Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff until January 2005, quote from Wednesday, October, 19th.
--Josh Marshall
Ugh, such lamentable piling on. If you must join in, the Daily DeLay has just posted the DeLay arrest warrant.
--Josh Marshall
As Kevin says, it's all about The Nukes. And he's right on target in pointing to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, as one of the key players in the vast political cover-up that hovers over the criminal one now creaking at every hinge. Laura Rozen has more on coordination between Roberts and Cheney's office.
Roberts was the key player in arranging the authorship of last year's thoroughly mendacious Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraqi WMD intelligence failures. He also played a key part at several points (possibly passively, but probably actively) in ensuring that no real investigation into the origins of the forgeries ever took place.
--Josh Marshall
Ahhh -- good point.
All day we've been discussing Tom DeFrank's article in today's Daily News which reports that President Bush has known about Karl Rove's role in the Plame leak for two years.
But this site points out that this sure seems to contradict what Murray Waas reported not long ago over at National Journal ...
In his own interview with prosecutors on June 24, 2004, Bush testified that Rove assured him he had not disclosed Plame as a CIA employee and had said nothing to the press to discredit Wilson, according to sources familiar with the president's interview. Bush said that Rove never mentioned the conversation with Cooper.
Now, don't lose sight of the fact that we're stacking a lot of 'ifs' on top of each other here. But we do have two articles from well-credentialed journalists pointing to two alleged facts -- one, that President Bush knew in late 2003 that Rove was involved and that Rove had told him he was involved; two, that a year later President Bush denied Rove had told him he was involved in an interview with the special prosecutor.
If both those 'facts' bear out, someone's in a lot of trouble, no?
--Josh Marshall
Larry Johnson knocks down some of the more recent lies about Joe Wilson.
--Josh Marshall
Sen. Schumer (D-NY) writes to President Bush asking for an explanation of the DeFrank article. More to come shortly.
Late Update: We've now added the letter to the TPM Document Collection.
--Josh Marshall
Tom DeFrank's piece in a Daily News is a touch vague about just when President Bush found out about Karl Rove's role in the Plame leak. The only explicit reference to timing comes in the lede where DeFrank writes that [emphasis added] "[a]n angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair."
Now, 'two years ago'.
In the Plame case a lot of things happened around two years ago. What happened almost exactly two years was the first intensive coverage of the story in the mainstream press. For the first couple months the scandal was largely the province of various disreputable blogs and other untouchables.
So, DeFrank really doesn't provide us with enough detail to say with any confidence precisely when the president knew. But it seems he's saying the president unloaded on Karl right about the time the story blew up into a serious scandal and spawned a Justice Department investigation.
So what was the president saying around that time?
One of his most detailed statements came on October 7th, in a brief exchange with the press just before a cabinet meeting ...
[T]he investigators will ask our staff about what people did or did not do. This is a town of -- where a lot of people leak. And I've constantly expressed my displeasure with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information. And I want to know, I want to know the truth. I want to see to it that the truth prevail. And I hope we can get this investigation done in a thorough way, as quickly as possible.But the Justice Department will conduct this investigation. The professionals in the Justice Department will be involved in ferreting out the truth. These are citizens who will -- were here before this administration arrived and will be here after this administration leaves. And they'll come to the bottom of this, and we'll find out the truth. And that will be -- that's a good thing for this administration.
Then, a few moment later, the president expressed an odd lack of confidence that the case would ever be solved ...
Randy, you tell me, how many sources have you had that's leaked information that you've exposed or have been exposed? Probably none. I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like to. I want to know the truth. That's why I've instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators -- full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is -- partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. But we'll find out.
Given the question of dating noted above, one might speculate that the president learned of Rove's action the next day. But if the DeFrank piece is accurate, it certainly seems likely that the president knew of Rove's complicity while he was saying these words.
Late Update: A lot of news has been bubbling this morning. And in the mix I neglected to note that there is another reference to the time frame of these events in the DeFrank article. TPM Reader MO notes this passage down at the end ...
None of these sources offered additional specifics of what Bush and Rove discussed in conversations beginning shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched into the leak of CIA agent Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.
We're still hanging on the "shortly after" here. But this would seem to nail this down a bit more conclusively: President Bush knew Karl Rove was one of the culprits when he made those statements above.
--Josh Marshall
Ahhh, yesteryear, when we were young and unindicted.
Scott McClellan, June 24th, 2004, almost a year after the president learned of Karl Rove's part in the Plame leak, according to the Daily News.
The President met with Pat Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in charge of the leak investigation, as well as members of his team. The meeting took place in the Oval Office. It lasted for a little more than an hour, probably about an hour and 10 minutes ... He also recently retained a lawyer, Jim Sharp, who you all have reported about before. I would just say that -- what I've said previously, and what the President has said: The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter. The President directed the White House to cooperate fully with those in charge of the investigation. He was pleased to do his part to help the investigation move forward. No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the President of the United States, and he has said on more than one occasion that if anyone -- inside or outside the government -- has information that can help the investigators get to the bottom of this, they should provide that information to the officials in charge.
What did the president tell Patrick Fitzgerald? As a number of lawyers and former prosecutors have informed me this morning, not being under oath does not get President Bush out of legal jeopardy if he didn't tell the truth.
--Josh Marshall
Isikoff has a new brief piece out on Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert "Gold Bars" Luskin.
Actually, for what it's worth, GB sounds like he'd be sort of a fun person to hang out with. But don't tell anyone I said that.
As we were first to report back in July (at least in the context of the Rove case) Luskin, a Democrat, got in trouble with the Feds back in 1997. He took up the appeal of a precious metals dealer who'd been convicted of laundering tens of millions of dollars of drug money. The DOJ got a bit miffed when they discovered that Luskin was taking payment in gold bars.
Luskin tells Isikoff he did nothing wrong but now concedes "I was completely obtuse about the optics of the situation."
Perhaps we need to rename him Robert "Gift for Understatement" Luskin.
--Josh Marshall
As I noted below, the DeFrank article came up three separate times in the gaggle this morning. I've now posted the DeFrank portions in their entirety over at TPMCafe.
--Josh Marshall
Right at the top of the gaggle this morning at the White House, reporters zeroed in one the DeFrank story ...
QUESTION: Scott, is it true that the President --SCOTT McCLELLAN: Welcome back.
QUESTION: Thanks. Is it true that the President slapped Karl Rove upside the head a couple of years ago over the CIA leak?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Are you referring to, what, a New York Daily News report? Two things: One, we're not commenting on an ongoing investigation; two, and I would challenge the overall accuracy of that news account.
QUESTION: That's a comment.
QUESTION: Which part of it?
QUESTION: Yes, that is.
QUESTION: Which facts --
SCOTT McCLELLAN: No, I'm just saying -- no, I'm just trying to help you all.
QUESTION: So what facts are you challenging?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Again, I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation.
QUESTION: You can't say you're challenging the facts and then not say which ones you're challenging.
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Yes, I can. I just did. (Laughter.)
...
QUESTION: Scott, let me come back to -- so you say you're challenging the accuracy, but you won't tell us why. Why would it be irresponsible for us to report that?SCOTT McCLELLAN: Report what?
QUESTION: What you said --
SCOTT McCLELLAN: It's up to you what you want to report. I'm just trying to --
QUESTION: Well, if you want us to say it's inaccurate, you need to give us a reason why, or it wouldn't be responsible to report it.
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Well, there's an ongoing investigation, and as you know, our policy is not to comment on it. So that's where we are.
QUESTION: You just did.
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Go ahead.
QUESTION: Based on your personal knowledge, based on your opinion, based on your frustration with the story -- what caused you to say that?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: No, I mean, I read the story and I didn't view it as an accurate story.
QUESTION: Why not?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: Again, I'm not going to go any further than that. There's an ongoing investigation. This is bringing up matters related to an ongoing investigation.
QUESTION: After you read the story, Scott, did you check with either the two people mentioned, the President or Rove, to ask them? Is that what you base --
SCOTT McCLELLAN: I don't have any further comment, Peter.
QUESTION: Well, is that what you base your guidance on, or is it just -- you know, is it just you're feeling that this couldn't have happened?
SCOTT McCLELLAN: I stand by what I just said and I'm going to leave it at that.
The subject comes up again later in the discussion. We'll bring you that later.
--Josh Marshall
On the DeFrank story this morning, McClellan got hammered and tried to deny its accuracy, but really couldn't. We'll provide details shortly.
--Josh Marshall
A few more thoughts on Tom DeFrank's article on President Bush, noted below.
According to DeFrank, President Bush knew about Karl Rove's role in leaking Valerie Plame's identity pretty much from the very start. He doesn't tell us whether the president knew in advance or while the purported crimes were occuring. But let's set that aside for the moment and stipulate, for the sake of discussion, the accuracy of DeFrank's nugget: that from the moment this became a public issue, President Bush has known Karl Rove was one of the culprits.
This raises several questions.
The possible perjury indictment hanging over Rove's head (to the extent we can know about these things from press reports) stems from his 'forgetting' to tell the grand jury that he leaked Plame's identity the first time around. Later, he 'remembered' this detail -- seemingly after Fitzgerald got other sworn testimony about it.
Did Rove tell the president about his role, then 'forget' before the grand jury, then 'remember' later? Not that many folks believe he forgot. But this would seem like the sort of chronological detail that could seal Rove's fate as far as a perjury indictment.
And that leads us to a second question.
Patrick Fitzgerald interviewed President Bush (at least, he was interviewed by his team; I don't remember whether it was Fitzgerald specifically who conducted it, though I would assume it was). The president's lawyers succeeded in getting Fitzgerald to agree that the interview not be under oath. Still, though, an interview took place and at the top of the list of questions must have been just what happened and what the president knew.
Did President Bush say that he knew Rove was involved? Did he deny it?
Obviously, we have many more questions than answers here. But if President Bush knew about Rove's role from the beginning, then all of these interviews and grand jury appearances and the almost inevitable contradictions between them become real trouble for the White House.
And one more question. For almost two years, Scott McClellan insisted that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby had anything to do with the leaks. He knew because he asked them, he said. He was very categorical.
Now it seems that at least with reference to Rove, the president knew McClellan's statements weren't true. And yet he allowed McClellan to make them. Come to think of it, I guess this one really isn't even a question. It speaks for itself, doesn't it?
--Josh Marshall
It's slightly sugar-coated. But the New York Daily News has the scoop of the day on Plame/Fitzgerald: the president knew what Karl Rove had done from the very beginning. So all that mumbojumbo about wanting to get to the bottom of it and fire the bad actors was, to revert to the King's English, crap.
He knew all along, as was certainly clear all along.
Now, the lede gives some sense of distancing ...
An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News."He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."
Bush has nevertheless remained doggedly loyal to Rove, who friends and even political adversaries acknowledge is the architect of the President's rise from baseball owner to leader of the free world.
But when you read further down into the piece you see that what got the president angry wasn't the leak; it was that they got caught.
Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.
A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.
"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.
Now, one other detail about this piece. It runs a few hundred words. But the most important two are probably these: Thomas DeFrank.
DeFrank's the byline and he's the Daily News DC Bureau Chief. DeFrank has a unique relationship to the Bush world, particularly to the older generation. He cowrote James Baker's diplomatic autobiography The Politics of Diplomacy, for instance. And back in the summer of 2001, The Weekly Standard suggested he'd actually been in the running to be chief Pentagon spokesman, before the job went to Tori Clarke.
I'm not including this background information to suggest that DeFrank is in the tank for the Bush crowd. Indeed, I have the sense that the relationship has become more strained or perhaps attenuated over the last few years. I add these details because the nature of DeFrank's access is unique in Washington. And this article carries more weight than it would with another byline.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader TO notes an interesting little blip of information from Howie Kurtz's June 2003 Post article on the Judy Miller controversy.
Miller's role with MET Alpha [the WMD search team] was controversial within the Defense Department and among some staff members at the Times, where one reporter was assigned to check up on whether other embedded journalists followed similar procedures.
It sounds like he's saying the Times assigned a reporter to find out just what sort of rules Miller was operating under and whether they were like those enjoyed by other embedded journalists.
Can someone tell me if this strand of the story has been reported out elsewhere?
--Josh Marshall
Yes, as you can see, we've redesigned Talking Points Memo.
The site is just shy of five years old. And depending on how you want to count them, this is either the third or fourth major redesign of the site. (If you've got an appetite for TPM trivia, here's what the site looked like when it started five years ago.)
Why did we do this redesign?
A whole slew of reasons. But most of them boil down to one reason: we needed more real estate on the page. Some of the things we're going to do we'll only be rolling out over time. But others we've already done. For instance, we've wanted to incorporate more of what's going on over at TPMCafe at the site. And, as you can see, we've now done that over there on the far-right sidebar, with links to the most recent posts. We also need room for ads, for features like a simpler to use and easier to find search function, and various other stuff. As we've grown, and tried to incorporate this new stuff, things just got more and more scrunched in the relatively narrow width of the site. At a certain point, it made no sense since there was so much space we weren't using.
We've tried to keep to some of the basic color scheme and, I hope, the relative simplicity of the design.
We're also busy at work on a redesign of TPMCafe, which we'll be debuting in the not-too-distant future. And we have other new projects we're working on as well -- one of which is to hire a full-time blogger-reporter who will expand on our coverage of the events of the day.
--Josh Marshall
From this evening's Nelson Report ...
ROVE/LIBBY...the Joe Wilson/Valeria Plame scandal...many thanks for a ton of interesting and valuable feedback from Loyal Readers to last night’s Report, and our use of the New York Times’ Frank Rich to lay out the most hard-line “case” against the Administration that could likely be imagined. Before we start, today’s hot gossip is that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald may have sent a “target letter”...an official warning of a likely indictment...to Vice President Cheney’s deputy chief of staff, John Hannah. According to sources which have been right from time to time, Hannah has told associates he has been forced to cut a deal, and that they think this includes testifying against his immediate boss, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.Hannah’s name resonates to the insiders, since he is a samurai for UN Amb. John Bolton, detailed to the White House while Bolton was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs...in other words, an office with folks quite likely to have known the CIA connection which may form the basis of any criminal indictments in this case.
This is the hot gossip. But it's more than gossip. Not necessarily the point about a target letter, but on the point of Hannah's cooperation. A number of well-placed sources are now saying this. But there are logistical and inter-personal mysteries raised by Hannah's claimed cooperation that still make the whole picture appear murky to me.
--Josh Marshall
The Hotline has a list posted here of everyone who's been interviewed, interviewed under oath, appeared before the grand jury or whatever in the Plame case. And they're looking to build out and correct their list with reader tips you can send in. Hey, wait a minute! Ahh, never mind. Just go look.
--Josh Marshall
Newsweek's Christopher Dickey has a wise and thoughtful take on Judy Miller, the state of journalism and what this whole conflagration means.
If that doesn't pull you in. He also presses a Chalabi aide on whether Ahmed was Judy's source on Plame. And all he gets are non-denial denials.
--Josh Marshall
The Times still seems to be swimming on the edges of the Plame-Fitzgerald story. But Wednesday's piece introduces two tangible new details. No action from Fitzgerald this week. And Fitzgerald does not plan to issue a report of any kind.
As the Times reporters suggest, that leaves Fitzgerald with the options of indicting someone or simply closing up shop without telling anyone what happened. And that second possibility seems hard to imagine.
Still, we don't know what Fitzgerald's going to do.
--Josh Marshall
A question about the story beneath the story, the origins of the Niger forgeries and who covered up the trail.
The FBI was tasked with investigating the origins of the forgeries, who forged them and why. That was in March, 2003, soon after the IAEA publicly revealed the documents as forgeries.
But no real investigation ever took place. When reports of FBI footdragging became public a year ago, the Bureau begged off with feeble excuses about not having received permission from the Italian government to interview the key player in the mystery.
A case like that doesn't go uninvestigated by itself. Why did it? Who slowed it down? And which senators were getting briefed on the progress of the investigation over the course of 2003 and 2004?
--Josh Marshall
For more than a year we've been asking the following question, as have many others. After Sunday's revelations it became an even greater mystery. After the original fiasco of her WMD reporting and her on-going role in the Plame story, how did Judith Miller end up covering the UN 'oil-for-food' scandal for a year?
Recall that Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told his reporters that in the late summer of 2003 he ordered Miller off the Iraq and non-conventional weapons beats. But he either couldn't or wouldn't control her. "She kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm," he told the paper.
This greatly understates what happened.
A year after Keller's order, as questions about Miller's reporting mounted and her tangle with the Fitzgerald investigation deepened, she was back covering the oil-for-food scandal for the Times. As I've written several times over the last year, that editorial decision is almost inexplicable.
The oil-for-food story was, by definition, about Iraq. So having Miller cover the case went directly against Keller's explicit instructions. But that's only the start of it. The most inflammatory accusations in the scandal, the ones that brought it to global prominence, were based entirely on documents of dubious authenticity produced by people on the payroll of Ahmed Chalabi. And Chalabi had been either the immediate or ultimate source for much of Miller's discredited WMD reporting. Beyond all these particulars, the whole struggle over the scandal became a replay by proxy of the lead-up to the war itself. Same players, same divide, many of the same issues at stake.
All told, there was scarcely any story this year or last on which Miller's credibility as a reporter was more compromised. And yet she either got the assignment or no one stood in her way when she took it on her own initiative. This is much more than drifting back into related issues.
Who made this decision or who failed to act to prevent it? If media criticism is a serious enterprise, this is a question that cries out for scrutiny.
--Josh Marshall
I want to let everyone know that we're having a discussion of the always vexed question of just how we got into Iraq and why, over at TPMCafe Book Club this week.
The basis of our discussion is George Packer's new book, The Assassins' Gate. You may know Packer from his extremely well-regarded New Yorker articles reported from Iraq. George got the discussion started. Foreign Affairs managing editor, Gideon Rose, responded last night. And Todd Gitlin has just weighed in with his first post "The War Movement and the Antiwar Movement".
Come by and join in the discussion.
--Josh Marshall
It just gets more and more embarrassing for them (from Bloomberg) ...
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers disavows telling a U.S. senator that she believes there's a constitutional right to privacy and that a case the high court relied on when it legalized abortion was correctly decided, the lawmaker's spokesman said in a statement.Senator Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued the statement after telling reporters that Miers, the White House counsel, had told him there was a right to privacy.
Specter's spokesman, Bill Reynolds, said Miers called the senator after reading news accounts of his comments about their conversation to say Specter had misunderstood her position about privacy or the 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut.
Piñata.
--Josh Marshall
They sorta buried it, probably because they didn't feel their sourcing was strong enough to make it their lede. But the Daily News suggests Fitzgerald's got a cooperating witness inside the White House.
--Josh Marshall
Like so many articles in these final days before the story is told, or at least begun, Tuesday's Post piece by VandeHei and Pincus suggests volumes but says frustratingly little.
Three points stand out.
First is the suggestion, noted several times through the piece, that Fitzgerald's investigation reaches back into Cheney's running battles with the CIA. Remember, Fitzgerald got two judges (Hogan and Tatel) to give him extraordinary latitude to pursue this case. To get that latitude he provided the appeals court with what the Times earlier called "secret evidence ... that neither the reporters nor their lawyers were allowed to see."
Agree with Fitzgerald's zealousness or not, he seems to have persuaded those judges that he was after more than lawyerly dissections of who uttered which phrase when and why in the conversation between Karl Rove and Matt Cooper. This looks like the outlines of what he told them he was after. At least it's our best hint so far.
Second point: Fitzgerald's office, for the first time I can remember, made an on-the-record statement about the conclusion of the investigation. The detail was mundane -- where the announcements would be made (in DC, not Chicago). But it's hard to figure why you say something like that unless some announcement is imminent.
Third point: look at this graf from the piece ...
The special prosecutor has personally interviewed numerous officials from the CIA, White House and State Department. In the process, he and his investigative team have talked to a number of Cheney aides, including Mary Matalin, his former strategist; Catherine Martin, his former communications adviser; and Jennifer Millerwise, his former spokeswoman. In the case of Millerwise, she talked with the prosecutor more than two years ago but never appeared before the grand jury, according to a person familiar with her situation.
This bucket of facts is dropped into the piece with no terribly clear explanation. And that's a lot of information about Jennifer Millerwise, isn't it?
She was Cheney's Press Secretary from 2001 to 2003. She then went to work on Bush-Cheney 2004. Then in January 2005 she was appointed Director of Public Affairs for the CIA. She had apparently also worked for then-incoming CIA-Director Porter Goss on Capitol Hill. And her installation appears to have been part of Goss's effort to install Republican operatives in key positions at the Agency. Douglas Jehl, in the Times last January, called her appointment "the latest in a series of former Republican aides to be installed by Mr. Goss in senior positions at the C.I.A."
What it means I do not know. But, in articles like these, threads like those are usually meant to be pulled.
--Josh Marshall
Blood all over the floor. And axe hasn't even fallen yet.
Times: Knives out for Andy Card.
Times: Bruce Bartlett fired from conservative think-tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, for anti-Bush heterodoxy.
Number of articles in the Times Tuesday about anything to do with the Fitzgerald-Plame investigation: zero.
--Josh Marshall
More on the Veep's office, Wilson, Plame and the CIA, soon out from the Post.
--Josh Marshall
President Bush refuses to say whether there will be consequences for those who leaked Plame's identity. "There's a serious investigation. I'm not going to prejudge the outcome of the investigation."
--Josh Marshall
I've been mulling over the New York Times dimension of the Plame story for the last day or so. And one thing seems more and more clear to me. This isn't a judgment made on particular reporting, more a sense or just intuition. So let me just briefly share it with you.
I think there's a whole part of the Times' story that we're not yet aware of. Let me try an analogy. If my memory is correct, when astronomers plot the location of black holes in space, they can't see them directly. It's impossible. No light escapes from them; so there's nothing to see. You can tell where they are by plotting the effects of their gravitational pull on nearby stars and celestial bodies.
There's something similar happening here.
When you read the Times Sunday article plus Miller's apologia, there's too much there that is simply inexplicable in terms of what we already know. Going into this mess Miller's reputation was already severely checkered and her journalistic judgment very much in question. And yet Sulzberger and Keller (the first in the van, the second following with an odd passivity) staked the reputation of the Times itself on her and went along for this whole ride without even getting the most basic information from her about what had happened?
Simple poor judgment doesn't explain that for me. Something else is up.
Now, I know it seems like I'm hinting ominously about some deep dark secret. Really, I have no idea what it is. But there's a whole piece to this puzzle, probably the most telling one, that we haven't yet seen.
--Josh Marshall
More on Judy Miller's special embed agreement, from Frank Foer's piece in New York magazine from the summer of 2004 ...
According to Pomeroy, as well as an editor at the Times, Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon—an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq. “Any articles going out had to be, well, censored,” Pomeroy told me. “The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the ‘Secret Squirrels,’ and their ‘sources and methods’ had to be protected and a war was about to start.” Before she filed her copy, it would be censored by a colonel who often read the article in his sleeping bag, clutching a small flashlight between his teeth. (When reporters attended tactical meetings with battlefield commanders, they faced similar restrictions.)As Miller covered MET Alpha, it became increasingly clear that she had ceased to respect the boundaries between being an observer and a participant. And as an embedded reporter she went even further, several sources say. While traveling with MET Alpha, according to Pomeroy and one other witness, she wore a military uniform.
When Colonel Richard McPhee ordered MET Alpha to pull back from a search mission and regroup in the town of Talil, Miller disagreed vehemently with the decision—and let her opinions be loudly known. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reprinted a note in which she told public-affairs officers that she would write negatively about his decision if McPhee didn’t back down. What’s more, Kurtz reported that Miller complained to her friend Major General David Petraeus. Even though McPhee’s unit fell outside the general’s line of command, Petraeus’s rank gave his recommendation serious heft. According to Kurtz, in an account that was later denied, “McPhee rescinded his withdrawal order after Petraeus advised him to do so.”
Miller guarded her exclusive access with ferocity. When the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman overlapped in the unit for a day, Miller instructed its members that they couldn’t talk with him. According to Pomeroy, “She told people that she had clearance to be there and Bart didn’t.” (One other witness confirms this account.)
More soon.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, this squares what I've heard from various sources over the last 24 hours.
Jim Miklaszewski on the NBC Nightly News blog says no one at the Pentagon, the DIA or the CIA knows anything about Judy Miller ever having a security clearance, as she appeared to claim in her tell-not-very-much piece in the Times.
As one Pentagon reporter pointed out to me, embedded reporters will frequently get tactical information that's classified -- troop locations, battle plans, etc. But that's information with a very short shelf-life. And knowledgeable sources doubt that anyone with Miller's background would confuse that sort of access with the much more specific meaning of getting a security clearance.
That leaves two possibilities. What I'd have to call the less interesting of the two is that Miller was either speaking imprecisely or self-aggrandizingly and she really had no more access than any other embedded reporter in the field who, in the nature of things, listens in on plans of action, locations, etc.
The second possibility is that Miller was given some special status or special clearance that was, shall we say, off-the-books, a special status few at the Pentagon or the CIA seem to know about or are willing now to admit knowing about.
But look at the passage in Miller's piece in question ...
In my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly turned to the subject of how Mr. Libby handled classified information with me. He asked, for example, whether I had discussed my security status with Mr. Libby. During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment "embedded" with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons.Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I had discussed classified information with Mr. Libby. I said I believed so, but could not be sure. He asked how Mr. Libby treated classified information. I said, Very carefully.
Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to examine a series of documents. Though I could not identify them with certainty, I said that some seemed familiar, and that they might be excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's weapons. Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Libby had shown any of the documents to me. I said no, I didn't think so. I thought I remembered him at one point reading from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.
I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance, given my special embedded status in Iraq. At the same time, I told the grand jury I thought that at our July 8 meeting I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq.
Mr. Fitzgerald asked me if I knew whether I was cleared to discuss classified information at the time of my meetings with Mr. Libby. I said I did not know.
Needless to say, everything here comes through Miller's (perhaps distorted) account of what happened in the grand jury room. But in her account, at least, Fitzgerald seems to have been aware of some special status she enjoyed and made it a point of repeated questioning.
Meanwhile, Rawstory.com reports, as you'd expect, that Miller's attorney Bob Bennett worked closely with her on writing the piece. And it's hard for me to see where an attorney as shrewd and alert as Bennett would have allowed Miller to just whip something like this up out of thin air. After all, she's in enough trouble already.
Perhaps this was just puffery on her part. But something seems to be at the heart of this.
--Josh Marshall
A number of Times' subscribers from outside New York and DC wrote in to me over the weekend asking if I knew why the paper's big Plame-Miller package wasn't included in their editions of the paper. This appears to be the answer.
--Josh Marshall
The Journal (sub.req.) got Miller on the phone Sunday, briefly ...
Despite giving a lengthy first-person account, Ms. Miller left some pivotal questions unanswered. For instance, she didn't disclose whether she was asked by Mr. Fitzgerald in her first grand-jury appearance about meeting with Mr. Libby in June 2003. Her failure to disclose that meeting led to her second testimony before the grand jury after some of her notes were found. But neither her account nor the Times story discusses how the notes were found and what set off a search for them.In a brief telephone interview yesterday, Ms. Miller said she discovered the June 2003 notes in her office after being prompted to seek out answers to another question Mr. Fitzgerald had asked her. "There was an open question about something, and I said I would go back and look and see if there was anything in my notes that would address that question," she said yesterday.
She said she found the notebook in her office. She reiterated that she couldn't recall who told her the name that she transcribed as "Valerie Flame." "I don't remember who told me the name," she said, growing agitated. "I wasn't writing a story, remember?" Asked if the other source was Mr. Rove, she replied, "I'm not going to discuss anyone else that I talked to."
When did she know she wasn't writing a story exactly?
--Josh Marshall
Here just after midnight I was trying to read tomorrow's papers to see if anyone had much more light to shed on the revelations of the weekend. And all I can think to say is that this mess gives new meaning to the phrase 'train wreck'.
Here in the Post, for instance, you have Floyd Abrams, Miller's one-time and maybe still lawyer, coming pretty close to calling Miller a liar, twice.
Look at this passage closely ...
According to the Times story, one of Miller's lawyers, Floyd Abrams, was authorized in the summer of 2004 to talk to Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate, about whether Libby, who had signed a paper waiver, "really wanted her to testify." The story said that "Tate had said she was free to testify," but Abrams added that "Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife."With that information, the Times said, Miller concluded that Libby was sending her a message that he did not want her to testify. The newspaper added that "Mr. Tate called Ms. Miller's interpretation 'outrageous.' "
Yesterday, Bennett would not say that Tate was trying to steer Miller's testimony, but that he thought it "complicated things" and that "Judy felt she did not have the clear personal waiver she needed."
In an interview yesterday, Abrams declined to endorse Miller's account that Libby did not want her to testify unless she was going to exonerate him. "That's Judy's interpretation," Abrams said. Tate "certainly asked me what Judy would say, but that's an entirely proper question."
Abrams also minimized Miller's assertion that another source may have given her the name "Valerie Flame," as she recorded it in the same notebook used for her first interview of Libby. Abrams said others may have mentioned Plame only "in passing. . . . The central and essentially only figure who had information was Libby."
Remember, this isn't just another player in the case. This is her lawyer. Nobody expects him to lie for her. But he doesn't have to say anything.
I know using the word 'lie' here may seem overdone. And certainly Abrams is careful to phrase his words in such a way so as not to explicitly say she is being untruthful. But these are not minor points in her story that he is contradicting. They are close to the two most significant ones -- first, just why she initially refused and then agreed to talk, and, second, whether there are other mystery sources out there who could be the source of Plame's name.
On both points he is taking it upon himself to contradict her account publicly.
And one other point along these lines. In evaluating all that happened here, the Miller denouement, the actions of Times management and everything else, pay close attention to the never-quite-explained hand off of the case from Abrams to Bennett. I trust I won't be shocking anyone too greatly if I say that the claim in the Times' piece that Bennett's representation began after he and Miller "bumped" into each other on Capitol Hill isn't quite the whole truth.
--Josh Marshall
Not until tonight did I closely read through the Times article on the Miller fiasco. And I have to ask: Was I the only one who found the reporting extraordinarily thin?
I'm not trying to criticize the reporters, or not necessarily them. But the piece read to me as though the reporters had been allowed to interview Times management and employees on the record -- and that was about it. I didn't get a sense that the piece was based on a lot of reporting outside the Times building itself and its Washington bureau. After all, how many other people are there in Washington the Times reporters could have interviewed on background? Miller's colleagues, FBI agents, various lawyers around the case, people at the State Department, the Pentagon, the possibilities are not much short of endless.
I can't know what Van Natta, Liptak and Levy did or who they talked to. And I can only imagine the cross-cutting pressures they were working under. But I didn't see much signs of that kind of reporting in the piece I read.
Of course, the piece is already pretty lengthy. And it reveals a number of important new facts about the story -- which I'll discuss in a moment. But it leaves an inevitable question: Is this it? The article leaves a slew of questions conspicuously unanswered -- about the paper, about Miller, about the case. Who's assigning follow-up articles? Look at the piece in detail and Miller and Jill Abramson seem to be calling each other liars. That, or there's a mystery 'editor' loose at the Times.
All that aside, what does it tell us? Several things, as near as I can see, and in no particular order. Miller seems to lie repeatedly in her statements both to the Times and, as she relates what she said, to the Grand Jury. She's still not cooperating with the Times. Sulzberger and Keller went down this whole path while knowing virtually nothing about the situation Miller was in or what she had done. She kept them almost entirely in the dark. And they didn't protest. Keller, meanwhile, concedes he either wouldn't or couldn't control Miller. That squares with a general impression that Keller was passive in the face of Sulzberger's recklessness and poor judgment.
Hopefully Pat Fitzgerald has a decent idea of what happened and what's happening here. Because I think our information is thin and more incomplete than we realize. Miller's still holding out for whatever reason, good or bad. The fire burning at the Times hasn't been brought under control let alone extinguished. And remember, Miller's just one part of this story.
--Josh Marshall
Kevin Drum has three really good posts on the Judy Miller portion of the Plame finale.
In one post he reminds of John Bolton's man Fred Fleitz as a very probable background player in the drama. And he rightly points to the significance of Miller's having been told by someone -- just who is almost a secondary matter -- the name 'Plame' rather than simply told that Joe Wilson's wife worked as a clandestine operative at CIA.
In the second he doubts the now-popular notion that Miller's attorney Bob Bennett hoodwinked Fitzgerald by getting him to agree to limit his questions to her conversations with Libby.
This last one explains why Miller's claim not to remember who identified Wilson's wife as "Plame" is obviously false.
--Josh Marshall