Italian PM Berlusconi distances in advance of trip to Washington on Monday.
"I tried many times to convince the American president not to go to war ... I tried to find other avenues and other solutions, even through an activity with the African leader (Libya's Colonel Muammar) Gaddafi. But we didn't succeed and there was the military operation."
--Josh Marshall
Yesterday we noted items #22 and #23 on page 8 of the Libby indictment, which read ...
22. On or about July 12, 2003, LIBBY flew with the Vice President and others to and from Norfolk, Virginia, on Air Force Two. On his return trip, LIBBY discused with other officials aboard the plane what Libby should say in response to certain pending media inquiries, including questions from Time reporter Matthew Cooper.23. On or about July 12, 2003, in the afternoon, LIBBY spoke by telephone to Cooper, who asked whether LIBBY had heard that Wilson's wife was involved in sending Wilson on the trip to Niger. LIBBY confirmed to Cooper, without elaboration or qualification, that he had heard this information too.
24. On or about July 12, 2003, in the late afternoon, LIBBY spoke by telephone with Judith Miller of the New York Times and discussed Wilson's wife, and that she worked at the CIA.
Here I've added item #24, for reasons which will become evident shortly. But, as I wrote yesterday, to my reading, two points stand out about items #22 and #23. First, before confirming Plame's identity as a CIA employee to Matt Cooper, Libby appears to have discussed whether or how to discuss her identity with other members of the vice president's staff, quite possibly with the vice president himself. Second, item #22 seems supererogatory. It has no clear relevance to the charges levied against Libby. It speaks to the complicity of others in the vice president's office.
What you really want, though, is to clear up that ambiguity about Cheney. Was he in on that strategy session about how Libby should deal with Cooper's call or kickin' back somewhere else on the plane?
TPM Reader JL points to a month old New York Times article (Johnston and Stevenson, Oct. 1st) which points very, very strongly to the conclusion that he did.
The article reports on Judith Miller's release from jail and subsequent grand jury testimony.
A short way into the article there is this passage (emphasis added) ...
A lawyer who knows Mr. Libby's account said the administration efforts to limit the damage from Mr. Wilson's criticism extended as high as Mr. Cheney. This lawyer and others who spoke about the case asked that they not be identified because of grand jury secrecy rules.On July 12, 2003, four days after his initial conversation with Ms. Miller, Mr. Libby consulted with Mr. Cheney about how to handle inquiries from journalists about the vice president's role in sending Mr. Wilson to Africa in early 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq was trying acquire nuclear material there for its weapons program, the person said.
In that account, Mr. Cheney told Mr. Libby to direct reporters to a statement released the previous day by George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence. His statement said Mr. Wilson had been sent on the mission by C.I.A. counter-proliferation officers "on their own initiative."
That passage leaves a bit of ambiguity about whether this might be a different conversation than the one on the plane. This one further down into the article doesn't (emphasis added) ...
Mr. Libby has said he spoke with Mr. Cheney on July 12, six days after Mr. Wilson's article.Mr. Libby said he told Mr. Cheney that reporters had been pressing the vice president's office for more details about who sent Mr. Wilson to Africa. The two men spoke when Mr. Cheney was on a trip to Norfolk, Va., for the commissioning of the carrier Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Libby said Mr. Cheney directed him to refer reporters to Mr. Tenet's statement, which said that the C.I.A. had been behind Mr. Wilson's selection for the trip.
That's pretty clear, isn't it?
Notwithstanding Libby's implausible claim that the vice president told him to refer reporters to Tenet's statement, Cheney did participate in that conversation. And Fitzgerald knows it. According to the Times, Libby testified to the fact himself.
--Josh Marshall
Anyone have any insight on this graf from 'Libby Charged' article in today's Times?
Mr. Fitzgerald was spotted Friday morning outside the office of James Sharp, Mr. Bush's personal lawyer. Mr. Bush was interviewed about the case by Mr. Fitzgerald last year. It is not known what discussions, if any, were taking place between the prosecutor and Mr. Sharp. Mr. Sharp did not return a phone call, and Mr. Fitzgerald's spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment.
Remember, in his capacity as president, Mr. Bush's lawyer is Harriet Miers, the White House Counsel. This is his personal lawyer. In fact, I believe Sharp was hired particularly for this case.
Thoughts?
--Josh Marshall
A year later, the real Niger scandal is beginning to surface. Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel report on the central role of the Italian intelligence agency SISMI in distributing the forged documents ...
Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, and people close to it, repeatedly tried to shop the bogus Niger uranium story to governments in France, Britain and the United States. That created the illusion that multiple sources were confirming the story....
Sept. 9 - With the White House's public campaign against Iraq in full swing, Nicolo Pollari, head of SISMI, met with then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley at the White House. Hadley later took the blame for including the false Niger allegation in Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech.
National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said Thursday that the meeting was a 15-minute courtesy call and that no one could recollect talk about yellowcake.
Note the similarity there to other instances of phony WMD intelligence which were planted with various intelligence agencies in order to create the appearance of multiple and overlapping sources of confirmation.
--Josh Marshall
Take a look at this post by Byron York at the The Corner. First, folks he's talking to agree that the case against Libby looks very strong. Set aside all the blah-blah about whether he should be indicting people for perjury if he couldn't get him on the underlying crime, etc. He went for a perjury and obstruction indictment. And it really looks like he has him. Second, he floats speculation that Tim Russert may have had some definitive record of his conversation with Libby, i.e., audio tapes, rather than simply a different recollection than Libby's.
--Josh Marshall
AP identifies "official A" as Karl Rove, according to three people close to the investigation.
--Josh Marshall
What is the explanation for this passage in the indictment (page 8, items #22-23 ...
22. On or about July 12, 2003, LIBBY flew with the Vice President and others to and from Norfolk, Virginia, on Air Force Two. On his return trip, LIBBY discused with other officials aboard the plane what Libby should say in response to certain pending media inquiries, including questions from Time reporter Matthew Cooper.23. On or about July 12, 2003, in the afternoon, LIBBY spoke by telephone to Cooper, who asked whether LIBBY had heard that Wilson's wife was involved in sending Wilson on the trip to Niger. LIBBY confirmed to Cooper, without elaboration or qualification, that he had heard this information too.
Does this not suggest that Libby discussed and planned in advance with others travelling with the Vice President (including possibly the Vice President himself) how he would respond to Cooper's questions about Wilson and his wife? After discussing the matter with colleagues in the Vice President's office he proceeded to speak with Cooper and confirm that it was indeed his understanding that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee.
So he planned what to do in advance with other members of the Vice President's staff. And what they seem to have agreed is that he would confirm Plame's identity, since that is in fact what he proceeded to do.
--Josh Marshall
This afternoon Sen. Rockefeller (D-WV), ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, put out the following statement ...
“It is a terrible day for all Americans when a top White House official is accused of lying and obstructing justice, made all the worse when it’s about a national security matter.“Revealing the identity of a covert agent is the type of leak that gets people killed. Not only does it end the person’s career, and whatever assignments they may have been working on, it puts that person in grave personal danger as well as their colleagues and all the people they have had contact with over the years.
“These very serious charges go to the heart of whether administration officials misused intelligence by disclosing an undercover CIA agent. They also heighten concerns that the administration engaged in a pattern of misusing intelligence to make the case for going to war with Iraq.
“To date, Congress has completely failed to answer these critical questions. The fact is that at any time the Senate Intelligence Committee pursued a line of questioning that brought us close to the White House, our efforts were thwarted. If my Republican colleagues are not prepared to undertake a full and serious congressional investigation into the potential misuse of intelligence, then I regretfully conclude that we have no choice but to pursue an outside independent investigation. The American people deserve answers and they want the truth.”
“We must send a strong message to all the patriotic Americans in our intelligence agencies who continue to serve their country at great personal risk. Our government and our judicial system will not tolerate those who leak classified information and put the lives of others at risk.”
It's a strong statement. And the Congress has completely failed in its oversight responsibilities in this whole matter. But the question can't be avoided.
If that's all true, why did he and fellow Democrats on the intel committee sign off on last year's report?
Why has he said so little this year about the failure to pursue the promised second phase of the Senate investigation, which was supposed to look into the question of executive branch manipulation of WMD intelligence?
Why has he remained silent in the face of evidence, put before him more than a year ago, that the FBI investigation into the forgeries, which he himself requested, has never been pursued in earnest?
Accountability for the Congress's failure to pursue its oversight responsibilities in this case does not end on the Republican side of the aisle. Nor does it end with Rockefeller. He's the ranking member of the committee, with unique access and power. But he's not the only Democrat on the committee. Why stand up now when they didn't stand up before? The Republicans' behavior at least has the logic of self-interest behind it. That of the Democrats' is inscrutable.
--Josh Marshall
With all the rush of news of late, I had not seen that my friend Penn Kemble died a week ago. An honorable man. I'll miss him.
--Josh Marshall
Remember, I. Lewis Libby doesn't just work for the Vice President.
From the beginning of the administration, a key root of Libby's power at the White House is that he works both for the Vice President (as Chief of Staff and National Security Affairs Advisor) and the President of the United States (as Assistant to the President).
--Josh Marshall
Overlooked in the current discussion.
Go to page 5 of the indictment. Top of the page, item #9.
On or about June 12, 2003, LIBBY was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Divison. LIBBY understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA.
This is a crucial piece of information. The Counterproliferation Division (CPD) is part of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, i.e., not the Directorate of Intelligence, the branch of the CIA where 'analysts' come from, but the DO, where the spies, the 'operatives', come from.
Libby's a long time national security hand. He knows exactly what CPD is and where it is. So does Cheney. They both knew. It's right there in the indictment.
Late Update: To be clear, there are of course support staff of various sorts in the DO. Not everyone is a field operative or a 'spy', certainly not in the colloquial sense of the term. But this is the essential difference between these two branches of the agency. These two guy had every reason to know what they were doing.
--Josh Marshall
Libby indictment devastating for the White House.
The Libby indictment is just out. And though I've now read through it, it was necessarily a cursory read. So consider this a preliminary reaction subject to revision.
A few points.
It's true that perjury charges can in some cases amount to 'gotchas', prosecutions brought for minor misstatements or possible lapses of memory.
This ain't one of those cases.
An indictment is always the prosecutor's case, unrebutted by the defense. But Fitzgerald seems to make a very powerful case that Libby repeatedly made claims under oath that he simply must have known were false. We'll have time to go over the details as time goes on. But that's my sense from a quick read.
Far more important, however, is the rest of the information included in the indictment. If you read the recitation of events which takes up, roughly, the first half of the indictment, one thing is made very clear: Libby was in communication about what he was doing with all sorts of people at the White House while he was doing it.
--Josh Marshall
Cheney speaks ...
Mr. Libby has informed me that he is resigning to fight the charges brought against him. I have accepted his decision with deep regret.Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and talented individuals I have ever known. He has given many years of his life to public service and has served our nation tirelessly and with great distinction.
In our system of government an accused person is presumed innocent until a contrary finding is made by a jury after an opportunity to answer the charges and a full airing of the facts. Mr. Libby is entitled to that opportunity.
Because this is a pending legal proceeding, in fairness to all those involved, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the charges or on any facts relating to the proceeding.
More to follow.
--Josh Marshall
Top of the list: who do you figure the "Under Secretary of State" (p.4) was who seems to have worked closely with Libby in getting information on Wilson?
Hint: Look at the org chart at the State Department and whose purview the State Dept intel shop, INR, falls under.
Late Update: Just to clarify, I believe this detail and the person's name was identified in an article in the Post some time in the last few months.
--Josh Marshall
Libby indicted on five counts: (2) perjury, (2) false statement, (1) obstruction of justice.
Late Update: The indictment.
--Josh Marshall
Fitzgerald tells members of Congress he believes "there is no legal authority to issue a public report in the Special Counsel matter", also confirms that the Plame grand jury is not a 'special grand jury'.
--Josh Marshall
Now, about that FBI investigation into the origins of the Niger forgeries, discussed by Doug Jehl in his piece in today's Times.
(Apologies to longtime readers of the site who will be familiar with much of what follows.)
Jehl reports that a "counterespionage official said Wednesday that the inquiry into the documents ... had yielded some intriguing but unproved theories."
That's not a lot for an investigation that began two and a half years ago.
And, remember, the existence of the supposed FBI investigation was the basis on which Sen. Roberts' Senate intel committee agreed not to examine anything about the origins of the documents or how they came into American hands.
So how serious has that investigation been? And what is known by the two senators -- Roberts and Rockefeller -- who've been regularly briefed on it?
Consider this: As is now all over the papers in the US and Italy, the 'security consultant' who tried to peddle the forgeries to a reporter for the Italian magazine Panorama in October 2002 is a man named Rocco Martino. FBI sources continue to tell reporters that they have not been able to question Martino because they have not been able to secure the permission of the Italian government to speak with him.
Given the gravity of the case, it seems difficult to believe that the United States would tolerate Italy's non-cooperation. But what about when Martino came to the United States?
Martino travelled to the United States twice last year. He travelled under his own name and stayed in New York City where he provided interviews to me and two other journalists. By the time Martino made his second visit to the United States his name and his central role in the case had been reported in several Italian and two major British papers. Yet no effort was made to contact him or question him when he was in the US for several days.
Surely US law enforcement wouldn't need the permission of the Italian government to speak to Martino when he was on US soil.
How serious can an investigation be when there is no attempt to speak to the central person in the case?
Another indication.
Elisabetta Burba is the Italian journalist, who works for the Berlusconi-owned magazine Panorama, to whom Martino tried to sell the forgeries. She was interviewed by the FBI not long after Sen. Roberts agreed to co-sign Sen. Rockefeller's request for an FBI investigation in the spring of 2003. But she describes the interviews and follow-ups as cursory at best.
There are various other reasons to doubt that the Justice Department has made a serious effort to solve the mystery of the Niger forgeries. But the apparent lack of interest in even speaking to the man at the center of the scheme is a decent place to start.
As Chairman of the senate intel committee, Sen. Roberts is in a position to receive detailed briefings on the status of the investigation. And his spokespersons say he's received them. So what does he know? More reporting needed.
--Josh Marshall
Today's LA Times story on the Niger forgeries contains the following passage ...
The murky saga involves one Rocco Martino, an occasional Italian spy and businessman who initially peddled the documents. He has told reporters over the last few years that he obtained the papers through a contact at the Niger Embassy in Rome (which, incidentally, was burglarized in 2001) with the help of another officer from Italian military intelligence, and that he sold them to a French intelligence agency with which he occasionally traded.Through his lawyer, Martino declined an interview this week. "The less I say, the better," the lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, quoted Martino as saying. The lawyer would only say that Martino, who was questioned by Italian prosecutors, did not realize the material was fake and did not obtain it from military intelligence.
Martino is a problematic figure. La Repubblica described him as a "failed carabiniere [policeman] and dishonest spy" and a "double-dealer" who plays many sides of every fence and was fired from his job in the Italian secret service.
There's actually a bit more to it than this. There are year-old and as yet unbroadcast taped interviews with Martino in which he describes the arrangement with SISMI officer Antonio Nucera and a female SISMI asset who works at the Niger embassy in Rome. In addition, there are interviews with another party to scheme which confirm Nucera's role. Thus, while Martino himself is what a lit prof might call an untrustworthy narrator, other evidence confirms his claims about SISMI involvement.
--Josh Marshall
It's funny how things become news a year or more after they're first reported.
About that long ago, this site first reported that while the Niger forgeries themselves first appeared in Rome in October 2002 that the foreign intelligence service reports in late 2001 and early 2002 were themselves text transcriptions of those same forged documents.
Today the Times reports the following as news ...
The United States government did not receive the papers until October 2002, eight months after the Central Intelligence Agency sent Joseph C. Wilson IV, a retired ambassador, to Niger on the fact-finding mission, according to a review completed last year by the Senate intelligence committee. The C.I.A. decided in March 2003 that the papers were forgeries.But a little-noticed passage in another government report said the C.I.A. had determined that foreign intelligence passed to the agency in the months before Mr. Wilson's trip also contained information that was "based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable."
That early foreign reporting, never endorsed by American intelligence analysts, prompted questions from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, which in turn led to Mr. Wilson's trip, a chain of events spelled out in the reviews of prewar intelligence issued this year and last year.
The LA Times also has a story to do about the now-just-breaking-into-the-open story of the Italian government's role in the Niger forgeries hoax.
More soon.
--Josh Marshall
Tom DeLay: "We are witnessing the criminalization of conservative politics."
Seems to me that sentence can be read more than one way.
Maybe Tom is finally seeing the light.
--Josh Marshall
The Times got there first with a report that Karl Rove will supposedly not be indicted tomorrow. But the AP and the Wall Street Journal seem to have more details.
Says AP ...
A person outside the legal profession familiar with recent developments in the case said Thursday night that Rove's team does not believe he is out of legal jeopardy yet but likely would be spared bad news Friday when the White House fears the first indictments will be issued.Fitzgerald signaled Thursday he might keep Rove under continuing investigation, sparing him from immediate charges, the person said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury probe.
And from the Journal (sub.req.) ...
Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser and deputy White House chief of staff, was informed yesterday evening that he may not be charged today but remains in legal jeopardy, according to a person briefed on the matter. Mr. Fitzgerald, who meets with jurors this morning, has zeroed in on potential wrongdoing by I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and is likely to charge Mr. Libby at least with making false statements. The testimony of reporters who have been witnesses in the case has contradicted Mr. Libby's public statements.Mr. Fitzgerald appeared still to be pondering whether to charge Mr. Rove and has notified the political strategist that he remains under investigation.
It seems pretty clear from these reports that Rove is not at all out of the woods. He just won't get bad news tomorrow.
Here's my question. As Kevin Drum notes here, Pat Fitzgerald has been at this for almost two years. He's interviewed or brought before the grand jury numerous witnesses and had Rove in there no fewer than four times. You'd assume he's got as many facts as he's going to get.
So why he's waiting? Does he need more facts? More time to think about it? Or is there some process of negotiation going on? Is there something else Fitzgerald expects will soon break free?
--Josh Marshall
A question in need of an answer.
Numerous recent press reports have stated that the term of the current Plame grand jury, having been extended once, cannot be extended again. Thus, if Fitzgerald is not done with his investigation tomorrow, he must impanel a new grand jury.
But tomorrow's big Times piece says Fitzgerald is "likely to extend the term of the federal grand jury beyond its scheduled expiration on Friday."
Does the Times just have the terminology wrong? Do they actually mean to say he plans to impanel a new grand jury? Is some very short extension of this grand jury actually possible, notwithstanding earlier reports to the contrary?
TPM counts quite a few lawyers among its readership. And this should be a fairly straightforward question for people who are familiar with the federal court system. Who can clear this up for us.
Late Update: Perhaps this is part of the explanation. Yesterday on NPR's All Things Considered, Professor Daniel Richman of Fordham Law School was asked to explain what grand juries do. Here was the exchange ...
BLOCK: First, though, some explanation about the role of the grand jury. Daniel Richman is a former federal prosecutor in New York and now a professor at Fordham Law School. He says federal grand juries have two functions.Professor DANIEL RICHMAN (Fordham Law School): One is to investigate, which many grand juries really don't do much of, but special grand juries can be expected to do a lot of. The other is to screen, to determine whether the government has met its burden of having sufficient evidence to pursue a case formally before a court.
It's a little unclear from the context in what way he's using the word 'special'. But the DOJ Criminal Resource manual contains a section on impaneling "Special Grand Juries". And this resource guide at the University of Dayton website makes the following distinction about the terms federal grand juries can serve (emphasis added) ...
Federal grand juries are of two types--regular and special. Regular grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months, but that term can be extended up to another 6 months, which means their total possible term is 24 months. Special grand juries sit for 18 months, but their term can be extended for up to another 18 months; a court can extend a special grand jury's term for 6 months, and can enter up to three such extensions, totaling 18 months.
Several TPM Reader lawyers have written in to say that Fitzgerald's grand jury is just such a "special grand jury". And if that's so it would seem that he has a good deal more latitude to seek extensions -- specifically, a year's more latitude -- than we've been led to believe. Others tell me that it's a six month extension and that's it.
USCourts.gov describes the difference between the two sorts of grand juries like this ...
Today, there are two main types of grand juries: regular and special. A federal judge officially convenes both types of grand juries, though a prosecutor (someone from a U.S. Attorney's office) actually conducts the proceedings. Regular grand juries are called to decide whether or not a prosecutor has presented enough evidence that a crime has been committed. Regular grand juries are convened for a period of 18 months, but may be required to sit as long as 24 months.Special grand juries are called to investigate a particular crime, usually one that is of some importance. Special grand juries are convened for a period of 18 months, and may be extended for six month intervals for a total of an additional 18 months.
If you're knowledgable on this subject and have more to add please drop me a line.
Even Late Update: Another question. Did Fitzgerald a new grand jury in January 2004 when he took over the case? This brief from the case says the following (emphasis added) ...
In late December 2003, the Attorney General recused himself from the investigation, and delegated his authority in connection with the investigation to Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey as Acting Attorney General. Id. at 4a, 192a-193a. Deputy Attorney General Comey, in turn, appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, as Special Counsel, and delegated full authority concerning the investigation to him. Ibid. The grand jury investigation began in January 2004.
That last passage is courtesy of TPM Reader SB.
--Josh Marshall
Early word from the Times: Libby to be indicted; Rove not to face indictment tomorrow but to remain under investigation; Fitzgerald likely to extend the term of the grand jury.
Share your thoughts here.
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) speaks out on his call to expand the Fitzgerald investigation to look at a possible White House conspiracy to deceive Congress.
--Josh Marshall
Good Counsel?
A reader points out this little graf down near the bottom of a Reuters article on Rove and his possibly-imminent indictment.
In advance of any possible indictment against Rove, his legal team consulted with former Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo on legal and public relations strategy, a source close to the matter said.
Carollo was named Director of Public Affairs at the Justice Department on September 23rd, 2003, just a few days before the CIA made its initial referral to the Justice Department for an investigation into the disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity.
I assume that that timing is merely a coincidence. Carollo had previously been Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs since March 2002. But this does mean that Carollo was the top communications person at Justice and one of John Ashcroft's close aides during the entire time Ashcroft was supervising the investigation. And he remained so until about a year ago -- in other words, through most of the life of the Fitzgerald investigation. Now he's working for Rove, the target of the investigation.
--Josh Marshall
Murray Waas in National Journal: "Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources."
We'll have more on this shortly. But there's more to be said about why this is coming out now, especially since the chairman of the committee, Sen. Roberts (R-KS) was doing his best already to cover for the vice-president.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, no Fitzgerald indictments today. But maybe a few Coingate indictments as a tide-me-over?
--Josh Marshall
Unite the Base Because I've Gotta Have Someone on My Side When I Can Pat Fitzgerald's Ass Watch (UBBIGHSMSWICPFAW) ...
Proposed title for new SCOTUS nomination waiting game.
--Josh Marshall
Boy, this one's delicious on like twenty different levels.
There's a great line from Peter Novick's book That Noble Dream in which he quotes Gene Genovese explaining how he got kicked out of the Communist Party for 'having zigged when I was supposed to zag'.
The quote is from memory. So I may not have it precisely right; but that's the gist. And I am often reminded of it when I see examples of party-liners cut off at the knees churning out the claptrap of the day while the party leaders are themselves about to shift course entirely.
And see here this clip from today's Washington Times, sent on to me by reader JI, apparently picked up by The Corner ...
Conservative activist Michael D. Brown said internal GOP polling being cited by party and administration emissaries purports to show that "70 percent of self-identified conservative voters have a favorable impression of Harriet Miers."The emissaries are warning that ordinary Republicans beyond the Washington Beltway continue to support the nomination because they trust President Bush, even after several weeks of conservative opposition to her, according to several conservative Miers critics who have been courted by the White House.
The administration is "disappointed that conservatives inside the Beltway are fighting among ourselves over this nomination, and it fuels the fires for our enemies, for Democrats," said Mr. Brown, the former Federal Emergency Management Agency director.
So in just sixty days Brown goes from FEMA Director to disgraced crony to "conservative activist". Who says there are no second acts?
--Josh Marshall
Berlusconi government lying, but how much?
As the AP reports, the Italian government is "categorically" denying any complicity in the Niger fraud. The Italians, says the AP, deny any "direct or indirect involvement in the packaging and delivery of the 'false dossier on Niger's uranium'."
I strongly suspect that this is a complete lie.
But it is certainly what we might call a de facto lie, an intentional deception which may be technically accurate because of the specific and misleading phrasing employed.
Allow me to explain.
It is more or less an open secret, at least known fairly widely within the US government, that the Niger uranium ball was started rolling in late 2001 by the Italians. It began when they sent their reports about an illicit uranium traffic between Iraq and Niger to the CIA. Those are the reports that got Cheney's attention and eventually lead to Wilson's dispatch to Niger.
Those reports were partial text transcriptions of what would later be revealed as the Niger forgeries.
Set aside for the moment whether Pollari, Castellaneta and others in Mr. Berlusconi's government connived later to get the documents themselves into the hands of the White House or publicize them by leaking them to a Berlusconi-owned magazine. The denial above is only true if we make a distinction between facsimiles (i.e., photocopies) of the documents and text transcriptions of the phony documents. One way or another, what some of web folks lightheartedly call the 'yellowcake road' leads right to Rome. And the Berlusconi government is refusing to come clean.
--Josh Marshall
Postcards from the Bush personality cult -- declining membership but still sporting plenty of diehards.
--Josh Marshall
A little comic relief?
James Dobson ...
I believe the president has made a wise decision in accepting Harriet Miers' withdrawal as a nominee to the Supreme Court.In recent days I have grown increasingly concerned about her conservative credentials, and I was dismayed to learn this week about her speech in 1993, in which she sounded pro-abortion themes, and expressed so much praise for left-wing feminist leaders.
When the president announced this nominee, I expressed my tentative support, based on what I was able to discover about her. But I also said I would await the hearings to learn more about her judicial philosophy. Based on what we now know about Miss Miers, it appears that we would not have been able to support her candidacy. Thankfully, that difficult evaluation is no longer necessary."
Ask not for whom the sponge tolls, it tolls for thee SpongeDob ...
--Josh Marshall
Ariel Sharon: "A country calling for the destruction of another people cannot be a member of the UN."
--Josh Marshall
Heckuva job watch. TPM Reader DS points out this AP story: "Former FEMA Director Michael Brown said Wednesday he was asked to stay on the job another 30 days to help the agency complete its review of the response to Hurricane Katrina, a 'completely legitimate thing to do.'"
--Josh Marshall
Weak White House Watch: Dep. AG nominee Flanigan withdraws, White House caves on Davis-Bacon, SCOTUS nominee Miers withdraws.
--Josh Marshall
First rule of blogging and I forgot it: never go to sleep with a timely post on the brain. Last night I was going to finish up with another request for a show of hands on just who thought Harriet Miers would ever sit on the Supreme Court. And you can see the price I paid for an early bedtime.
In any case, I have to say I think this played out very much as I suggested it might back on the 9th. Despite the thunderings on the right, this nomination didn't go down because it had so many enemies or because those enemies were so strong. It went down because the nomination never found any reliable bank of defenders. She had no allies. And the White House was too enfeebled to create them. As I wrote ...
Nominations can have dynamics similar to those of political scandals.We tend to think that the real key to a scandalee's fate is how many mobilize against him or her. Usually, though, the key issue is whether and how quickly they can find some committed group to mount a defense. If that happens, and quickly, a scandal equilibrium can be reached, and an embattled pol can often withstand merciless attacks and revelations. With no true base of support, however, a career can rapidly collapse even if the opposition itself isn't all that intense.
Miers' nomination could fail in a similar way.
Sure, only a few Republican senators have expressed serious misgivings. But who is it exactly, either in or out of the senate, who is going to fight hard for this nominee? What argument are those senators going to make on the floor? That the country needs Harriet Miers on the Court? That the criticisms of her nomination are frivolous?
In the end this nomination fell apart because of the crushing weight of its own insubstantiality.
The problem for the president -- aside from the imminent forced rearrangement of personnel -- is that each group that took a bite out of Miers will feel empowered. And those groups are so multifarious that the president's freedom of maneuver will be significantly curtailed.
The most obvious answer is that the president needs to throw one right over the plate for his right-wing base. But which one? The DC brainiac right? The single-issue anti-abortion fundies? Certainly there are plenty of brainy circuit court judges out there who could fill the bill. But each group feels empowered now and will want to be catered to.
Meanwhile, Democrats will see the obvious: that President Bush is a very weak chief executive right now. This is the second time in something like a week that a nomination has been withdrawn. Yesterday, the president folded on a policy initiative for the right -- the Davis-Bacon suspension. Democrats can see that the president's initiatives really can be beaten. In fact, they're going down pretty routinely now. And more Republicans up for reelection next year will think twice before walking off another plank for the president.
In sum, he's dealt himself deep in the hole with the Miers' fiasco.
--Josh Marshall
Like many of you I've been curious just what it's like right now in the White House. So I asked Paul Begala if he could share some of his thoughts on how it feels in a White House under siege, in a special counsel's cross-hairs. Profoundly different as the situations are (Clinton Fall '98 and Bush Fall '05), some of the workplace and emotional dynamics must be the same.
Well, he really hit this one out of the park: the hardest-boiled aides cracking under the pressure, a president paying the price for the toady-fication he's surrounded himself with. Check it out here at TPMCafe; Paul just posted.
--Josh Marshall
Silvio's comin' to town?
Eagle-eyed TPM Reader PP sent me this ABC News political calendar which includes this detail ...
Oct. 31, 2005: President Bush hosts Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the White House for a meeting and lunch, Washington, DC.
So let's see. President Bush is engulfed in a firestorm originally ignited by the administration's use of the phony Niger uranium documents. A flurry of press reports in Italy have just implicated Berlusconi's government in being behind the forgeries themselves.
Can I come to lunch too?
Joint press conference? Press questions before the meeting?
--Josh Marshall
More on today's installment of the La Repubblica series. This is a very rough translation of one passage from today's piece. The reference to the 'Atlantic Monthly' actually refers to two reporters from the Washington Monthly (that's small magazine publicity for you), then pursuing the Niger forgeries story ...
Pollari makes his move in the summer of 2004. Usually discreet, he suddenly becomes eloquent. He sits down at his desk behind a pile of papers and documents. As he tells Repubblica (on August 5, 2004): ”I don’t trust anybody. I want to read the documents by myself”. He looks like he’s having a difficult time. He feels the American reporters of the Atlantic Monthly on his neck. He reads a request for an interview posted by the American network CBS at the Italian embassy in Washington. “What do they want from me? Who’s informing them? The CIA? The FBI?”. He knows that Rocco Martino was approached by the producers at 60 Minutes and he fears, as a personal catastrophe, what the man could tell in front of their microphones.Now Pollari needs a way out of that mess, and he thinks he’s found it. He tells Repubblica ”It was the French of the DGSE to cheat the Americans. We have nothing to do with it”. He takes out a power-point document that should prove the involvement of the French in the Niger affair. It never looks convincing. And time will prove that the French lead was completely unfounded.
To review the original Italian, see the article here at the La Repubblica website.
--Josh Marshall
Just following up on our earlier post about SISMI Chief Nicolo Pollari, there are already a few US news organizations snooping around over in Rome about this story. But, really, they needn't go so far afield.
According to La Repubblica, a key role in the Italo-American Niger uranium back channel was played by a man named Giovanni Castellaneta.
He was then a key foreign policy advisor to Silvio Berlusconi.
He is now the Italian Ambassador to the United States.
I placed a call to the press office at the Italian Embassy in Washington this afternoon. The man who took the call told me the embassy is being deluged by requests to discuss the Repubblica allegations with Castellaneta. He took my number and said I could expect a call back from the press attache.
--Josh Marshall
They won!
Rep. George Miller (D-CA) played a pivotal role in organizing cosponsors for a bill to overturn the president's Gulf Coast Wage Cut. Later, he found a way to force a vote on the legislation. Unwilling to face that prospect, today the White House caved in and revoked the wage cut on their own.
Rep. Miller explains what happened here at TPMCafe.
--Josh Marshall
Pollari on the ropes?
Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation may not be the only game in town when it comes to the now-quickly-evolving Plame/Niger/uranium forgeries story.
As we discussed with you at the time, last year the Italian government and its intelligence agency SISMI mounted an extended disinformation campaign, using articles fed to Italian and British publications, in an effort to discredit or prevent further revelations about SISMI's complicity in the Niger uranium forgeries scandal.
Those bogus stories came in response to the as yet-unpublished-interviews that Rocco Martino was then giving, in which he detailed the involvement of SISMI officer Antonio Nucera and a SISMI asset, a female Italian national, who works in the Nigerien embassy in Rome in the promulgation of the forgeries.
Repubblica now seems to be delving into that cover-up effort that was taking place through much of last year.
More soon.
--Josh Marshall
Weak White House.
You heard it here first: White House caves on the Gulf Coast Wage Cut.
--Josh Marshall
David Rieff questions the premises of establishment Democratic foreign policy thinking and the assumptions of the authors of TPMCafe's America Abroad blog.
--Josh Marshall
More coming momentarily on the third installment from Italy's La Repubblica, more details on how SISMI floated bogus cover stories to hide their role in the Niger forgeries, cover stories (implicating the French, for instance) eagerly gobbled up by the conservative press in the UK and the US.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader JS has a question ...
Regarding the Colin Powell speech to the U.N., Powell--and now his former Chief of Staff--have said that they threw out much of the draft speech given to them by the White House. Yet, even as delivered, the speech had several falsehoods. My questions: how much worse was the first draft and why can't we see that draft? Nobody can says it's classified because it was exactly what the White House wanted Powell to tell the whole world.
Good question. If we ever have a real congressional inquiry maybe it will be asked.
--Josh Marshall
Berlusconi government issues carefully worded quasi-denial of complicity in Niger forgeries hoax. Relies on Roberts and Butler Reports for back up.
--Josh Marshall
Joe Hagan at the Journal: "New York Times reporter Judith Miller has begun discussing her future employment options with the newspaper, including the possibility of a severance package, a lawyer familiar with the matter, said yesterday."
--Josh Marshall
Coming tomorrow: Sen. Roberts' (R-KS) broken promise to complete the Senate Intel Committee Iraqi WMD inquiry after the 2004 election, what remains unrevealed in the fall 2003 Joint State-CIA IG Report into the Niger forgeries, and is it not time that we ask for an accounting from the Berlusconi government about the hoax perpetrated on the American people?
--Josh Marshall
The tsunami flows over into Italy. From the Associated Press ...
The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday.Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman.
She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials and Britain's MI6 intelligence services a dossier it knew was forged.
...
When foreign intelligence agencies met the documents with skepticism, Pollari used his own contacts in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and an aide to the president's national security adviser to promote the dossier, La Repubblica said, without elaborating.
Remember, Pollari had good contacts with folks at Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans. At the end of 2001 one he had attended a secret meeting in Rome with OSP stalwart Harold Rhode, the now-indicted Larry Franklin and neo-con regime-change-everywhere-at-once guru Michael Ledeen.
This is what my colleagues and I wrote last year about that meeting and the irregular nature of the meetings ...
The first meeting occurred in Rome in December, 2001. It included Franklin, Rhode, and another American, the neoconservative writer and operative Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting. (According to UPI, Ledeen was then working for Feith as a consultant.) Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. One of the Iranians, according to two sources familiar with the meeting, was a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks within the Iranian security services. The Washington Monthly has also learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in neoconservative circles in Washington.Alarm bells about the December 2001 meeting began going off in U.S. government channels only days after it occurred. On Dec. 12, 2001, at the U.S. embassy in Rome, America's newly-installed ambassador, Mel Sembler, sat down for a private dinner with Ledeen, an old friend of his from Republican Party politics, and Martino, the Italian defense minister. The conversation quickly turned to the meeting. The problem was that this was the first that Amb. Sembler had heard about it.
According to U.S. government sources, Sembler immediately set about trying to determine what he could about the meeting and how it had happened. Since U.S. government contact with foreign government intelligence agencies is supposed to be overseen by the CIA, Sembler first spoke to the CIA station chief in Rome to find out what if anything he knew about the meeting with the Iranians. But that only raised more questions because the station chief had been left in the dark as well. Soon both Sembler and the Rome station chief were sending anxious queries back to the State Department and CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., respectively, raising alarms on both sides of the Potomac.
The meeting was a source of concern for a series of overlapping reasons. Since the late 1980s, Ghorbanifar has been the subject of two CIA "burn notices." The agency believes Ghorbanifar is a serial "fabricator" and forbids its officers from having anything to do with him. Moreover, why were mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence agency behind the back of the CIA -- a clear breach of U.S. government protocol? There was also a matter of personal chagrin for Sembler: At State Department direction, he had just been cautioning the Italians to restrain their contacts with bad-acting states like Iran (with which Italy has extensive trade ties).
According to U.S. government sources, both the State Department and the CIA eventually brought the matter to the attention of the White House -- specifically, to Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the National Security Council, Stephen J. Hadley. Later, Italian spy chief Pollari raised the matter privately with Tenet, who himself went to Hadley in early February 2002. Goaded by Tenet, Hadley sent word to the officials in Feith's office and to Ledeen to cease all such activities. Hadley then contacted Sembler, assuring him it wouldn't happen again and to report back if it did.
See the rest of the meetings article here.
--Josh Marshall
The LA Times picks up the La Repubblica story ...
As anticipation swirled in Washington of potential indictments — and what it would mean for a Bush administration already beset by low approval ratings, the Iraq war and an embattled Supreme Court nomination — a related controversy was brewing in Italy over how the Niger allegations made their way into the intelligence stream.Italian parliamentary officials announced Tuesday that the head of Italy's military secret service, the SISMI intelligence agency, would be questioned next month over allegations that his agency gave the disputed documents to the United States and Britain, according to an Associated Press report. A spokeswoman said Nicolo Pollari, the agency director, asked to be questioned after reports this week in Italy's La Republica newspaper claiming that SISMI sent the CIA and U.S. and British officials information that it knew to be forged.
The newspaper reported that Pollari met at the White House on Sept. 9, 2002 with then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. The Niger claims surfaced shortly thereafter. A spokesman for Hadley, now the national security advisor, confirmed that the meeting took place, but declined to say what was discussed.
Hadley had played a prominent role in the controversy over Bush's claims in his State of the Union address — taking responsibility for the insertion of the 16 words that laid out the allegations.
Won't be the last.
--Josh Marshall
Roll Call (sub.req.): "Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was spotted Tuesday at the law offices of Patton Boggs paying a visit to Robert Luskin, the eccentric (for Washington, D.C.) lawyer who represents Karl Rove."
--Josh Marshall
As I hinted at in this post from earlier this evening, in his 2003 State of the Union address President did not say "Iraq purchased uranium from Niger" or even that "the British say that Iraq purchased uranium from Niger." He said something much more specific and couched, using language the significance of which would only become clear months later.
"The British government," said the president in the famous sixteen words, "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
As we learned later that summer and fall, those carefully chosen words had a very precise rationale behind them. The White House tried and failed to get the uranium claim into the October 7th, 2002 Cincinnati speech. The same battle was refought in late January of 2003 as the same parties struggled back and forth over whether the claim would be inserted in the State of the Union address. The CIA refused to countenance the use of the claim. So a compromise of sorts was struck. The president wouldn't be a fact witness to the allegation. He'd hang it on the Brits.
So the president wasn't saying Saddam had bought uranium. He wasn't even saying he'd tried. He said the Brits had "learned" that he tried.
Some White House defenders still hang their hat on this point, arguing that nothing the president said was in fact false. Anybody who got the wrong impression just didn't read the fine print.
That argument (let's call it 'the con-man defense') speaks for itself, I think.
But all of this brings us back to the question: What did the British know? They said they had good intel. The CIA didn't buy it. So what did they know?
Did they have separate non-discredited intelligence? Or, were they just holding out, refusing to admit they'd either been scammed or in on the scamming?
To date the British have refused to concede that they too may have been relying on flawed or phony evidence. They stand by their claim, but refuse to disclose the source or the nature of their evidence.
Last year's Butler Report (a rough analogue to last year's Senate intelligence committee report) went to great lengths to insulate the British finding from the taint of the forgeries. In one passage it says that ...
The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.
Later in the Report, in a pretty telling illustration of how tied the Butler Report was to the needs of US politics, the authors went so far as to provide the president with a specific exoneration ...
We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that:The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
was well-founded.
I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about how such a passage could have found its way into a British government inquiry. But let's review the story. The Brits say that they had multiple pieces of evidence upon which they based their claim. And the forged documents -- which they only found out about much later -- were not one of them. So the discreditation of the forgeries is irrelevant to their finding. The taint, shall we say, does not attach.
My assumption, and that of many others, is that the Brits are, to put it bluntly, full of it on this one. My best guess is that they are holding on to some de minimis 'other' evidence as a placeholder to get out of taking their own lumps in the Niger skullduggery.
With the claims of an intelligence agency especially, proving a negative is near impossible. So I can't prove to you that the Brits have nothing else. But I think I can make a pretty strong argument that the Butler Report was intentionally misleading on this key question.
The Butler Report wasn't the only British government inquiry into the faulty intelligence question. There was also a parliamentary committee report published in September 2003, before the question of the forgeries and Wilson and the rest of it became so intensely politicized. And a close look at this earlier report, chaired by Labour MP Ann Taylor, shows pretty clearly, I think, that the Butler Report was willfully misleading about the Brits' reliance on the forgeries.
I discussed this point at length in a post from July 17th, 2004. So if you're interested in finding out more, seeing the evidence and the argument, read that post and draw your own conclusions.
--Josh Marshall