The claim is that the Bush administration leaked Ms. Plame’s occupation as a CIA agent to the press in retaliation for her husband’s newspaper piece stating that he found no evidence of attempts to buy yellowcake from Niger. How well established is this claim, i.e. that it was done in retaliation? Please give the GQ answer if possible.
Thanks,
Rob
There really probably isn’t a GQ answer.
They tried to convict I. Scooter Libby on the violations of the intelligence act but the special prosecutor didn’t feel he could gain convictions on those charges and instead pursued obstruction of justice and perjury charges. Libby was convicted and sentenced to 30 months in jail, followed by 24 months of supervised released and a $250,000 fine. President Bush immediately commuted the jail sentence, the commutation was not the same as a full pardon and Libby remains a convicted felon and cut a cashier’s check for $250,000 and served his supervised release.
Most of the people who investigated the case, including the prosecutor, as well as the jury that heard the case, felt Libby was a fall guy and that the Vice President bore a greater responsibility for what happened. Some members of the jury even said they wouldn’t really be bothered if Libby was pardoned, because they viewed him as a peon essentially taking the fall for his boss. They weren’t excusing him but the jury also felt like the trial was trying the wrong person.
The popular perception remains that Cheney had Libby leak Plame’s identity as retribution. It is essentially a fact that Cheney told Libby, and Libby told reporters. Libby tried during his trial to say that he first heard about Plame through a reporter (Tim Russert) and that any time Libby mentioned her status after that he was just repeating a rumor he heard from Tim Russert. It was essentially proven in open court that Cheney, who had known Plame’s status because the Director of the CIA told him, had informed Libby of Plame’s status before Libby ever spoke with Tim Russert. Additionally the reporters who Libby says he told “this is a rumor I heard from Tim Russert” testified that Libby did not qualify his statement like that, he just flatly said “Plame is a covert operative.”
But has anyone been able to prove definitively that Cheney ordered Libby the leak the information? No. In fact Libby was not even convicted of leaking the information even though all the evidence in the court case suggests he did. Additionally no one has been able to establish any sort of GQ level “proof” of what the motivations were.
Also it is worth mentioning my personal, non-GQ analysis is that Cheney did it out of vindictiveness and President Bush was essentially out of the loop.
I say that because obviously Libby was not someone who had the access to know the name of a covert CIA operative just on his own, and since it was demonstrated in court that he heard this information from Cheney, we know the “original source” of the leak was Vice President Cheney.
We can’t of course prove what Cheney told Libby to do with that information.
I won’t say it is impossible that Cheney told Libby to “further expand on Libby’s knowledge of the full Joe Wilson situation so that he could better do his job” and that Libby let it slip because he’s a big mouthed idiot with no fucking clue how to conduct himself. That’s not impossible, but given the timing of all of it I just don’t know that it’s something I personally believe.
The reason I do not believe President Bush is involved is that he only commuted Libby’s sentence and did not pardon him. He commuted Libby’s sentence right away, and if he had later (right before leaving office) had pardoned Libby entirely I would have been suspicious. Instead, Bush only commuted the sentence and left Libby having to pay $250,000, left Libby having to remain a convicted felon and serve a period of supervised release. Bush could certainly have done the commutation instead of the pardon out of political necessity, but his last day in office political necessities would not have been a concern and he could have issued a pardon then. It is known because Cheney has made it known, that Cheney vehemently argued for a pardon and that he strongly disagree with the President’s decision not to issue a pardon. Such an openly worded disagreement between Cheney and Bush isn’t something that was entirely routine during the Bush administration. Additionally it wasn’t entirely routine for Cheney’s opinion to not be the most persuasive amongst Bush’s advisers–Cheney is widely considered by observers and political scientists to be the most powerful Vice President in American history for good reason.
I think the open break on the treatment of Libby is because Bush was furious that Cheney had done this thing against Plame behind his back.
But I thought it came out that it was Dick Armitage who leaked that Plame was a covert operative.
Rob
Pleeeeeze, let’s not ruin a good story with the truth.
Several people leaked it. Dick Armitage was the source of Robert Novak, whose column set off the whole affair. However, there is no evidence whatsoever Dick Armitage was in any way an insider of the Bush Administration or in any way connected with anything illegal or retaliatory. It looks like maybe you already know about it since you’re asking about him by name?
Armitage was investigated heavily and it was concluded his leak was not criminal in nature.
Libby was noted for having leaked information to other journalists, around one month prior to Armitage (Armitage gave his interview with Novak in July 2003 and Libby is accused of leaking to Judith Miller and others in June of 2003), and Libby’s leak is the only one I know of that was ever looked at seriously as a retaliatory action from the administration.
Armitage was with the State Department which was sort of known as being an outlier in the Bush Administration at that time, if you recall Powell’s State Department was not really on the best of terms with the White House, and Armitage isn’t someone who you would really expect to be working closely with Bush/Cheney to intentionally go after Joe Wilson.
It also appears 100% genuine that Libby mouthing off to reporters and Armitage giving Novak an interview were 100% unrelated. Armitage found out about Plame because he saw her name in a classified State Department document, Libby found out because Vice President Cheney informed him personally. So Armitage knowing about Plame and Libby knowing about Plame were totally separate and in no way related. Armitage’s leak was never charged as a criminal action.
Now, all of that being said, Robert Novak came out and said Armitage didn’t inadvertently leak Plame’s information but instead deliberately did it and deliberately expected it to be a big deal. How that squares with everything else I don’t know, I also don’t know how Armitage responded to those allegations from Novak.
Note that neither was Libby’s. They got him for lying to the FBI and the grand jury about how he learned the information.
In his press conference announcing the indictment of Libby, as I read it, Fitzgerald suggested that at least part of the reason Libby was not charged over the leak itself was a perceived difficulty in showing what Libby’s motives were, i.e., whether he was deliberately trying to harm Plame. This was not an exoneration of Libby, however – far from it. Fitzgerald said that it was Libby’s lying itself that made the determination of motive impossible to prove.
The alternative explanation is that it was leaked to explain why the administration would send someone as loose lipped as Joe Wilson. People were being blamed for sending Joe Wilson to Niger and leaking Plame’s role in his being sent was the administration’s way of saying don’t blame us, blame the CIA.
Once Armitage leaked her name, she may have become “fair game” as far as the White House was concerned, and repeated this information to the press, eventually using Armitage as an excuse. Rather than taking steps to protect her after the leak occurred, which an honorable White House would have and should have done, they used the situation to punish her and her husband by further destroying her career. After all this first happened, the continued smear campaign against the Wilsons generated by the Bush White House and the Republican Party was a complete disgrace to this country. So many lies against them have been repeated so many times, their familiarity makes them seem true, but they are still lies. Its ironic that it was a CIA expert in weapons of mass destruction in the middle east that was brought down, or at least not supported, by the same White House who used WMDs as an excuse to mount a war against a regime that was already being kept under control by other means, to the point that they had already given up their WMDs. A further disgrace is the thousands of needless American, coalition and innocent Iraqi deaths since, including many children, and the huge monetary cost to this country that will never be regained, not to mention how it has bolstered anti-American sentiment around the world and actually increased the standing of groups like Al-Qaeda that present a real threat to our safety, rather than the imagined threat that Iraq was before the war. There were many much better and less costly ways to deal with Iraq, and we will pay for the bad judgement of the Bush White House for many years to come. Medicare may be just one casualty if the Republicans get their way, there will be more to come. I’m still ashamed to have been complicit in this war by not standing up against it, as Joe Wilson and a very few other people had the ethical conviction to do. Never again.