Was Armitage deliberately chosen as a Plame leaker?

Raw Story’s post undercutting Richard Armitage’s claim to innocence in his leaking of Valerie Plame’s name to Bob Novak got me to wondering whether Libby, or even Cheney himself, didn’t deliberately finger Armitage as a potential leaker.

Add in Novak’s own statement: “Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear that he considered it especially suited for my column.”

First, he’s not a neoconservative. His leak, then, would give the Cheney take on Plame deliberately picking Joe Wilson to go to Africa better legs.

Second, he was in the State Department. Of course, almost all the major and semimajor neocon players, especially on the invasion of Iraq, were either in the Defense Department or Cheney’s office. So, Armitage being at State would be a second way to try to make the story walk better.

That answers the question of why Armitage in particular would be a good outlet for the leak.

So, let’s say Armitage did know what he was doing. The next question is “why”? Why, in the sense of, why did Armitage voluntarily sign up for being a leaker?

Several possibilities, probably related.

First, though not a neocon, other statements by Armitage make him even more a true believer in the idea that Saddam Hussein had WMDs than his boss, Colin Powell. So, purely from his own foreign policy stance, he had reason to push for war.

Second, maybe it was a quid pro quo to keep neocon heat off of Powell.

Third, it was a personal gesture by Armitage to neocons that he thought would deflect some pressure from Powell without being an official quid pro quo. (In this scenario, Armitage chose himself as a leaker.)

Fourth, maybe Powell knows more about all this than he has ever let on. That means Armitage is continuing to dive on his own sword, or else that Powell was in on setting him up to be the leaker.

In any case, taking Novak at his word, or even halfway at his word, about Armitage, it’s clear Armitage was no babe in the woods on this.

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After facing angry letters & calls, judge refuses to keep Scooter Libby out of jail

The news just keeps getting better and better today.

A judge has just refused to allow Scooter Libby to stay out of jail pending his appeal. No date has been set for Libby to report to prison, but it is expected to be within six to eight weeks.

It's nice to see justice -- and not influence -- being done.

Interestingly, the judge's decision today could well put our not-so-beloved president in a hard spot.

The Washington Post reports:

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton's decision will send Libby's attorneys rushing to an appeals court to block the sentence and could force President Bush to consider calls from Libby's supporters to pardon the former aide....

Walton never appeared to waiver from his opinion that a delay was unwarranted. After 12 prominent law professors filed documents supporting Libby's request, the judge waived it off as "not something I would expect from a first-year in law school."

He also said he received several "angry, harassing, mean-spirited" letters and phone calls following his sentencing but said they wouldn't factor into his decision.

This is also posted on In This Moment.

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A Soldier By Any Other Name

Some things just make your blood boil. There have been many things like that recently for me. But none so much as the op-ed article wrtitten by Fouad Ajami for Friday's Wall Street Journal. I will let Mr. Ajami's words speak for themselves:


"In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe, a refusal to be lulled into moral and political compromises. Your critics have made much of this and have seen it as self-righteousness and moral absolutism, but this has guided you through the great, divisive issues faced by our country over these last, searing years. Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics. He didn't sit around the councils of power only to make the rounds in Georgetown's salons insinuating that this was not his war all along. He didn't claim this war when it promised an easy victory only to desert it when it stalled in the alleyways of Fallujah and Baghdad and in the twilight world of Arab politics.
.....snip......
He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own."


What the fuck? Are you kidding me? Wow, this Fouad Ajami guy must be some kind of dedicated American soldier, with a heroic record of bravery, to have the cojones to make this statement right? Eh, not so much. Fouad Ajami is a native of Lebanon who has lived in the United States since 1963. Never so much as been a bugle boy in a ROTC squad. He's got zip for military service; but he is very fond of war, as long as it is not him, his friends, or their families fighting in it. Who are his friends? You need not have asked. They are, of course, Wolfowitz (a mentor of sorts), Cheney, Candiliar Rice, Kristol, the fine citizens at the Council of Foreign Relations, and every other leading neocon in sight. There is not a freaking one of them that has ever been in a uniform or seen a drop of blood shed for their follies. This sick little prick needs to be sent back home to Lebanon immediately. There, he should be able to view first hand the war ravaged handiwork of minds like his.

Numerous other writers have already noted the absurdity of Ajami's incendiary comments about Libby when juxtaposed against the real American soldiers dying and being maimed by the thousands for this charlatan's frivolity, and that is so true. But there is another soldier that has fallen casualty to the neocon's war of belligerent choice. The soldier taken out of service to her country by Libby, and the treasonous conduct which he ended up in the dock for in the first place. Valerie Plame Wilson, a woman who spent over twenty years serving her country in the clandestine division of the CIA, nearly a third of which was overseas and undercover. A woman who was the leader of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction anti-proliferation group in the CIA at the time she was heinously outed by cowards like Libby, Cheney and Ajami. If my thin blood is boiling, Valerie Plame Wilson's must be running like double habernero hot sauce.

The real soldiers lost as a result of the Iraq war don't mean a tinker's damn to the neocon cowards, nor do their death and destruction, but the thought of poor pasty little Scooter serving a couple of years in Club Fed before returning to his life of leisure and wealth, now that gets their panties all twisted. I am going to end this article with the dead on accurate thoughts of of a fellow commenter at The Next Hurrah, JGabriel, because I could not possibly say it better:

"Well, if Libby is a 'soldier' in the war (in Iraq? on Terror? against Liberals?), then so was Valerie Wilson.

Which means Libby isn't so much the 'fallen' soldier as he is the one who stabbed a fellow soldier in the back, left her bleeding on the ground, and posted a sign next to her saying 'Desecrate This U.S. Corpse'.

With that reasoning in mind, Libby should be court-martialed, at the very least."

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Libby Sentenced To 30 Months

Rawstory is reporting that Scooter Libby was just sentenced to 30 months in prison, fined $250,000 and given two years probation. Many of the letters blue girl and bmaz asked to have released can be found on the website the Smoking Gun. I imagine blue girl and bmaz will have more to say later.

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Senator Jay Rockefeller Needs To Man Up

In a series of extremely good posts, emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler) at The Next Hurrah discusses the unfortunate, yet consistent, tendencies of Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence (SSCI), to turn into a shrinking violet at critical moments when the chips are down. Instead of quoting and retelling the stories here, I am going to link to the four pieces emptywheel has done and urge everyone here to read them in their entirety. This is important stuff and Ms. Wheel does a remarkable job with it. Again, take the time to click the links and read the material. On the other side of the links, I will relate a somewhat interesting little story from my past involving Sen. Rockefeller.

The Wilson SSCI Part One: Or, Why I Want a New SSCI Chair

The Wilson SSCI Part Two: Or, Kneecapping Waxman

The Wilson SSCI Part Three: Or, Cheney's Black Hole

How's that Search for a New SSCI Chair Going, John Ashcroft Testimony Edition

Now, for my little story. In 1981-1982, I was living in Tucson Arizona and attending graduate school at the University of Arizona (organic chemistry and physics for those thinking I am solely a legal imbecile). While in Tucson, I worked for Mo Udall and his re-election campaign. My mother had long been friends with Mo and his brother Stewart, and there were several very hot girls working on the local portion of the campaign, so I eagerly signed on. At any rate, our big be all to end all fundraiser before the election was a tribute dinner for Mo, honoring his twentieth year in Congress, to be held at the DoubleTree Resort in Tucson. The named guests headlining this gala event were Robert Redford and, wait for it,.... an up and coming Democratic star to be, the young Governor of West Virginia, Jay Rockefeller. I still have to this day, somewhere in a box, souvenir t-shirts with the silk screened likeness of Mo in the middle and Redford on one side and Rockefeller on the other. Redford and Mo consumed most of the oxygen the entire day, but they kept trying with every ounce of energy to put Rockefeller on an even plane, because the grooming had already begun for his Senate run two years later. This night was to be part of Rockefeller's national coming out in anticipation of the Senate run. I, along with several of my friends, had a chance to really talk to Rockefeller during a couple of different points in the day, because everything concentrated on Redford and Mo no matter what we did. Rockefeller was literally left alone a couple of times, and that is when we would go over. At any rate, the consensus opinion among all of us was "man, this is the nicest and brightest guy, but what a fucking milquetoast". Some things, apparently, never change.

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CREW Asks Patrick Fitzgerald to Reopen The Plame Case

CREW has written Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald asking him to reopen the Valerie Plame investigation. CREW notes that:

Press reports indicate that Mr. Rove uses a Republican National Committee (RNC) email account for 95% of his communications. In addition, the RNC's counsel has admitted that all of Mr. Rove's emails prior to 2005 have been destroyed. Moreover, the White House has admitted that - as CREW reported yesterday - five million emails are missing from the White House servers. All of this raises serious questions about whether Mr. Rove knowingly destroyed evidence relevant to the Special Counsel's inquiry and whether Mr. Fitzgerald received all relevant documents.

Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director, said today, "It looks like Karl Rove may well have destroyed evidence that implicated him in the White House's orchestrated efforts to leak Valerie Plame Wilson's covert identity to the press in retaliation against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson." Sloan continued, "Special Counsel Fitzgerald should immediately reopen his investigation into whether Rove took part in the leak as well as whether he obstructed justice in the ensuing leak investigation."

Rawstory notes that although at the end of the Libby trial Fitzgerald said he didn't expect to take any future action he did say that if new information came to light he would engage in further investigation.

What is unknown is whether the missing emails are "new information" to Fitzgerald. According to attorney Robert Luskin Rove was under the "understanding" that all of his emails have already been preserved by Patrick Fitzgerald. The AP's Laurie Kellman reports that Luskin said, Fitzgerald "saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee."

Hey, Judiciary Committee Investigators, how about having a talk with Patrick Fitzgerald? All he can do is tell you he isn't going to open his file.

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What A Day!!!

Today has been one of the most interesting days in years. This morning I was reminded what I have known for a long time--you just can't unring a bell. Last Friday the Kansas Board of Public Utilities found out that the Kansas City Star and a local weekly called the Pitch had published stories on their websites based on a confidential communication between the board and its lawyer. They immediately secured a temporary restraining order forcing the newspapers to pull down their stories. Yesterday evening the Kansas City Kansan published its own story based on the story first published by the Pitch and then ordered down. So much for unringing a bell. Once a story is posted to the Internet it is there for all time.

Then there were the all day House and Senate Judiciary Hearings where with each passing witness it became ever more apparent that at least some of the purged prosecutors were fired for either not prosecuting Democrats in time to help Republicans, or for prosecuting Republicans with too much vigor. Those were amazing hearings. Watching the Bush administration needlessly sacrifice some of the best and brightest young Republicans was sad. I have the impression that if the Administration had just said that it wanted to a change of direction the purged USAs would have never said a word. Whoever thought up the idea of challenging their job performance should be fired. Whoever decided that was a good idea should join that person on the unemployment line. At the end of the day a senior Senator and two Representatives (including the ranking member of the house ethics committee) seem to have committed ethical violations. The Bush administration has done great damage to the Justice Department and its US attorney program.

Then there is the Libby verdict. Listening to the juror who gave a press conference, I came away with the idea that the jury liked Libby, and wanted to find him innocent. They couldn't. They really wanted to get at those who they believe are the real villains of this sad story--the Vice President and Karl Rove. And they couldn't. Like the USA scandal the Plame scandal was self inflicted. The Vice President needlessly decided to bring the name Valerie Plame into the story. Why is any body's guess. Arrogance. Stupidity. Self destructive vindictiveness. Outing her wasn't necessary to constructing a defense, but they did it anyway.

Then there is the continuing scandal that is Walter Reed. The reasons for that mess are symptomatic of the arrogant incompetence and lack of concern for us regular citizens that have been the hallmarks of the entire Bush administration. There is an old saying "hope for the best, but plan for the worst." Obviously, that old saying is meaningless for an administration that doesn't believe in Plan B.

Finally, hanging over all of the day is Iraq itself. I know several young men and women who have served or are in the final stages of training to serve in Iraq. How do you train somebody to referee a civil war? Your guess is as good as any general's opinion. I am not sure this administration really cares about those young men and women, but I do. So should you. Goodnight. I wonder what wonders or horrors tomorrow will bring.

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Why Did Scooter Libby Pick Tim Russert?

If you have been following the Scooter Libby trial you know that Scooter Libby has pretty consistently contended that he learned of Valerie Plame's connection to Joe Wilson from Tim Russert during a July 2003 phone call. Russert has said that the two didn't talk about Valerie Plame during that phone call. In fairness Russert first told the FBI he couldn't recall discussing Plame with Libby, but later firmed up his position and has steadfastly acknowledged he talked to Libby but denied Plame was ever discussed.

Fitzgerald has presented a mountain of evidence showing that Libby learned of Plame's identity long before he talked to Russert. He has also presented a mountain of evidence indicating that Dick Cheney was obsessed with contradicting Joe Wilson. Cheney thought Wilson had said that Cheney sent him to Niger. Early reporting made it sound like Cheney had directly ordered Wilson to Niger. In fact, Wilson only said that he was sent to Niger by the CIA to check on a concern of the VP. Both Cheney and Wilson were 100% accurate. The mainstream media had simply screwed up the reporting.

Cheney was hot to prove he didn't personally send Wilson. He found out that Wilson's wife was CIA and had something to do with Wilson's selection. He decided to push the story that Wilson's wife had sent Wilson to Niger as a boondoggle. Why anybody would consider a trip to Niger a boondoggle is beyond me, but that was Cheney was peddling to the Right Wing Noise Machine.

Prior to Plame ever being mentioned in the press, and prior to his discussion with Russert, the overwelming evidence proves that Libby had been part of several conversations concerning how Cheney wanted to respond to the report that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger. Libby is simply lying when he claims he learned about Plame from Russert.

Here has been what troubling me about this whole Libby trial. Something that just doesn't hang together. When Scooter Libby was scrambling for a story that had a chance of holding water, why in the world did he point to a specific conversation with Tim Russert, of all people, as being where he learned that Plame was Wilson's wife. Was he counting on Russert's reported bad memory? Was he counting on Russert's unhealthy coziness with Cheney's office and his chief of staff? After all Dana Milbank has reported that Cheney thinks he owns Tim Russert. You know, they call guys like Russert journalists because they often take notes. Why would Libby reasonably think Russert didn't make notes of their phone conversation? Or was there something else? If so what?

I haven't seen this blogged. If you have post a comment. I am truly puzzled. Just why would Libby point to a specific conversation with a specific journalist to bolster his claim that he didn't learn about Plame from Dick Cheney or some other Administration official, unless he had some reason to believe Russert would back him up. Any other explanation sounds like a pretty stupid move for a very shrewed operator.

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