Reading through Scooter Libby’s defense discovery motion makes for some intereting reading. I think I find the following to be the most intriguing. It relates to the documents the CIA drew up for the Department of Justice, asking that an investigation be opened. The prosecution has not turned the documents over to the defense.
CIA officials have been openly critical of the OVP – and indeed, according to the indictment, Mr. Libby was critical of the CIA as well. In that context, agency and witness bias are a legitimate concern for the defense. And, to the extent that Director Tenet was involved in
the creation of the referral documents, or actively pushed the DOJ to investigate the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity, the referral documents would show that the bias against Mr. Libby reached to the highest levels of the CIA and did not simply represent the complaints of lower ranking employees. Further, Mr. Tenet is a likely witness. If he was personally involved in the referral process, then the referral documents would be important for preparing to examine him on the issue of bias.
I have always thought George Tenet was the senior administration official in the Mike Allen and Dana Priest’s September 28, 2003 article:
Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson’s account touched off a political fracas over Bush’s use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.
“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.
The Libby defense makes me think I had it right all along.
was that Libby just fingered Rove and Fleischer. I can’t find this on the blogs and they had a 10 minute segment calling this huge… very strange.
he didn’t finger them. He indicated that he intended to call them as witnesses and that he would attempt to impeach their credibility. To do that, his lawyers said, they needed to get discovery of their emails and other correspondence so that they could effectively question them.
In Ari’s case, they are trying to establish that Ari’s recollection is faulty, or that he heard about Plame from some other source. It’s a wild goose chase.
For Rove, it is less clear.
Also, they intend to go after Marc Grossman, whose memory they claim is faulty.
I was amused to read that Libby intends to call Joe Wilson as a hostile witness (p.9). Should it come to pass, that testimony will be a Classic. He’s not likely to ‘break’ under questioning.
Having Rove on the stand is going to be fun too. How long do you think he’ll be up there before he gets testy & Libby’s lawyers ask to treat him as hostile?
Did you see that Walton admonished the lawyers for leaks to the press today, & set a hearing on the matter for later in the month?
I can’t wait for the “contemporaneous documents [that]reflect the points that Mr. Libby was to make to reporters” to be made public.
I don’t get why naming Tenet as a possible witness ties him to the WaPo quote. Tenet seems a possible source, but so does Armitage. It’s never been clear that Tenet was willing to do much more with his frustrations than to bite his tongue ’til it bled. He’s described in Steve Coll’s book as the consummate bureaucrat — acceding to pressure to issue a referral seems more like his MO for dealing with his anger. Not arguing one source or an other, just wondering what connection you’re seeing here — I’m missing it.
OT: did anyone see Olbermann’s bit on the Lodi terrorism case Tues night? He wasn’t too impressed by the gov’t’s case either. Local tv aired some of Hayat’s “confession” last night — it was really lame. Both juries (his & his fathe’s) are deliberating now.
The first thing to remember about Tenet is that he got punked by Woodward with that ‘slamdunk’ comment. He didn’t say it in the context in which it was presented.
But beyond that…Tenet’s agency was strongly against going to war and refused all pressure to maunfacture a case tying Iraq to 9/11. For this, people like Krauthammer and Safire savaged the agency and called them girly men.
On the nuclear issue, the agency was willing to say that Saddam was probably pursuing nukes, and that the centrifuges were for that purpose…but only in the face of relentless pressure.
The analysts particularly hated Libby and Cheney because they came to Langley personally and urged them to go on pointless witchunts.
When Wilson went public, the administration blamed the agency and forced Tenet to take the blame, even though it was Tenet that warned them personally, and repeatedly, not to use the Niger intelligence.
But, once they outed Plame, it was over. The agency had had enough. And that is when they counterleaked and forced Hadley to take the blame.
It has always seemed to me that Tenet fought back when, after he took the blame, they still went ahead and outed one of his agents. A failure to do so would have undermined his authority within the agency. Plus, he was rightfully pissed off.
Yea, I get that about Tenet. Coll makes clear he was very good at bridging divides. Clearly, he was pissed; no one knows how much that Medal bought. He certainly could be the ssource for that quote; I just don’t see anything in the brief to link him to it though.
So … what kind of witness do you think Joe Wilson will make?
I can’t imagine that they will call Wilson. In fact, I think their defense is all procedural. If they win on procedural grounds, the case will not go forward. If they lose, they’ll plea out.
I don’t think there will be an actual trial.
By procedural are you referring to the dismisal via graymail? They’re not even close on that one yet. Wouldn’t discount Bush intervention though. I’m old enopugh to remember well the excitement aas Iran-Contra began to unfold.
You may be right that they have no real intention of calling Wilson (just fishing for papers they won’t get), but I can’t help but smirk at the thought. But given their balls-out approach ot things, ‘best defense is good offense’ crap, they may actually delusional enough to think they’d prevail.
Walton’s an interesting judge (despite the Sibel-Edmonds case he quashed) — he’s not going to let this go away easily. Expect Libby to get a good bit of the discovery he asked for (in his compromise position — what’s in PF’s office).
I have a bet on; Libby’s team is setting up for a casper pardon. This case will never make it to trial.
There’s a war on, and we’re about to launch a third. The commander will be too busy.
Just remember in all of this legal stuff, that Libby is just indicted for lying and obstruction of justice. When the WH comes out and says things like bla bla…just remember this…especially about the NIE lies…
One of the broader aspects of all this is that, in the end, people with an authoritarian mindset and an appetite forpower and dominion over others always turn against each other eventually.
And now, as the weight of the Bush regime’s abiding insanity and aggresive dysfunctionality causes it to implode upon itself, all the self-serving rats are attacking each other.
Interestingly, there’s no indication that any Democrats anywhere in the public discourse stream have anything to do with helping to bring about this fracturing of Repub and Neocon symbiosis. I’m sure many will try to take credit for it as things continue to disintegrate for BushCo, but the lack of Dem voices truly and seriously engaged in all this does not bode well going forward, (though certainly almost anything will bean improvement over the BushCo madness).
Sadly, your last paragraph is all too true. Maybe Murtha could be credited with inspiring the retired Generals to start speaking up.
Weirdly, there’s an an article by Julian Borger in last Sunday’s Guardian that, if true, makes one hope Rove remains by W’s side at least a little longer. He reports, via Vince Cannistraro, that Rove is “adamantly opposed to a war” with Iran.
Rove is a villain and a devious bastard but he’s never been a Neocon, despite the confluence of interest necessitated by the mutual involvement with the Imbecile in Chief.
And it would seem clear there’s been an ongoing state of tension between Cheney’s operation and Rove’s operations for quite some time and that dynamic has become much more openly adversarial in the last year or so as the Neocon insanity has become ever more dysfunctional and ever more desperate as they lose more and more of their power to bully and intimidate in order to get their way.
So, it’s wingnut on wingnut. Rove is a blazing asshole, but he is rational. The Cheneyites have no such restraint on their criminal insanity.
The lack of Dem voices could really hurt them in future elections. All an “outsider” Republican has to say to an incumbent is: “You were there. Why didn’t you speak up?”
Yes! That’s what I meant above when I said;
“…but the lack of Dem voices truly and seriously engaged in all this does not bode well going forward…”
By failing to articulate an unequivocal and responsible position on the war, and by capitulating so easily and so often to the Repub agenda in congress with barely a whimper, the current Dem leadership has played right into the hands of the GOP propaganda machine going forward. And in doing so they may have inflicted even greater damage on the Dem party itself and the country as a whole than we can even imagine right now.
I think you are overstating the problem. But it depends a lot on how many freshmen democrats are elected to the house this year.
The new crop is going to be forceful. But if their caucus is only 20 strong it won’t be that influential. If the crop is 30-50 strong, then it will have real clout.
The Senate is where the real problem lies. Our leadership is compromised and there will little in the way of new blood. Plus, the new blood is not very impressive or independent minded.
Just a question here for those who have followed the recent developments more carefully than I have….
Have any of the official papers filed since October 2004 by anyone involved mentioned anything about what fitz considers to be the motive for Libby’s lies?
The reason I ask this is that someone wrote somewhere (I’m sorry I’ve forgotten where now, I read so many blogs it’s sometimes hard to remember where I read things…) that the last time fitz had anything to say about the supposed motive was in Oct of 2004 and that he has said nothing on his official suspected motive since that time.
I wonder if that is true and, if so, if it means anything, like perhaps Fitz is seeing through to some deeper motives. Maybe the real motive was to stop the Brewster Jennings “group”, Valerie Plame’s fake company cover, from finding out too much about something or another that was/is going on concerning Iraq/Iran?
Every time I see the “revenge” motive cited, I get a spidey-sense tingle that something isn’t quite right with that. I certainly see how the “revenge” and squelching dissent and ridiculing the messenger of truth(Joe Wilson) motive might be sufficient, but then I wonder if everything is as simple as it seems, and the above question is part of wanting to know. Maybe Libby was killing two or three birds with one stone…
Is my hat looking metallic yet?
if you follow the link to Libby’s motion, you will see that Fitz has attributed Libby’s perjury to a desire to avoid being fired, since the President said he would fire anyone that leaked.
On one level, this is stupid. The President knew who leaked. But on another, it makes sense. It kept any one from leaking to what Libby had testified to, and therefore, Bush was under no pressure to fire him.
As to the Brewster-Jennings angle, I have never found that persuasive. I think they just wanted to punish Wilson, spin the story, and send a message to other potential leakers.
Those last paragraphs in Fitzgerald’s brief talking about Libby’s fear of being fired is the equivalent of legal snark. He’s throwing their words in their (& Libby’s) face but isn’t buying.
There’s language in there though of documents shoing a concerted effort by the admin to hit back at Wilson. Motive enough.
I would’t discount the B-J angle, but without serious leakage, it’s something we’ll simply never know. As you point out, the cover-up of manipulated intelligence narrative works well enough without it.