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Dear W,

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I’m still angry that you did not pardon Scooter. "I don’t think was appropriate," for you to have ordered Libby–on the morning of June 9, 2003, to respond to Joe Wilson’s assertions about our case for war against Iraq, and to have told me it was okay to "get the whole story out," just before Scooter tried to launder this through Judy Miller on July 8, 2003 and then Novak on July 9, 2003, only to let him take the fall for you when Patrick Fitzgerald started investigating who leaked Valerie Wilson’s name.

You asked Scooter to "stick his neck in the meat-grinder" to rebut Joe Wilson’s criticisms, and now you have "in effect left Scooter hanging in the wind" for something you ordered.

Let this be a warning to you. I consider this fair game [oh wait–that’s Rove’s word] for my memoir, which I’m currently shopping.

Love,

Dick

The Only Picture on Dick’s Wall

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I hate to keep harping on Politico’s blowjob for Cheney. But I’ve been obsessing all morning by this picture accompanying the story, showing the sole picture hanging on the wall of Cheney’s office (click to enlarge; the other Politico pictures show a lot of family pictures on furniture, but this appears to be the only one on the wall).

How odd, first of all, that an article trying to redeem the Bush-Cheney failed presidency gives pride of place to an earlier historically unpopular President, Gerald Ford. And how odd that this picture accompanies this statement–highlighted by Peterr. 

Not content to wait for a historical verdict, Cheney said he is set to plunge into his own memoirs, feeling liberated to describe behind-the-scenes roles over several decades in government now that the “statute of limitations has expired” on many of the most sensitive episodes. [my empahsis]

See, I’m interested in Cheney’s focus on statute of limitations and on that picture for several different reasons.

Cheney talks about statutes of limitations going back decades. But of course, the ones that would be expiring now would be those for crimes he committed (he seems to be admitting) during the Bush Administration–those crimes committed about five years ago, in many cases.

A number of smart lawyers have been reminding me via email of late that, while the statute of limitations on things like FISA violations may be expiring in the coming weeks, the statute of limitations on any conspiracy to cover up those crimes would not expire until the conspiracy to cover-up those crimes was over. 

Except.

Except that that is only true for as long as Bush and Cheney tried to hide their crimes from law enforcement. You know–from people over at DOJ like Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft. If, for example, Cheney ordered the future AG to go to then-current AG John Ashcroft and tell him they were going to violate FISA even though Jim Comey told them not to, then they couldn’t very well be accused of covering up the crime from DOJ, could they? Keeping DOJ in the loop at each stage of the process seems to innoculate the White House–to some degree–from this kind of cover-up charge.

Maybe the smart lawyers can explain in comments how this works. Read more →

Obama's Executive Privilege Order and the House Judiciary Committee Lawsuit

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I’ve seen a lot of celebratory posts about the effect of Obama’s Executive Order on Presidential Documents, but I fear it distracts attention from an equally important focus: the House Judiciary Committee lawsuit.

The posts all focus on Obama’s order that Executive Privilege claims must be reviewed by the incumbent President, not the former President.

(a)  Upon receipt of a claim of executive privilege by a living former President, the Archivist shall consult with the Attorney General (through the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel), the Counsel to the President, and such other executive agencies as the Archivist deems appropriate concerning the Archivist’s determination as to whether to honor the former President’s claim of privilege or instead to disclose the Presidential records notwithstanding the claim of privilege.  Any determination under section 3 of this order that executive privilege shall not be invoked by the incumbent President shall not prejudice the Archivist’s determination with respect to the former President’s claim of privilege.

(b)  In making the determination referred to in subsection (a) of this section, the Archivist shall abide by any instructions given him by the incumbent President or his designee unless otherwise directed by a final court order.  The Archivist shall notify the incumbent and former Presidents of his determination at least 30 days prior to disclosure of the Presidential records, unless a shorter time period is required in the circumstances set forth in section 1270.44 of the NARA regulations.  Copies of the notice for the incumbent President shall be delivered to the President (through the Counsel to the President) and the Attorney General (through the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel).  The copy of the notice for the former President shall be delivered to the former President or his designated representative.

So, commentators say, this means we’ll be able to get a bunch of documents–the US Attorney scandal documents and the Plame documents are the most frequently mentioned–that Bush has been withholding.

But of course, particularly with respect to those documents, there’s already a pending case–the HJC case that was reinstated under the House rules (and now includes Turdblossom for the USA purge documents and Mukasey for Siegelman documents and Plame documents).

Now, I’ve asked some folks on the committee and they’re sure Obama’s EO won’t moot their suit. And, presuming AG Holder approves it, Obama’s administration can presumably release the documents right to the Committees Read more →

Dick Still Complaining that His Beloved Firewall Didn't Get Pardoned

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Apparently, Dick Cheney doesn’t believe the little scold he sent Bush through Michael Isikoff the other day was sufficiently shrill. He’s out again today, explicitly criticizing Bush for not pardoning his little Scooter.

h/t mikepellegrini

h/t mikepellegrini

George Bush should have pardoned I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney said after stepping down as vice president this week.

"He was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision," Cheney told Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard, a leading conservative Washington magazine.

[snip]

Hayes said that Cheney had publicly disagreed with Bush only four times in the eight years of the Bush administration.

They were only out of office for a day before the fifth disagreement surfaced.

I wonder whether Cheney is worried that his firewall might not hold tight as Libby faces the rest of his life as a felon? Or perhaps Dick is just aghast that Bush–who after all asked Libby to stick his neck in a meat grinder–didn’t return the favor by sacrificing a little of his scarce posterity to thank Libby for his work protecting Bush?

In any case, I do hope Cheney’s mood about Bush remains contentious and sour. There is little I’d like more than to see Bush and Cheney take each other out during their retirement.

Dick’s Talking Points, Two

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When Libby was first asked about any discussions he had with Cheney in response to Joe Wilson’s op-ed, he first claimed he had not discussed the op-ed until after the Novak column (though with his aborted discussion of a "conver–"sation, he may have been thinking of the July 9 conversation he had with Novak and subsequently hid).

I don’t recall that conversation until after the, until after the Novak piece. I don’t recall it during this week of July 6. I recall it after the Novak conver — after the Novak article appeared I recall it , and I recall being asked by the Vice President early on, you know, about this envoy, you know, who is it and — but I don’t recall that, early on he asked about it in connection with the wife, although he may well have given the note that I took.

Q. And so your recollection is that he wrote on July — that you discussed with the Vice President, did his wife send him on a junket? As a response to the July 14th Novak column that said, he was sent because his wife sent him and she works at the CIA?

A. I don’t recall discussing it –yes, I don’t recall discussing it in connection with when this article first appeared. I recall it later.

Then, when Fitz points out the utter absurdity of discussing with Cheney, speculatively, that Plame was purportedly involved in sending her husband, after Novak had already reported that fact directly, Libby shifts, and tries to claim they talked about it after July 10 when–he claimed–Tim Russert had told him of Plame’s identity.

Q. And are you telling us under oath that from July 6th to July 14th you never discussed with Vice President Cheney whether Mr. Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA?

A. No, no, I’m not saying that. On July 10 or 11 I learned, I thought anew, that the wife — that, that reporters I lwere telling us that the wife worked at the CIA. And I may have had a conversation then with the Vice President either late on the 11th or on the 12th in which I relayed that reporters were saying that.

Basically, Libby was trying to date the notations Cheney had made on Wilson’s op-ed ("Or did his wife send him on a junket?") Read more →

Cheney’s FBI Report

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Murray’s got an important Christmas Eve scoop, reporting key details from Cheney’s FBI interview. I’ll return to the main point of it later, but IMO the really interesting detail is this one:

Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame’s identity.

This answers the really substantive question I had about Cheney’s FBI interview: whether he attempted to leave open the possibility that he had ordered Libby to leak Plame’s identity–and that, because either Cheney or Bush insta-declassified Plame’s identity, the leak was legal. 

Apparently, Cheney did not. 

I’m off for dinner with mr. ew, so I’ll have to return to the implications of this fact and others later. But in the meantime, go read Murray’s scoop. 

Scott McClellan Dismantles Cheney’s Plame Firewall

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When evidence from the Scooter Libby trial showed that Dick Cheney had probably ordered Scooter Libby to leak Valerie Plame’s identity, Cheney built a firewall that legally excused the leak–but still insulated George Bush from involvement in knowingly outing a CIA spy. Cheney claimed, on at least two occasions, that he himself had the authority to declassify classified information, presumably up to and including Valerie Plame’s identity. Yet new information from Scott McClellan dismantles Cheney’s firewall; McClellan reveals that in the same period when Cheney was claiming he had the authority to declassify such information, the White House Counsel’s Office under Harriet Miers disagreed that the Vice President had such declassification authorities.

The Evidence Cheney Ordered Libby to Leak Plame’s Identity

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In spring of 2006, evidence was accumulating that Dick Cheney had ordered Scooter Libby to leak Valerie Plame’s identity to Judy Miller. We learned (and then, during the trial, we saw) that on July 7 0r 8, Cheney had ordered Libby to leak something to Judy Miller. We learned from Miller’s newspaper account (and then, during the trial, from her testimony) that after receiving that order, Libby proceeded to leak Plame’s identity to Miller.

And, as we got more information, we learned that Scooter Libby’s cover story for that order and that leak–that Cheney had only ordered him to leak the National Intelligence Estimate–could not be true. That’s because (among other reasons), Libby claimed he did not leak the classified information Cheney ordered him to leak until he got reassurances from David Addington that the President could insta-declassify classified information, thereby making such a leak legal.

I had previously spoken to our General Counsel, David Addington, and our General — and ask our General Counsel, does the President have the ability if he wants to take any document and say it’s declassified, go talk about it?

And Libby further explained that, at the same conversation where he got those reassurances from David Addington, he asked about Wilson’s probable contract with the CIA.

Q. And can you recall what — in your conversation with Mr. Addington about declassification, do you recall if you discussed any other topics with Mr. Addington at the time?

A. Yes. I also discussed in that conversation or close to that conversation, the question of whether there was a contractual obligation for Mr. Wilson.

Given these details, Libby’s notes, and Addington’s testimony (Addington said the conversation took place after Joe Wilson’s op-ed appeared), we can date this conversation to July 7 or 8. (Indeed, Libby even says the conversation declassifying the information itself may have happened on July 7 or "some time at the end of the previous" week.) Read more →

Five Years Later–and the Attorney General Still Maintains the Cover-Up

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Five years ago today, on a Monday morning just like today, this happened:

Our bedroom was just beginning to show the first hints of morning light on July 14 when Joe marched in, dropped the newspaper on the bed, and said in a tight voice, "Well, the SOB did it." He set a steaming mug of coffee on my bedside table and left the room. What? I struggled to wake up. I sat up, switched on the lamp, and opened the Washington Post to the op-ed page; I didn’t know what I would find, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. Rovert Novak had written in his column that "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

And yet, five years later, through the President’s efforts to silence Scooter Libby and through the Attorney General’s determination to hide the Vice President’s and President’s own testimony, we still have had no full accounting of the leak of Valerie Wilson’s identity. In fact, most of the press attention has been focused on the following sentence in Novak’s column, the one that–Richard Armitage apparently convinced Patrick Fitzgerald–derived from a stupid and careless but ultimately ignorant leak.

Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.

And so, largely because once an investigation was announced, Novak told a different story about that first line–about how he learned of Valerie’s maiden name and about how he learned of her status–than he told just after the leak, when he said "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it," the press just bought that implausible, revised story. Novak’s new cover story got so far-fetched that he was comparing Valerie Wilson with a person running a congressional campaign in Wyoming.

I call all kinds of politicians operatives. … Someone’s running a congressional campaign in Wyoming, I call him an operative.

And even when it was revealed that there had been a third conversation that went into Novak’s column, a conversation between Libby and Novak, a conversation they both made efforts to hide for three years, almost no one went back to scrutinize Novak’s column and sources again. Read more →

Did Cheney Rent One of Rummy’s Rent-A-Generals to Try to Refute Joe Wilson?

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I’m working on a catalog of Rummy’s Rent-A-Generals. But I couldn’t help but notice this particular Rent-A-General.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

[snip]

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

[snip]

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

Read more →

Steven Hatfill’s Lawyer Asks Some Questions

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I have very mixed feelings about Steven Hatfill’s suit against those who leaked that he was a person of interest in the anthrax investigation. Unlike his lawyer, I’m not sure the federal officials who spoke to reporters broke the law (indeed, you could argue that some of them were trying to tamp down suspicion about Hatfill). Further, I disagree with Judge Walton that there’s not a scintilla of evidence against Hatfill. Nevertheless, I think Hatfill’s lawyer, Mark Grannis, asks some worthwhile questions.

First, should people like Steven Hatfill — that is, people injured by government leaks — have a remedy at law, and if so, what? It is not clear how victims like Dr. Hatfill can ever be made whole, if leakers and reporters join in a conspiracy of silence. Senators should expect a better explanation on this point before they make it impossible for courts to enforce the federal Privacy Act.

Second, how can the arguments and behavior of journalists in a case such as this be reconciled with the profession’s self-image as the public watchdog, bringing accountability to government? The public officials who leaked investigative information to Ms. Locy broke the law, ruined an innocent man, and violated the public trust. Shouldn’t our watchdog bark or something?

The leakers should be fired, prosecuted, or both — and reporters who care about government accountability should be racingeach other to tell us who these miscreants are. The fact that they shut their mouths tight and run the other way suggests that the image of reporter-as-watchdog does not reflect the current place of journalism in society, whatever may have been true in the past.

Third, if the law prevents courts from ordering reporters to identify anonymous sources, what will prevent government officials from using the private information they keep on us for personal or political score-settling? What will prevent them from simply lying? What will prevent reporters from inventing anonymous sources who don’t actually exist?

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