J's Cafe Nette

Archive for the ‘Fitzgerald’ Category

This sums it up. It might please a few but it angers many.

President Bush commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby yesterday, sparing Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff 2 1/2 years in prison after a federal appeals court had refused to let Libby remain free while he appeals his conviction for lying to federal investigators.

Bush, who for months had sidestepped calls from conservatives to come to Libby’s aid, broke his silence early yesterday evening, touching off an immediate uproar from Democrats who accused the White House of circumventing the rule of law to protect one of its own.

The president announced his decision in a written statement that laid out the factors he had weighed. Bush said he decided to “respect” the jury’s verdict that Libby was guilty of four felonies for lying about his role in the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity. But the president said Libby’s “exceptional public service” and prior lack of a criminal record led him to conclude that the 30-month sentence handed down by a judge last month was “excessive.”

The president noted that he had promised before not to intervene until Libby had exhausted his appeals. But he stepped in short of that point. “With the denial of bail being upheld and incarceration imminent,” Bush said, “I believe it is now important to react to that decision.”

Although he eliminated Libby’s prison term, Bush did not grant him a full pardon, which was sought by some conservatives and would have erased his conviction. As a consequence, Libby will still have to pay a $250,000 fine and will remain on probation for two years. The president said Libby’s punishment remained “harsh,” in part because his professional reputation “is forever damaged.”

Bush commuted the sentence hours after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Libby’s request to postpone his prison term while he pursued appeals. The panel concluded that his grounds for appeal were unlikely to be strong enough to prevail in higher courts.

The appellate judges’ unanimous opinion upheld an identical ruling slightly more than two weeks ago by U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, the trial judge in Libby’s case. After a month-long trial that forced presidential aides and prominent journalists onto the witness stand, Libby was found guilty of two counts of perjury and one count each of lying to FBI agents and obstructing a federal investigation into whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Bush has granted far fewer pardons and commutations than any of his predecessors, dating to John F. Kennedy. He commuted three previous prison terms during his 6 1/2 years in office.

At a time when his popularity is as low as any president’s in modern history, Bush’s action also defied public opinion. Shortly after Libby was convicted in March, three national public opinion polls found that seven in 10 Americans said they would oppose a pardon of Libby.

Still, the president appeared to calculate that he would antagonize his conservative base too severely if he did not provide Libby some form of reprieve, according to people close to the White House

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MSNBC is reporting Valerie Plame really was covert when Robert Novak published her name.

We now know that because Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has an attachment to his memorandum to the court supporting his recommendation that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, spend 2-1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation.

The nature of Plame’s CIA employment never came up in Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice trial.

Why didn’t it, since that was the basis of the investigation conducted by Fitzgerald anyway?

Why was the so-called lie more important to Fitzgerald than the actual crime of outing a covert CIA agent?

We know now it was Richard Armitage who leaked the information to Robert Novak, by Armitage’s own admission and by Novak’s.

Armitage claims he didn’t know she was covert, but ignorance of the law is no excuse. At least that’s what I was taught in school.

The unclassified summary of Plame’s employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, “Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

[...]

The employment history indicates that while she was assigned to CPD, Plame, “engaged in temporary duty travel overseas on official business.” The report says, “she traveled at least seven times to more than ten times.” When overseas Plame traveled undercover, “sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias — but always using cover — whether official or non-official (NOC) — with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.”

From an editorial in Investors Business Daily we read this item in the next to last paragraph:

The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz has reported that U.S. officials said her identity was first disclosed to Russia by a Moscow spy in the mid-1990s. She returned to the U.S. in 1994 because the CIA suspected her cover was blown by turncoat Aldrich Ames.

Interesting. So, that leads me to this Washington Times Gertz piece dated 7/22/04, according to the archives date in the URL.

The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.

Mrs. Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.

The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said.

So, in the 90s it is suspected Aldrich Ames outed her to the Russians and somebody in the CIA itself later outed her to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana, as in Cuba, as in Castro rules there, and the Cubans got their hands on the information somehow and read it!

Gertz’s article goes on to say:

However, officials said the disclosure that Mrs. Plame’s cover was blown before the news column undermines the prosecution of the government official who might have revealed the name, officials said.

“The law says that to be covered by the act the intelligence community has to take steps to affirmatively protect someone’s cover,” one official said. “In this case, the CIA failed to do that.”

A second official, however, said the compromises before the news column were not publicized and thus should not affect the investigation of the Plame matter.

So, the justification by at least one official is since she wasn’t outed in the US where she should be safe anyway, it should be irrelevant that Russia and Cuba knew her status because they didn’t announce it. Clear?

To summarize, we now supposedly have a real crime committed by Richard Armitage, who wasn’t charged, and Scooter Libby is going to the big house for not remembering which reporter he talked to when.

In the meantime, since the 90s her identity has most likely been known to the Russians and at some point the CIA itself put her name to paper and sent it to Cuba where the Cubans got their grubby little paws on it and knew too.

So, was she outed by Armitage? She wasn’t by Libby. Was she outed by Ames? It appears so. Was she outed by the CIA to Cuba? It looks like it.

I admit to not being the most intelligent person in the blogosphere, but even I can’t buy this story. Somebody please help me.

Others blogging this story: Captains Quarters who says:

So now we have confirmation that Plame did get her cover blown. I suppose the only reason that Fitzgerald didn’t bother to indict Richard Armitage for the crime was that it would have meant explaining how the CIA tried to hide its NOC asset in plain sight.

Macsmind, who isn’t buying the story she was covert at all.

Follow the links and read what others are saying on this topic.

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