Rove to take the stand?

[jillian]

This could be interesting....


Leak Case: Will Rove Testify?

The president's political guru—and counselor Dan Bartlett—have been subpoenaed by Scooter Libby's lawyers. What it means for the most-watched trial in Washington—and who's next on the witness stand.

A WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Updated: 5:05 p.m. PT Jan 26, 2007

Jan. 26, 2007 - White House anxiety is mounting over the prospect that top officials—including deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and counselor Dan Bartlett—may be forced to provide potentially awkward testimony in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Both Rove and Bartlett have already received trial subpoenas from Libby’s defense lawyers, according to lawyers close to the case who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters.

While that is no guarantee they will be called, the odds increased this week after Libby’s lawyer, Ted Wells, laid out a defense resting on the idea that his client, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, had been made a “scapegoat” to protect Rove. Cheney is expected to provide the most crucial testimony to back up Wells’s assertion, one of the lawyers close to the case said. The vice president personally penned an October 2003 note in which he wrote, “Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the other.” The note, read aloud in court by Wells, implied that Libby was the one being sacrificed in an effort to clear Rove of any role in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joe Wilson. “Wow, for all the talk about this being a White House that prides itself on loyalty and discipline, you’re not seeing much of it,” the lawyer said.

Libby is charged with lying about when and from whom he learned about Plame during the spring and early summer of 2003, a time when the White House was working to discredit Wilson. A former U.S. ambassador, Wilson was dispatched to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Africa. Wilson said he told U.S. officials there was nothing to those reports. But the president later used the claim anyway in his 2003 State of the Union address, prompting Wilson to charge the administration had manipulated the intelligence about Iraq. The week after he went public, journalist Robert Novak first reported that Wilson’s wife, Plame, worked for the CIA—a disclosure that prompted allegations that administration officials had “outed her” in retaliation for Wilson’s criticism.

The possibility that Rove could be called to testify would bring his own role into sharper focus—and could prove important to Libby’s lawyers for several reasons. Rove has said in secret testimony that, during a chat on July 11, 2003, Libby told him he learned about Plame’s employment at the CIA from NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, a legal source who asked not to be identified talking about grand jury matters told NEWSWEEK.

If Rove repeats that story on the witness stand, it could back up Libby’s core assertion that he honestly, if mistakenly, thought he had heard about Wilson’s wife from the “Meet the Press” host—even though Russert denies he knew anything about Plame, and more than a half-dozen officials (including Cheney) have said they passed along the same information to Libby earlier than that.

But the Rove account could cut in other ways. Fitzgerald would likely argue that Libby’s comment to Rove merely shows that the vice president’s top aide “was even lying inside the White House,” according to the legal source. Moreover, Rove is likely not eager to recount the story either. The reason? He would have to acknowledge that shortly after he had the chat with Libby, he went back to his office and had a phone conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper in which he also disclosed the fact that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. The disclosure was potentially illegal since, at the time, Plame was employed in the Directorate of Operations, the agency’s covert arm. (There is no evidence that Rove or anybody else knew Plame’s status at the time—and Rove has never been charged with any crime—but the possibility that White House officials were leaking classified information in an effort to discredit Wilson is what triggered the probe in the first place.)

An equally embarrassing conflict could emerge next week when former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer takes the stand. Fleischer has been one of the most mysterious figures in the case, making virtually no public comments about it since he left the White House in July 2003. In the past he has insisted he wasn’t even represented by a lawyer.

But it emerged during court arguments this week that Fleischer originally invoked his Fifth Amendment privileges to avoid testifying and then only agreed to do so after he was given an immunity deal by Fitzgerald—an arrangement that normally requires extensive bargaining among attorneys. Fleischer’s testimony is critical to Fitzgerald’s case: as the prosecutor laid out this week in his opening statement, Fleischer has said that Libby told him over a White House lunch on July 7, 2003, that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and made a point of describing this information as “hush and hush.” Fitzgerald used that account to undercut Libby’s grand-jury assertion that he was surprised and “taken aback” just three or four days later when, he claims, Russert told him about Wilson’s wife.

“You can’t learn something startling on Thursday that you’re giving out Monday and Tuesday of the same week,” Fitzgerald said. Fleischer has also testified that Bartlett also later told him about Wilson’s wife and, after hearing it from both Libby and Bartlett, the then-White House press secretary disclosed the information to NBC reporter David Gregory.

On its face, Fleischer’s account seems to contradict the repeated public assertions of his immediate successor, Scott McClellan, in October 2003 that nobody at the White House was in any way involved in the leak of Plame’s identity. It also potentially puts Bartlett, one of the president’s senior and most trusted advisers, on the hot seat.

If Bartlett backs up Fleischer, it suggests he himself played a role in passing along radioactive information that triggered a criminal investigation that has plagued the White House for more than four years. If he contradicts Fleischer, it raises questions about the credibility of a man who was President Bush’s chief spokesman for the first two and a half years of his presidency. His lawyer declined to comment on what Bartlett will say.

But either way, it’s not a scenario that anybody at the White House can be looking forward to.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16832257/site/newsweek/

[Gaffer]

This whole thing is a total waste of time, money and effort.

[jillian]

This whole thing is a total waste of time, money and effort.

I disagree, obviously. But no one on the right expressed that view from 1992 to 2000. ;)

Frankly, though I'm interested in why you think the charges against Scooter are a waste of time.

[red states rule]

I disagree, obviously. But no one on the right expressed that view from 1992 to 2000. ;)

Frankly, though I'm interested in why you think the charges against Scooter are a waste of time.

Let's see Sandy Burgler steals, destroys, and lies about his theft of classified national security documents. He did this while working for John "I Served in Viet Nam" Kerry and the documents covered the Clinton administration and OBL.

Libby may have forgot the order of the timeline when he learned the identity of a CIA paper pusher

Not surprised you are more interested in Libby and want to foget about Sandy Burgler

[jillian]

Libby Trial Reflects a Secrecy-Obsessed Administration
By Liz Halloran

Posted 1/31/07

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller this week may have proved to be a lousy witness–often dithering and plagued by seemingly stunning memory lapses–but at this point press critics who expected the perjury trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby to add up to a scathing indictment of the Washington reporting corps have to be disappointed.

Well, at least a little.

What has emerged in U.S. District Court even more dramatically than the media's well-documented though often overstated shortcomings is an intimate and at times amusing portrait of how an administration obsessed with secrecy dispatches its apparatchiks to obfuscate, plant, plot, and discredit.

And while it may take more than the Libby trial to elicit any measurable sympathy for reporters who have had to deal with the West Wing's wall of doublespeak through the buildup to the Iraq war and beyond, consider this: Patrick Fitzgerald, one of the most aggressive prosecutors in the country and equipped with subpoena powers and a grand jury, couldn't get former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer to admit–on the witness stand–that he was with the president in Entebbe, Uganda, in July 2003.

(White House reporters told me this week that the president's Entebbe visit was pretty memorable: On the ground at the airport they could see an Air France jet that was hijacked in 1976 and whose passengers were freed in a raid by Israeli special forces. Fleischer's briefings, "Aboard Air Force One En Route to Entebbe, Uganda," can also be found on the White House website.)

And the former spokesman's on-the-stand anecdote about how a reporter said "prove it" when told by Fleischer that al Qaeda had attacked the United States can be read two ways. Is it really, as Fleischer intended to suggest, proof of an inept media? Or does it say more about Fleischer's–and the White House's–negligible credibility with the press corps even at the early stage of the Bush presidency?

The Libby trial is many things to many people, including an important test of reporter-source privilege–if, indeed, there is such a thing. (More journalists are on the witness list–former Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper was on the stand Wednesday afternoon, telling jurors that top White House political adviser Karl Rove was the first to tell him that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and NBC's Tim Russert and potentially a handful of others are also expected to be called.)

Yes, Miller is a lousy witness. Yes, Miller and others wrote some misguided stories that had far-reaching and drastic effects. And yes, though the Libby grand jury investigation has unfairly caricatured most of the working press in Washington as administration lap dogs, reporters everywhere engage in sometimes complicated deal making with sources to get stories.

(Read Miller's testimony about "on the record," "on background," "on deep background," and "off the record," and about Libby's desire to be identified as a "former Hill staffer" to see how the dance can work.)

But that's not why a former high-ranking administration official is on trial for lying to a grand jury or why a parade of government witnesses and reporters have been testifying about the inner workings of the White House and press rooms.

It's because in mid-2003, senior staff at the White House–according to Libby's own handwritten notes–decided that the media was taking seriously a guy named Joseph Wilson, who had come back from a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger with news about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction that the administration didn't like.

Wilson was leading the news, and people were questioning the president's trustworthiness, Libby wrote. Worse, he continued, in seemingly an echo of Rove's thoughts, people were beginning to accept Wilson as a credible expert.

And that, of course, would have to change.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070131/31libby.htm

[red states rule]

Sandy Berger: What Did He Take and Why Did He Take It?
By Ronald A. Cass

Some things cry out for explanation. Like finding $90,000 in marked bills in a Congressman's freezer. Or finding out that a blue-chip lawyer who held one of the most important jobs in the nation was willing to risk his career, his livelihood, and his liberty to steal, hide, and destroy classified documents.

We all have a pretty good idea what the money was doing in Representative William Jefferson's freezer. But the questions about President William Jefferson Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, just keep piling up.

It's time we got some answers.

According to reports from the Inspector General of the National Archives and the staff of the House of Representatives' Government Operations Committee, Mr. Berger, while acting as former President Clinton's designated representative to the commission investigating the attacks of September 11, 2001, illegally took confidential documents from the Archives on more than one occasion. He folded documents in his clothes, snuck them out of the Archives building, and stashed them under a construction trailer nearby until he could return, retrieve them, and later cut them up. After he was caught, he lied to the investigators and tried to shift blame to Archive employees.

Contrary to his initial denials and later excuses, Berger clearly intended from the outset to remove sensitive material from the Archives. He used the pretext of making and receiving private phone calls to get time alone with confidential material, although rules governing access dictated that someone from the Archives staff must be present. He took bathroom breaks every half-hour to provide further opportunity to remove and conceal documents.

Before this information was released, the Justice Department, accepting his explanation of innocent and accidental removal of the documents, allowed Berger to enter a plea to the misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material - no prison time, no loss of his bar license. The series of actions that the Archives and House investigations detail, however, are entirely at odds with protestations of innocence. Nothing about his actions was accidental. Nothing was casual. And nothing was normal.

What could have been important enough for Berger to take the risks he did? What could have been important enough for a lawyer of his distinction to risk disgrace, disbarment, and prison?

To paraphrase the questions asked of Richard Nixon by members of his own Party, what did he take and why did he take it?


**********

The report released by Rep. Tom Davis last week makes plain that right now we cannot answer those questions. We cannot say what information in fact was lost through Mr. Berger's actions.

At President Clinton's request, he reviewed highly confidential material during four visits to the Archives over four months. Only Mr. Berger knows what transpired on his first two visits, when he reviewed collections of confidential memos, e-mails, and handwritten notes, including materials taken from counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke's office - all of which were not catalogued at the individual item level.

On Mr. Berger's third visit Archives employees became suspicious that he might be removing classified material. Rather than directly confront a former Cabinet-level official, Archives officials simply took steps to identify further theft on succeeding visits. That is how Mr. Berger's thefts on his fourth and last visit were documented.

We don't know what Mr. Berger might have removed from the uncatalogued materials reviewed in his earlier visits, but we know his last visit focused on a memorandum called the Millennium Alert After Action Report (MAAAR). Copies of this report were made available to the 9/11 Commission, but the information in those copies undoubtedly is not what interested Berger most. Berger took five copies of the report and later destroyed three of them.

What was on the copies he destroyed? Handwritten notes from Berger, the President, or some other official? Observations that would be embarrassing to them, evidence they missed an important threat or considered or recommended actions - or decisions not to act - they wouldn't want to defend in public? Evidence, perhaps, that would have supported the Bush Administration? We don't know, and no one who does is saying, but the evidence must have been terribly damning for Berger to take the risks he did.


**********

There are good reasons to protect sensitive communications within the government. Some discussions should be private if presidents are to have the best advice and the nation is to have the best decisions on sensitive matters. The President and top officials should be able to explore options and discuss threats - among themselves and with their key staff members - without fear that a remark taken out of context or poorly phrased will come back to haunt them.

Laws that endeavor to strike the balance between salutary confidentiality and beneficial public disclosure at times tilt too far to disclosure. In public debate, advantages of disclosure are often easier to explain than advantages of secrecy. That, in part, follows from the nature of secrets - if you don't reveal them, you can't explain fully why they should have stayed secret.

The Berger episode, however, strictly involves materials that are supposed to be turned over under the law, materials specifically covered by a presidential directive that authorized sharing the information with those investigating 9/11 intelligence-gathering and evaluation. Mr. Berger's willingness to risk everything to suppress the information goes well beyond ordinary concerns against excessive disclosure.

Bill Clinton obviously has great sensitivity to his place in history and to accusations that he did too little to respond to al-Qaeda, that he is to some degree responsible for failing to prevent 9/11's tragedy. That is why he and his lieutenants made reckless and baseless accusations against the current Bush administration, attempting to portray them as having dropped the baton handed off by ever-vigilant Clintonistas (who, according to John Ashcroft's testimony, withheld the MAAAR and its warnings about al-Qaeda's operations in the US from the Bush transition team).

But maybe there is more to the story. Maybe there is something far worse than we can imagine that is worth having his chief security aide risk his reputation, his career, and his liberty to cover up.


**********

Mr. Berger, the Clintons, and their allies do not want questions about this story asked or answered. Mr. Berger's lawyer, Lanny Breuer, along with former Clinton officials, assured us that all of the material destroyed by Berger existed in other form and was made available to the 9/11 investigations, that nothing relevant to the Clinton Administration's response to al-Qaeda was withheld.

Of course, we also were assured that Monica had only imagined a relationship with Bill and that rumors to the contrary were, in Hillary's famous phrase, the work of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Politicians never like to admit mistakes. They see legitimate inquiries as politically inspired, which they often are. Changing the subject or shifting blame to others aren't tactics peculiar to the Clintons.

The Clintons, however, take the game of deny-deceive-and-distract to a new level. Their relentless personal attacks on Ken Starr were designed to undermine the credibility of information about Bill Clinton's perjury, to deflect attention from his own failings. Clinton's excessive reaction - complete with hyperbole, finger-wagging, and scolding - to a simple question from Fox News' Chris Wallace about his response to al-Qaeda is in the same vein. Something here touches a nerve.

That nerve is exposed in the Sandy Berger saga. This story at bottom is about the security of our nation, about what was - or was not - done to protect us from the most shocking and deadly attack on American citizens by foreign agents in our nation's history. This story is critical not only to understanding our past but also to securing our future. It can help us understand what it is reasonable to expect can be done to keep us and our loved ones safe from harm. It is, in short, as important a story as there is.


**********

It is a story the news media should be desperate to explore, not desperate to avoid.

They should want to know the full story, no matter what the implications are for the legacy of a president much loved by an overwhelmingly liberal media or what the risks are for a former First Lady whose future is tied to her husband's past. Those risks loom especially large before a field of potential Republican presidential candidates with strong reputations in security matters - like Rudy Giuliani, for example, whose courageous performance on 9/11 still resonates.

Those who wrap themselves so frequently in the mantra of the people's right to know should want to know the truth - all the time. Sadly, today's would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins look more like ostriches than hawks, showing no curiosity about what Sandy Berger was hiding. Had that been the attitude when Watergate first appeared as a minor news story, Richard Nixon would have served out his full second term. The rest, as they say, is history.

Mr. Cass, Chairman of the Center for the Rule of Law and Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law, served Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as Commissioner and Vice-Chairman of the US International Trade Commission.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/01/sandy_berger_what_did_he_take.html

[jillian]

*Yawn*

Try not to derail every thread you touch, cookie.

[red states rule]

*Yawn*

Try not to derail every thread you touch, cookie.

I am pointing out the usual liberal hypocrisy when it comes to criminal acts

BTW, are you always this grumpy or do I always seem to meet you during that certain time of the month

[OCA]

*Yawn*

Try not to derail every thread you touch, cookie.

How is this derailing? Sandy Bergler(sp?) committed crimes but was given basically a free pass, Scooter Libby is convicted in the press before the trial begins. He's pointing out a hypocrisy, hardly a derailment.

[red states rule]

How is this derailing? Sandy Bergler(sp?) committed crimes but was given basically a free pass, Scooter Libby is convicted in the press before the trial begins. He's pointing out a hypocrisy, hardly a derailment.



Now don't confuse jilly with facts. Her head will explode

[jillian]

How is this derailing? Sandy Bergler(sp?) committed crimes but was given basically a free pass, Scooter Libby is convicted in the press before the trial begins. He's pointing out a hypocrisy, hardly a derailment.

And I'm sure you make that observation with your usual unbiased opinion. ;)

[red states rule]

And I'm sure you make that observation with your usual unbiased opinion. ;)

no more unbiased then yours

[jillian]

no more unbiased then yours

Are you OCA's pet troll? Cool.

[red states rule]

Are you OCA's pet troll? Cool.

this from a mod? making you a mod is like putting al capone in charge of the liquor control board

[OCA]

And I'm sure you make that observation with your usual unbiased opinion. ;)

Jilly look at the facts, those are facts I just pointed out. How is that bias?

[red states rule]

Jilly look at the facts, those are facts I just pointed out. How is that bias?

The liberal media, like Jilly, could not care less because Sandy is one of them

Meanwhile, Libby must be guilty because he is a Republican. Plus they can smear Rove. This is what they really want

[red states rule]

Matthews Drools Over Libby Trial
Posted by Matthew Sheffield on January 29, 2007 - 21:24.
"Truth is stranger than fiction" is a phrase you often hear tossed around. I'd add a corollary to it: truth can be funnier than fiction, too.

Such was the case on tonight's "Hardball" where host Chris Matthews got so excited with his quest to blame the Bush admin for the Valerie Plame kerfuffle, he actually started drooling about it on the air, going past anything that "Saturday Night Live" actor Darrell Hammond has ever done in parody.


And no, that's not hyperbole. See the screenshot to the right and watch the video here in WMV or in RealPlayer.

This wasn't the first time Matthews has embarrassed himself regarding Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame. Last September, the notoriously effusive commentator couldn't find the words to describe the case once it became clear that Karl Rove would not be indicted.

http://newsbusters.org/node/10490