Robert Parry: Bush’s Plame-Gate Coverup
Robert Parry: Bush’s Plame-Gate Coverup
By Robert Parry
http://www.ConsortiumNews.com
Wednesday 21 November 2007
In early fall 2003, George W. Bush joined in what appears to have been a
criminal cover-up to conceal the role of his White House in exposing the
classified identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.
That is the logical conclusion one would draw from a new statement by
then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan when it is put into a
mosaic with previously known evidence.
McClellan says President Bush was one of five high-ranking officials who
caused McClellan to lie to the public in clearing Bush’s political adviser
Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis Libby of
any responsibility for the leak of Plame’s employment as an undercover
intelligence officer.
“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on
his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” McClellan said. “So I stood at the
White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights
for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the
senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
“There was one problem. It was not true.
“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the
highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing
so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the
President himself.”
McClellan’s comments were part of a press release from his publisher
regarding McClellan’s memoir, which is scheduled to reach the book stores
next April.
Though the press release didn’t add more details about Bush’s role,
earlier evidence already had implicated Bush in the outing of Plame after
her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had gone public in July
2003, disclosing that Bush had used false information to frighten the
American people about Iraq’s alleged nuclear program.
To discredit Wilson, Bush administration officials began telling
reporters about Plame’s CIA job to suggest that an early 2002 investigation
that Wilson undertook for the CIA into reports about Iraq seeking yellowcake
uranium from Niger was the result of nepotism.
Though several reporters balked at blowing Plame’s covert identity,
right-wing columnist Robert Novak revealed it in a column on July 14, 2003.
It was later learned that Novak was relying on information from Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage and his friend, Karl Rove. Libby and
other White House officials had been peddling the same information to other
journalists.
At the time, the smear campaign represented a classic dirty trick by
Bush’s White House, which was becoming famous for using hard-ball tactics
against political adversaries. However, this time, the collateral damage
included the destruction of a sensitive intelligence network that Plame
managed.
CIA Protest
The case took another serious turn in September when CIA officials,
angered by the damage done to Plame’s spy network, struck back. They lodged
a complaint with the Justice Department that the leaks may have amounted to
an illegal exposure of a CIA officer.
But the initial investigation was under the control of Attorney General
John Ashcroft, considered a right-wing Bush loyalist. So, the President and
other White House officials confidently denied any knowledge of the leak.
Bush even vowed to fire anyone who had leaked the classified material.
“The President has set high standards, the highest of standards, for
people in his administration,” McClellan said on Sept. 29, 2003. “If anyone
in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this
administration.”
Bush personally announced his determination to get to the bottom of the
matter.
“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,”
Bush said on Sept. 30. “I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any
information inside our administration or outside our administration, it
would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find
out whether or not these allegations are true.”
Yet, even as Bush was professing his curiosity and calling for anyone
with information to step forward, he was withholding the fact that he had
authorized the declassification of some secrets about the Niger uranium
issue and had ordered Cheney to arrange for those secrets to be given to
reporters.
In other words, though Bush knew a great deal about how the anti-Wilson
scheme got started - since he was involved in starting it - he uttered
misleading public statements to conceal the White House role.
Also, since the various conspirators knew that Bush already was in the
know, they would have read his comments as a signal to lie, which is what
they did. In early October, press secretary McClellan said he could report
that political adviser Karl Rove and National Security Council aide Elliott
Abrams were not involved in the Plame leak.
That comment riled Libby, who feared that he was being hung out to dry.
Libby went to his boss, Dick Cheney, and complained that “they’re trying to
set me up; they want me to be the sacrificial lamb,” Libby’s lawyer Theodore
Wells later said.
Cheney scribbled down his feelings in a note to press secretary
McClellan: “Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy the Pres
that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence
of others.”
In the note, Cheney initially was ascribing Libby’s sacrifice to Bush
but apparently thought better of it, crossing out “the Pres” and putting the
clause in a passive tense. On Oct. 4, 2003, McClellan added Libby to the
list of officials who have “assured me that they were not involved in this.”
So, Libby had a motive to lie to the FBI when he was first interviewed
about the case. He had gone to the mat with his boss to get his name cleared
in the press, meaning it would make little sense to then admit involvement
to FBI investigators.
“The White House had staked its credibility on there being no White
House involvement in the leaking of information about Ms. Wilson,” a federal
court filing later noted. For his part, Libby began claiming that he had
first learned about Plame’s CIA identity from NBC’s Washington bureau chief
Tim Russert after Wilson had gone public.
This White House cover-up might have worked, except in late 2003,
Ashcroft recused himself because of a conflict of interest, and Deputy
Attorney General James Comey picked Patrick Fitzgerald - the U.S. Attorney
in Chicago - to serve as special prosecutor.
Fitzgerald pursued the investigation far more aggressively. Over the
next three-plus years, the Plame-gate affair would become a slow-growing
infection eating away at White House credibility, despite the best efforts
of the President’s political and media allies to confuse the issue or to
shift the blame onto Wilson.
In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted Libby on five counts of lying to
federal investigators and obstructing an investigation. Libby was convicted
on four of five counts in March 2007 and sentenced to 30 months in jail, but
Bush commuted Libby’s sentence to spare him any jail time. That also
eliminated any incentive for Libby to turn state’s evidence against Bush and
Cheney.
Now, however, McClellan has become the first White House insider to
acknowledge the original lies that senior administration told about the
Plame-gate affair - and to put the President in the middle of the cover-up.
The next question might reasonably be: what are the Democrats in
Congress going to do about it?
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Time to Apologize to
Wilson/Plame” or our new book, Neck Deep.]
——–
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous
Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two
previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
‘ProjectTruth’ are also available there.