Fitzgerald Will Seek New White House Indictments
    By Jason Leopold
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Tuesday 28 March 2006

    It may seem as though it's been moving along at a snail's pace,
but the second part of the federal investigation into the leak of
covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is nearly complete, with
attorneys and government officials who have remained close to the
probe saying that a grand jury will likely return an indictment
against one or two senior Bush administration officials.

    These sources work or worked at the State Department, the CIA
and the National Security Council. Some of these sources are
attorneys close to the case. They requested anonymity because they
were not permitted to speak publicly about the details of the
investigation.

    In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said
that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare
the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment
against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National
Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

    Although the situation remains fluid, it's possible, these
sources said, that Fitzgerald may seek to indict both Rove and
Hadley, charging them with perjury, obstruction of justice, and
conspiracy related to their roles in the leak of Plame Wilson's
identity and their effort to cover up their involvement following a
Justice Department investigation.

    The sources said late Monday that it may take more than a month
before Fitzgerald presents the paperwork outlining the government's
case against one or both of the officials and asks the grand jury to
return an indictment, because he is currently juggling quite a few
high-profile criminal cases and will need to carve out time to write
up the indictment and prepare the evidence.

    In addition to responding to discovery requests from Libby's
defense team and appearing in court with his attorneys, who are
trying to obtain additional evidence, such as top-secret documents,
from Fitzgerald's probe, the special prosecutor is also prosecuting
Lord Conrad Black, the newspaper magnate, has recently charged
numerous individuals in a child pornography ring, and is wrestling
with other lawsuits in his home city of Chicago.

    Details about the latest stage of the investigation began to
take shape a few weeks ago when the lead FBI investigator on the
leak case, John C. Eckenrode, retired from the agency and indicated
to several colleagues that the investigation is about to wrap up
with indictments handed up by the grand jury against Rove or Hadley
or both officials, the sources said.

    The Philadelphia-based Eckenrode is finished with his work on
the case; however, he is expected to testify as a witness for the
prosecution next year against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice
President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in
October on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying
to investigators regarding his role in the leak.

    Hadley and Rove remain under intense scrutiny, but sources said
Fitzgerald has not yet decided whether to seek charges against one
or both of them.

    Libby and other officials in Cheney's office used the
information they obtained about Plame Wilson to undermine the
credibility of her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson
was an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. He had alleged that
President Bush misspoke when he said, in his January 2003 State of
the Union address, that Iraq had tried to acquire yellow-cake
uranium, the key component used to build a nuclear bomb, from Niger.

    The uranium claim was the silver bullet in getting Congress to
support military action two months later. To date, no weapons of
mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and the country barely had
a functional weapons program, according to a report from the Iraq
Survey Group.

    Wilson had traveled to Niger more than a year earlier to
investigate the yellow-cake claims and reported back to the CIA that
intelligence reports saying Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from
Niger were false.

    On Monday, though, attorneys close to the leak case confirmed
that Fitzgerald had met with the grand jury half a dozen times since
January and recently told the jurors that he planned to present them
with the government's case against Rove or Hadley, which stems from
an email Rove had sent to Hadley in July of 2003 indicating that he
had a conversation about Plame Wilson with Time magazine reporter
Matthew Cooper.

    Neither Hadley nor Rove disclosed the existence of the email
when they were questioned by FBI investigators or when they
testified before a grand jury, the sources said, adding that Rove
testified he found out about Plame Wilson from reporters and Hadley
testified that he recalled learning about Plame Wilson when her name
was published in a newspaper column.

    Rove testified before the grand jury four times. Rove testified
before the grand jury four times. He did not disclose the existence
of the email during his first two appearances before the grand jury,
claiming he simply forgot about it because he was enmeshed with the
2004 Presidential election, traveling around the country attending
fundraisers and meetings, working more than 15 hours a day on the
campaign, and just forgot that he spoke with Cooper three months
earlier, sources familiar with his testimony said.

    But Rove and Libby had been the subject of dozens of news
stories about the possibility that they played a role in the leak,
and had faced dozens of questions as early as August 2003 - one
month after Plame Wilson was outed - about whether they were the
administration officials responsible for leaking her identity.

    The story Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, provided to
Fitzgerald in order to explain why Rove did not disclose the
existence of the email is "less than satisfactory and entirely
unconvincing to the special counsel," one of the attorneys close to
the case said.

    Luskin did not return numerous calls for comment. A spokeswoman
for the National Security Council said she could not comment on an
ongoing investigation and has vehemently denied that Hadley was
involved in the leak "because Mr. Hadley told us he wasn't
involved."

    In December, Luskin made a desperate attempt to keep his client
out of Fitzgerald's crosshairs.

    Luskin had revealed to Fitzgerald that Viveca Novak - a reporter
working for Time magazine who wrote several stories about the Plame
Wilson case - inadvertently tipped him off in early 2004 that her
colleague at the magazine, Matt Cooper, would be forced to testify
that Rove was his source who told him about Plame Wilson's CIA
status.

    Novak - who bears no relation to syndicated columnist Robert
Novak, the journalist who first published Plame Wilson's name and
CIA status in a July 14, 2003, column - met Luskin in Washington DC
in the summer of 2004, and over drinks, the two discussed
Fitzgerald's investigation into the Plame Wilson leak.

    Luskin had assured Novak that Rove learned Plame Wilson's name
and CIA status after it was published in news accounts and that only
then did he phone other journalists to draw their attention to it.
But Novak told Luskin that everyone in the Time newsroom knew Rove
was Cooper's source and that he would testify to that in an upcoming
grand jury appearance, these sources said.

    According to Luskin's account, after he met with Viveca Novak he
contacted Rove and told him about his conversation with her. The two
of them then began an exhaustive search through White House phone
logs and emails for any evidence that proved that Rove had spoken
with Cooper. Luskin said that during this search an email was found
that Rove had sent to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen
Hadley immediately after Rove's conversation with Cooper, and it was
subsequently turned over to Fitzgerald.

    "I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the email to Hadley
immediately following his conversation with Cooper on July 11,
2003. "Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a
welfare reform story coming. When he finished his brief heads-up he
immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the
president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were
him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."

    Luskin wound up becoming a witness in the case and testified
about his conversation with Viveca Novak that Luskin said would
prove his client didn't knowingly lie to FBI investigators when he
was questioned about the leak in October 2003, just three months
after Rove told Cooper that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

    The email Rove sent to Hadley, which Luskin said he found,
helped Rove recall his conversation with Cooper a year earlier. Rove
then returned to the grand jury to clarify his previous testimonies
in which he did not disclose that he spoke with journalists.

    Still, Rove's account of his conversation with Cooper went
nothing like he had described in his email to Hadley, according to
an email Cooper sent to his editor at Time magazine following his
conversation with Rove in July 2003.

    "It was, KR said, [former Ambassador Joseph] Wilson's wife, who
apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction]
issues who authorized [Wilson's] trip," Cooper's July 11, 2003,
email to his editor said. "Wilson's wife is Plame, then an
undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of
Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the
essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The email
characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of
the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove]
implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in
acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger... "

    It is unclear whether Rove was misleading Hadley about his
conversation with Cooper, perhaps, because White House officials
told their staff not to engage reporters in any questions posed
about Wilson's Niger claims.

    But Fitzgerald's investigation has turned up additional evidence
over the past few months that convinced him that Luskin's eleventh-
hour revelation about the chain of events that led to the discovery
of the email is not credible. Fitzgerald believes that Rove changed
his story once it became clear that Cooper would be compelled to
testify about the source - Rove - who revealed Plame Wilson's CIA
status to him, sources close to the case said.

    If any of the people named in this story believe they have been
unfairly portrayed or that what was written in this story is untrue,
they will have an opportunity to respond in this space.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_032806Z.shtml