Plamegate: Cheney's revenge. A key fact of Plamegate, one that people keep failing to take sufficient account of, is that Rove et al. were quick—remarkably quick—on the trigger. I mean, cripes, they were in full gear within two days of the Wilson op-ed: which means that they had to have the smear in place, ready to launch on practically a moment's notice. I don't know why that doesn't tickle more peoples' funny bones. To me the crucial questions aren't about how Rove and Libby disseminated the smear once the op-ed showed them the greenlight (those are crucial questions, of course, but of a different order), they're about how the smear came into being in the first place, who conceived and authorized it.

Well, pay close attention to these posts from Digby and Josh Marshall, because to my eye, taken together, they draw a compelling outline of the genesis of the anti-Wilson campaign. Wondering about the June 2003 State Dept. memo reported on in new detail today in the Times, the one that's emerging as a crux of the investigation into the Plame distribution network, Digby cites this from Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard:

It was reported in the media and repeated by politicians that Cheney had asked the CIA to send someone to Niger to look into the matter. This is untrue. What did happen is that CIA officials, without the knowledge of Cheney or Tenet, dispatched a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate. Columnist Robert Novak has reported that Wilson's wife, a CIA employee, recommended him for the job. Wilson traveled to Niger, interviewed current and former officials, and decided that no deal for uranium had been made with Iraq.

When Wilson returned, he gave an oral report to the CIA. But he didn't meet with Cheney or send him a written report on his trip. Cheney didn't learn of Wilson's trip until he read in the New York Times in May 2003 that an ex-ambassador had been sent. Cheney later received a document from an American diplomat who had debriefed Wilson. It was marked with a warning that the information might be unreliable. Leaders in Niger were not likely to admit to an American envoy that they'd violated United Nations sanctions by selling uranium to Saddam, it suggested.

Digby conflates the "document from an American diplomat" that Cheney received some unspecified "later" time after Nick Kristoff's column of May 6, 2003 with the State Dept. memo, and asks why Cheney would have had the memo written up when "there were earlier real-time documents that reflect Wilson's debriefing upon his return"? But my hunch is that we're talking about two different documents here—that the document Barnes mentions is, indeed, the contemporaneous Wilson debriefing, and that the now-contentious State Dept. memo was only ordered as a follow-up.

Here's relevant discussion from Josh Marshall, pegged to a short piece from June 15, 2003 by Walter Pincus on the CIA's critical self-assessment of its handling of (the yet-unnamed) Wilson's Niger evidence. Wilson, Josh notes, assumed his report made its way up the channel to Cheney; Pincus's Agency-sourced report, though, says that "the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies." Why not, asks Josh?

The explanation confected by the authors of the SSCI report was the rather contradictory one that either Wilson's trip generated no substantive information or that it in fact tended to confirm suspicions of an illict uranium traffic between the two countries. No one who's looked at the evidence involved believes that. Nor is that cover story compatible with the CIA's subsequent and repeated attempts to prevent the White House from using the Niger story.

Here in Pincus's reporting -- before the evidentiary and political battle lines were drawn -- is the answer: "Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded."

It never made it back to Cheney's office because it wasn't what Cheney's office wanted to hear. They were looking for evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program, not ambiguous data and certainly not evidence that contradicted the claim.

In this key respect, the dismissal of the information is displaced from the VP's office to the CIA. And the reason is that they already understood what was wanted and what wasn't.

Notice, from the end of the Barnes quote, that the debriefing was "marked with a warning that the information might be unreliable": suggesting precisely the self-censoring means by which Wilson's report was sidelined before it could raise Dick Cheney's blood pressure.

So let's put two and two together. When Kristoff mentioned the Niger mission of an unnamed former U.S. ambassador to Africa on May 6, it rocked Scooter Libby's world. There was a scramble: nobody in Cheney's office knew about the trip, and they were momentarily at a loss. Worse, they understood that somebody, some CIA or State dissident (Kristoff calls his source "a person involved in the Niger caper") had just fired a shot across their bow. And Dick Cheney—who seems to have had a weird emotional fixation on the Saddam nuke story, not to mention whatever involvement he might have had in the (separate but related case) of the forged Niger documents—was wicked pissed.

So the minions quickly filled in the story, and dug up the debriefing document that had eluded them the first time around. But of course that debriefing document would have made no reference to Valerie Plame. Maybe her (quite vestigial) role in Wilson's mission came up through the grapevine while Cheney's people were getting themselves up to speed in the immediate aftermath of Kristoff's column, maybe not. But certainly the State Dept. report, which put Plame front and center, was commissioned (perhaps out of Bolton's office) shortly thereafter as oppo research. An effort was commenced to establish—preemptively, as a contingency—a counterattack should Wilson or somebody in the CIA go public with the Niger info, as it must have been clear they were preparing to do. (And one wonders just exactly the sequence of events, on Wilson's side, that led to the op-ed being published: has Wilson ever spoken about that? I don't recall seeing anything.)

Which means that outing Valerie Plame wasn't Rove's revenge at all—something that never quite made sense to me, given the compressed timeline. It was Cheney's revenge, done on spec, and Rove (with Libby, with the WHIG) was charged to execute it when and if necessary. (Though, as I said earlier, the particular line taken bears the marks of having been of Rove's crafting.)

Granted, all this is just speculation. But it fits the facts as we've seen them emerge. I flatter myself that I have a good instinct for narrative: and the story of Cheney's revenge not only fits, it has a good shape, it satisfies. So I'll go with it for now: my theory, and what it is too.

posted by michael  2:53:26 PM  
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