Will Scooter fall on his sword? (Title borrowed from the ever-entertaining Whatever It Is, I'm Against It.) I want to revist the subject of my last post, Tuesday's scoop in the Times that fingered Dick Cheney as Scooter Libby's source for the identity of Valerie Plame. Nobody else is much talking about the article—on the hows and whys of its appearance, at least—and yet I think it throws a light, however ambiguous, on the obscure doings behind the scenes this last week. And maybe allows us a bit of insight into what's going to come.

As I said below, it's a certainty that the information about Libby's July 12 conversation with Cheney, and the fact that Fitzgerald had Libby's notes about it, was leaked to the Times from Libby's lawyers: the article all but bylined Scooter's counsel Joseph Tate. That's an important point. The leak was signed, and the signature on it was meant to be legible, to all parties involved: given the way these transactions go, I have no doubt that the specific form of non-attribution that appeared in the Times article, in this graf—

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment, and Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, would not comment on Mr. Libby's legal status. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, declined to comment on the case

was negotiated rather carefully between the reporters and Tate.

With Friday's indictment in hand, a couple of things seem clearer about what occasioned the leak. Somewhere in the back-and-forth in the day or so before the article appeared, Fitzgerald dropped a bomb: he had Libby's notes on the July 12 conversation with Cheney. This must have caused exactly as much alarm in Libby's camp as Fitzgerald intended it to. No sane man would have so relentlessly perjured himself as Libby did, knowing that investigators had documentary evidence he himself had produced that he was lying: perhaps (as seems unlikely) Libby had forgotten those notes existed; perhaps he had unwrranted confidence in their having been sanitized. No matter. Before sometime probably early on Monday, Libby didn't know that Fitz had the notes—nor did anybody else outside the prosecutor's office. Fitzgerald is known to squeeze defendants like a boa constrictor, and in the pre-indictment negotiations this was a very big, very constricting squeeze indeed.

So, the leak. I don't know as a practical matter whether Fitzgerald could have enjoined secrecy on Tate, in the matter of the conversation notes: if he could have, he didn't, and if he couldn't, then self-evidently he didn't care if the news got out. (Leaking to the press would seem to have become a prime source of billable hours lately for defense lawyers in the Plame case.) And why would he, when he was already preparing an indictment, a public document, with the information in it? He wasn't going to reinterview Cheney, under oath or not, before Friday—nor is it likely that he'd try to spring a perjury trap on the Vice President anyway. Nothing in his operation could have been compromised by the Times story on Tuesday, because premature release of the information would have given no one he was targeting any unwelcome advantage.

The information about the notes was news, but as far as Fitzgerald was concerned it didn't matter (that news being public) in the context of the prosecution. (We'll leave aside the possibility that he may have got a little pleasure at the thought that the news might make a few of the not yet indicted malefactors squirm.) Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that Fitzgerald was wrong about that, or that Libby's team made a different calculation. Let's imagine that they thought it was important to give Scooter's (soon to be ex-) boss a heads-up about the notes, and pronto, even with the certainty that he'd know all about it via the prosecutor himself just a couple days hence. They're going to give him that heads-up on the front page of the NY Times? Even though Libby and Scowly probably haven't enjoyed untrammeled communication (on anything related to the Plame matter) for a while now, I have to believe there are significantly less public, and less politically damaging, channels in existence through which Scooter could have let Cheney know where things stood.

No: the leak was certainly intended for Cheney, but it was intended to cause pain, as in fact it did. And that was the message: the pain the communication caused, rather than the information it contained as such, was the substance of the communication. This is going to hurt, and it's just starting, says Scooter to Dick. With, as I suspect, a corollary implied: Better do what you can to make it stop.

I can think of plenty of reasons why somebody in Scooter Libby's parlous position would want to hurt a Dick Cheney: I don't think his lawyers would underwrite simple vindictiveness, though, however justified. That's why I continue to think that this was a flare-gun signal of sorts, an effort from Libby's team, under the Fitzgeraldian squeeze, to squeeze Cheney in their turn. To get what, if not a pardon? I don't know: in comments below, emptywheel (to whom all must defer, on anything Plame-related) is dubious about the pardon idea, but I can't think of anything else Libby could hope to get out of such a public display of non-affection. (A villa in Tuscany he can retire to once he serves out his sentence?) Nor can I think of any other reason that Tate (as it appears) was so careful to make the provenance of the leak clear to anybody that cared enough to know—if you're making a threat, after all, you gotta let 'em know who to pay off. But that all may be just a detail, anyway. What really leaps out in this transaction is: this is not the work of a loyalist. A die-hard, throw-myself-on-the-grenade-to-save-my-boss guy doesn't deliver a leak like Scooter delivered on Monday to the New York Times. We're not in omerta territory here.

Hence, what I said above about insight into how things play out from this point. What the Times leak tells us is twofold: one, Fitzgerald (per his MO) is squeezing Libby hard; two, Libby's getting weak in the knees. I can't think that Fitz has been squeezing just for the exercise, or just to get Libby to plead out so he can go back home to Chicago. (Though it's awfully lovely here this time of year.) Indeed, the leak all but confirms that Fitzgerald has Cheney in his sights. And the combination—of a pitiless prosecutor, and a consigliere who's signaling that he's desperate for an out—does not bode well for the Dickster. Sleeping a little rough these days, are you, Mr. Veep?

posted by michael  9:48:30 AM  
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Scooter Libby does not go quietly. It's late and I should be in bed, but this one I can't resist. Let's parse the big NYT "revelation" about Dick Cheney as Libby's Ur-source in the Plame scandal, shall we?

First of all, this is a leak from Scooter Libby's legal team. Just application of the cui bono principle probably would have told us that anyway, but why bother? Johnston/Stevenson/Jehl helpfully spell it out:

It would not be illegal for either Mr. Cheney or Mr. Libby, both of whom are presumably cleared to know the government's deepest secrets, to discuss a C.I.A. officer or her link to a critic of the administration. But any effort by Mr. Libby to steer investigators away from his conversation with Mr. Cheney could be considered by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the case, to be an illegal effort to impede the inquiry.

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment, and Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate, would not comment on Mr. Libby's legal status. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald, declined to comment on the case.

Notice how that highlighted sentence does not read: "White House officials did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate." No: the White House and Fitzgerald's office are provided blanket no-comments (produced at the Times' request), but Tate's (which is not said to have been prompted by the Times) is specifically limited to "Mr. Libby's legal status"—the subject of the immediately preceding paragraph. In other words, the comment about Libby's legal jeopardy is explicitly not sourced to Tate, and that comment alone; while the reporters very carefully decline to foreclose the possibility of Tate's (or his office's) having sourced any of the rest of the information that the article attributes to "lawyers in the case." In a piece like this that's tantamount to giving Tate a byline.

Likely Scooter and his boss don't talk much these days, if ol' Scoots has to send smoke signals to the Dickster via the Times: being under relentless scrutiny for obstruction of justice (among other peccadillos) can probably force you into such awkwardnesses. But what exactly is this particular smoke signal saying? What motivates Scooter to make this play now?

I'm not going to try to go through all the permutations; I'll just pick the one that seems likeliest to me. This is a leak that accomplishes a couple of things: it ratchets up the political heat on Cheney, and thus on Bush; at the same time it manages not to say anything that Cheney doesn't already know, and (more to the point) that he doesn't likely already know that Fitzgerald knows. It may even be, in some degree, a deliberate obfuscation. (The Times apparently failed to locate George Tenet for a comment before the article went to press, but quotes "another former senior intelligence official" expressing skepticism over the central fact-ish thing here, that it was Tenet who briefed Cheney on Mrs. Wilson's CIA affiliation: "The former official said he strongly doubted that the White House learned about Ms. Wilson from Mr. Tenet." Make of it what you will.) Bad, a bit of a shock to the Cheneyan ticker maybe, but not too bad—not yet, anyway. The leak would, in other words, seem to be in the nature of a promise: a promise that more, and worse, and more definitely incriminating, may follow.

And why make such a promise, in such a forum, except as part of a negotiation? I'm guessing that the real scrotum-tightening action within the White House these days, at the Libby/Rove level, is over the question of pardons: an ugly little word, but one that us Fitzmas-impatient kids need to reckon with. No doubt Scooter and Karl have both been made to understand that they're supposed to take one for the team here: immediate pardons, in the current (shall we say) politically sub-optimal environment, would be awfully ticklish to manage. They might produce a swell of condemnation, on all sides, that'd make the Harriet Miers thing look like the proverbial walk in the park. Sorry boys, you'll just have to gut it out till '08. On the evidence of this Times article, though, I'd say that Scooter is so far uninclined to play the good soldier. Is he bucking for a get-out-of-jail-free card?

Update: Just to clarify. I think what this piece means, appearing just (one expects) a bit in advance of indictments, is that Scooter hasn't flipped yet: but that he will, and he wants his erstwhile pals to know he will, unless some pretty ironclad guarantees are forthcoming. I'm guessing it makes Scooter, really, really unhappy to think he might see the inside of a federal prison. I'd be able to guess that just knowing he was called "Scooter."

posted by michael  2:09:47 AM  
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No one, you see, Can spill more than he. RAW STORY says (via Susie Madrak) that Fitzgerald's flipped John Hannah.

Individuals familiar with Fitzgerald’s case tell RAW STORY that John Hannah, a senior national security aide on loan to Vice President Dick Cheney from the offices of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John Bolton, was named as a target of Fitzgerald’s probe. They say he was told in recent weeks that he could face imminent indictment for his role in leaking Plame-Wilson’s name to reporters unless he cooperated with the investigation.

Superfluous as it is for me to comment on this, when we've got the likes of Digby and Jane Hamsher doing the heavy lifting, I can't resist: it's just that huge. Be sure not to miss the end of the story, which is where the action really gets hot and heavy.

Hannah is currently under investigation by U.S. authorities for his alleged activities in an intelligence program run by the controversial Iraqi National Congress (INC) and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi.

According to a Newsweek article, a memo written for the Iraq National Congress (INC) raised questions regarding Cheney’s role in the build up to the war in Iraq. During the lead up to the war, Newsweek asserts, the INC was providing intelligence on the now discredited Iraqi WMD program through Hannah and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.

"A June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two 'U.S. governmental recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, 'defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed'; the info was then reported to, among others, 'appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.' The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a "principal point of contact" for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number."

Isn't that nice? All our good friends are here: John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Ahmed Chalabi. So, by implication, is our friend Judy Miller: it'd be a really delicious irony if John Hannah turned out to be the nameless other source she was trying to "protect." (Which might well explain John Bolton's visit to her in her martyr's cell. "Hannah's the weak link here, Judy—burn Scooter if you have to, but keep Hannah's name out of it at all costs.")

The outlines of the pre-war disinformation conspiracy are coming ever clearer, and they look more and more like the visage of Ol' Scowly himself. Via carefully placed, ideologically reliable Party operatives at the Pentagon and in the State Department (Doug Feith, Bolton), Cheney had constructed a network whose purpose was to launder skewed or fabricated "intelligence," no doubt produced on demand, through paid clients such as the INC (and allied foreign intelligence services, like SISMI?)—intelligence that had to be kept out of the normal pipelines, where it would have been vetted and discounted, and maybe its tangled sourcing unravelled. And that "intelligence" was then channeled surreptitiously to such media friendlies as Judith Miller, who more than ever looks herself like a member of the network, a conscious and committed agent. (She's just got too damn many ties to too many of its key figures.)

The Plame case is just the crack in the baseboard that exposes these cockroaches to the light. Cheney got careless, and used the same apparat that had distributed false WMD claims to burn Joe Wilson's wife, and thereby opened the whole shebang to criminal investigation. With Hannah—who sounds like he was running the INC branch of the operation—as a cooperating witness, I have more hope than ever that there will be a public accounting of the conspiracy on a broad scale. We may get an impeachment out of this yet.

posted by michael  4:16:29 PM  
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That blur you saw in the middle of yesterday's big tell-some in the Times was Judy Miller, in the midst of being airbrushed out of the paper's group photo. As it's rare—not to mention rather a contradiction in terms—for an unpersoning to document itself, students of the form should take careful notes.

Mr. Sulzberger and the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, knew few details about Ms. Miller's conversations with her confidential source other than his name. They did not review Ms. Miller's notes. Mr. Keller said he learned about the "Valerie Flame" notation only this month. Mr. Sulzberger was told about it by Times reporters on Thursday.

Interviews show that the paper's leaders, in taking what they considered to be a principled stand, ultimately left the major decisions in the case up to Ms. Miller, an intrepid reporter whom editors found hard to control.

"This car had her hand on the wheel because she was the one at risk," Mr. Sulzberger said. ...

On July 30, 2003, Mr. Keller became executive editor after his predecessor, Howell Raines, was dismissed after a fabrication scandal involving a young reporter named Jayson Blair.

Within a few weeks, in one of his first personnel moves, Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues. Even so, Mr. Keller said, "she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm."  ...

Ms. Miller's article on the hunt for missing weapons was published on July 20, 2003. It acknowledged that the hunt could turn out to be fruitless but focused largely on the obstacles the searchers faced.

Neither that article nor any in the following months by Ms. Miller discussed Mr. Wilson or his wife.

It is not clear why. Ms. Miller said in an interview that she "made a strong recommendation to my editor" that an article be pursued. "I was told no," she said. She would not identify the editor.

[Jill] Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation. ...

Mr. Sulzberger said it was impossible to know whether Ms. Miller could have struck a deal a year earlier, as at least four other journalists had done.

"Maybe a deal was possible earlier," Mr. Sulzberger said. "And maybe, in retrospect, looking back, you could say this was a moment you could have jumped on. If so, shame on us. I tend to think not." ...

"It's too early to judge it, and it's probably for other people to judge," said Mr. Keller, the executive editor. "I hope that people will remember that this institution stood behind a reporter, and the principle, when it wasn't easy to do that, or popular to do that."

"It is not clear why": the article's motto, and maybe a good candidate to replace "All the news that's fit to print" on the masthead. Nobody knowed nothin' about Judy's bidness, did they? And if anybody abetted the crazy, freebooting bitch, well it was only from an excess of kindness, and principle, and herrrm herrrm harrrummm humph. Please, please don't get the impression that anything in this story implicates the Times and its leadership in any systemic corruption, that any structures might have been created (or distorted) to give Judy license to catapult the neocon propaganda. It's all just a bunch of stuff that happened!

Miss Run Amok now appears to have been some kind of poltergeist afflicting the Times offices: you'd be working on a story, there'd be a crash behind you, all your crap would have been swept off your desk, but there was no one there. Newsroom legend has it, as I'm informed by an anonymous Times staffer, that if you say Judy Miller's name three times while looking in a mirror at midnight, she appears at your back—and the next day, false claims about Iraqi WMDs have inserted themselves in your copy. Especially disconcerting if you were writing about, say, an auction at Sotheby's.

To be fair, though, Miller herself—under no doubt her valedictory NYT byline—has assisted her own unpersoning, managing the odd feat of virtually writing herself out of her first-person account of her grand jury appearances.

My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A.

My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003. (Mr. Novak used her maiden name, Valerie Plame.) ...

My interview notes show that Mr. Libby sought from the beginning, before Mr. Wilson's name became public, to insulate his boss from Mr. Wilson's charges. According to my notes, he told me at our June meeting that Mr. Cheney did not know of Mr. Wilson, much less know that Mr. Wilson had traveled to Niger, in West Africa, to verify reports that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium for a weapons program.

Or perhaps Miller was using one of the newfangled robo-notebooks they're all talking about, and (delicately anticipating her future gig as a stoolie?) sent it alone, in her place, to interview Scooter.

Symmetries are usually pleasing, especially when they exemplify not just an aesthetic but a moral order. The Times has defended Judy Miller with exactly as much tenacity, and every bit the good faith, as Miller has defended Scooter Libby, and First Amendment principle. The pair deserve each other.

posted by michael  12:18:30 PM  
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Woo Woo. I was treated this morning at Avanti, the Southport coffee shop I frequent, to a long, episodic and disjointed conversation with a Northside legend, Cubs superfan Ronnie "Woo Woo" Wickers. It's fall temperatures now, and Ronnie showed up today (he comes in to the shop every so often, though I've never talked with him before) with a blue warmup jacket over the full Cubs uniform ("Woo Woo" stitched across the back) that he always, always wears.

I sat in the window up front, reading the Times' Monday sports section, which made a ready topic—though I doubt that lack of a topic would have been any hindrance to Woo Woo, who of course is known in these parts and who knows that he's known, and treats it (charmingly) as a universal entree. He took it in stride when I confessed I couldn't share his support of the Astros in the NLCS, being a lifelong Cardinals fan: he seemed annoyed, though, when I told him I didn't have any plan to get back home for one of the upcoming games. "Call yourself a baseball fan?" Woo Woo puts aside a little money every month so he can get himself a Cubs World Series ticket, should the miraculous opportunity ever present itself; failing which, he uses it to get to spring training. He was fervid about getting to the park in the postseason: "Even if it's five hundred dollars, that's something you'll have the rest of your life! Imagine if you saw 'em win a World Series game! You'd be right there, you'd feel like you were one of the boys!" [All exclamation marks, by the way, believe me, are Woo Woo's.] I tried to respond with a reminiscence about being in the Cardinals dugout back in my boyhood, and shaking Lou Brock's hand, but Ronnie's attention wanders when he's not the one talking.

Woo Woo had come in with a pudgy, middle-aged white guy, a Southsider and Sox fan, who kept to his own table and interjected occasionally, Woo Woo more or less ignoring him when he did. They apparently had some sort of business relationship, though I couldn't make out what (just as I didn't catch the Sox fan's name). It seemed unpromising; the man had a perpetually befuddled look about him, an air of never having quite caught up to life. He rattled on about business concepts that had been stolen from him. He wanted to merchandise Woo Woo—gather a thousand aspirants in every major league market, one of whom would be chosen to be his own team's "Woo Woo" for a year, "like Miss America." Somehow this would have the collateral effect of stemming sports riots in cities that won championships, something he seemed very concerned about. He'd set himself up a company name and a tax ID, but admitted he wasn't sure he had the contacts to pull the scheme off.

Woo Woo wanted to know what I did; he doesn't know anything about Web software, but my being freelance struck a chord. You've got to keep plugging away, was Woo Woo's advice. "Like me, tomorrow I'm going down to Wrigley's," he said. [The gum company, not the stadium.] "You just tell 'em you want to see the president, and see if there's anything you can do for 'em." They may not pay you as much as they would somebody else, but it doesn't matter, Ronnie insisted: you can't let pride get in your way. (Something he seemed to think I particularly needed to hear, and he said it with emphasis, more than once.) He doesn't have an agent, he told me (I asked); Woo Woo gets his promotional work on his own stick.

Making it freelance is like making women—the thought had occurred to Woo Woo before, I'm sure, and it led him to take some concern for my single status. A woman I recognize but don't know, another Avanti morning regular, was reading the Trib by herself a couple of tables behind us. "Lady." She wasn't having any of it. "Lady." Woo Woo wouldn't take feigned inattention for an answer, and he started quizzing her about her romantic life, it seemed with the (horrific, oblivious) intention of fixing us up. He wondered why her boyfriend wasn't with her, why they weren't married if they'd been together as long as she'd said, bulling forward as she gathered her things and made a quick, no doubt premature exit of the place.

Ronnie and his odd mate left not long after. On his way out, he mentioned that he'd be turning sixty-four in a couple of weeks, on Halloween. Happy birthday in advance, Ronnie.

posted by michael  8:33:08 PM  
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