Cheney's Staff Focus of CIA Name Leak Probe

[jamiroguy1]

Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe

Posted Feb. 5, 2004

By Richard Sale

Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.

The case centers on Valerie Plame, a CIA operative then working for the weapons of mass destruction division, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and as a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad in the early 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, he was head of African affairs until he retired in 1998, according to press accounts.

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration in March 2002 to check on an allegation made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address the previous winter that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from the nation of Niger. Wilson returned with a report that said the claim was "highly doubtful."

On June 12, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus revealed that an unnamed diplomat had "given a negative report" on the claim and then, on July 6, as the Bush administration was widely accused of manipulating intelligence to get American public opinion behind a war with Iraq, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Post in which he accused the Bush administration of "misrepresenting the facts." His piece also asked, "What else are they lying about?"

Full Article

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/02/17/National/Cheneys.Staff.Focus.Of.Probe-598606.shtml

[jamiroguy1]

UPDATE

Targets: Novak, Neocons, Niger Forgery

Bush Aides Testify in Leak Probe

Grand Jury Called McClellan, 2 Others

By Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt

Washington Post Staff Writers

A federal grand jury has questioned one current and two former aides to President Bush, and investigators have interviewed several others, in an effort to discover who revealed the name of an undercover CIA officer to a newspaper columnist, sources involved in the case said yesterday.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that he talked to the grand jury on Friday. Mary Matalin, former counselor to Vice President Cheney, testified Jan. 23, the sources said. Adam Levine, a former White House press official, also testified Friday, the sources said.

None is suspected by prosecutors of having exposed undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame, but they were questioned about White House public relations strategy, the sources said.

FBI agents have interviewed those and at least five other current and former Bush aides and have questioned them about thousands of e-mails that the White House surrendered in October, along with stacks of call logs and calendars, the sources said.

The logs indicate that several White House officials talked to columnist Robert D. Novak shortly before July 14, when he published a column quoting "two senior administration officials" saying that Plame, "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," had suggested her husband for a mission to Niger to investigate whether Iraq tried to acquire uranium there as part of an effort to develop nuclear weapons.

Full Article

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26979-2004Feb9?language=printer

[jamiroguy1]

Anxiety Takes Hold of Presidential Aides Caught Up in Leak Inquiry

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: February 12, 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 — It started almost casually last fall, with F.B.I. agents leaving business cards under doors around the White House, politely calling for appointments and even meeting some officials, without any lawyers present, over a few beers at a nearby bar.

But the investigation into who at the White House leaked the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer has become much more intense in the last few weeks. Some administration officials have been summoned for confrontational interviews. Current and former members of the White House's communications and foreign policy teams have hired lawyers. At least a handful of White House aides have had to appear before a federal grand jury.

At the White House, the topic is rarely discussed openly among those who have already been drawn into the investigation and those who think they may be, people who have been questioned in the case said. The result, they said, is an information vacuum that is being filled to some extent by fear of what current or former colleagues may be telling investigators.

Some officials now find themselves in a bind borne of the potentially huge political stakes of the case. Since the investigation began in September, President Bush has said repeatedly that he wants to get to the bottom of the matter and that he has directed everyone on his staff to cooperate fully. Some lawyers involved in the case said White House officials were now trapped between that direction from the president and legal advice that they aggressively assert their own rights.

Full Article

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/politics/12LEAK.html?ex=1077253200&en=3b086d711db1fcbe&ei=5062

[jamiroguy1]

House panel sidetracks resolution calling for spy probe

February 25, 2004

By David Hess, CongressDailyPM

Under a thick partisan overcast, the House International Relations Committee on Wednesday sidetracked a resolution calling for a congressional probe of the circumstances surrounding the public outing of a CIA agent whose husband had debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq obtained uranium from Africa.

By a 24-22 margin, the GOP-controlled committee voted along straight party lines to report the resolution adversely to the House. In effect, such votes quash any chance that a measure like this would ever be taken up or, in this case, that a prompt election-year congressional inquiry into this case would be launched.

In thwarting the Democrats' proposal to embark on the investigation, International Relations Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., insisted that an ongoing grand jury inquiry could be compromised by a parallel congressional probe.

"It would be irresponsible for this committee to allow [the resolution] to jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice," Hyde said. "That is a matter best left to the grand jury."

Full Article

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0204/022504cdpm2.htm