Wes Vernon
July 16, 2007
From the Novak diaries--Part 1
The Justice Dept. knew Plame leaker before appointing special prosecutor
By Wes Vernon

Republicans have been playing the role of the stupid party again. The Bush Justice Department (DOJ) tripped all over itself and got its own administration tied in knots just to get the Democrats and the media off its back. All because a desk-bound bureaucrat at the CIA was mentioned in a column by Robert Novak. His new book The Prince of Darkness follows the trail in all its Keystone Cops detail.

In an interview with this reporter, the syndicated columnist/TV commentator emphasized a significant, but widely ignored fact: the Justice Department knew from Day One that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was Novak's source that Valerie Plame Wilson was an employee of the CIA. That circumstance is overlooked or played down by most of the mainstream media.

His authority

Bob Novak has the ultimate authority to speak on this phony, trumped up "scandal," having been on the ground floor at the start. In July 2003, when he wrote what is now the most controversial column of his career, he had no idea that the leak — almost a throw-away line — would cause the uproar that it did or lighten his wallet in legal fees. Novak declines to call on the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee (as advocated by this column, 6/11/07) — to recall Plame Wilson to answer allegations that she lied under oath. At her March hearing, she flatly denied having recommended her husband for a mission to Niger, contradicting her own memo clearly showing otherwise.

"I think she's pathetic right now," longtime journalist Novak told this writer. "So I'm not really anxious to prosecute her and have her follow the path of Scooter Libby into prison." (This was before President Bush commuted Libby's sentence.)

Me: Well, but he doesn't deserve it. She does.

Novak: As you probably know, Tom Davis [ranking Republican on the House panel] has asked that [Committee Chairman Henry] Waxman recall her. [When Waxman recalled a Bush administration witness in an unrelated case for supposedly not telling the truth] Congressman Davis said, "Just to be fair, Valerie Plame should be called back as well to find out what is the truth. And Waxman said he would take it under advisement."

Update: In a more recent column, Novak reports Waxman bucked the issue over to the House Intelligence Committee, whose Democrat staffers insisted Plame "has been consistent in her sworn testimony." A July 14 Novak column says, "Davis was baffled in view of contradictory evidence."

Trumped up from the get-go.

Bob Novak devotes two chapters of his new 638-page book (recounting his 50 years reporting in Washington) to the Plame affair and his role in it. For those just returned from a distant planet, this case began when Armitage — then a top official in Colin Powell's State Department — casually and in an offhand manner became the source of Novak's information that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. She was an analyst at the agency and was not covered under the relevant statute. Her covert activity had come to an end years ago when she was outed by the traitor Aldrich Ames.

Novak then confirmed this by referring to the very public Who's Who in America, wherein Plame was listed as the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson, Plame, and their Georgetown cocktail party circuit allies then charged that the Bush White House had leaked Plame's name to punish Wilson for writing (falsely, but apparently that was irrelevant) in the New York Times that his mission to Niger had shown no Iraq effort to obtain uranium (yellowcake) — contrary to the president's claim in a State of the Union address.

Now back to the interview in Novak's office

Novak:
The special prosecutor [Patrick Fitzgerald] as he walked in — we didn't know that at the time — but as he walked into this office [to question me] he [had been] handed the name of my source [Armitage]. So why did we need a special prosecutor? Well, we [apparently] needed a special prosecutor to go on a fishing expedition and stir around and decide what to do with the source, and then [when he found out] the source was Deputy Secretary of State Armitage, he did nothing with it."

At this point in the interview, I shared with Novak my findings (with legal advice) on how to curb out-of-control prosecutors (see this column 4/9/07), which dealt with trial court testimony.

But the trial court in the Scooter Libby case, the veteran journalist noted, was that of Judge Reggie Walton who "was known variously as a government judge or a hanging judge [where] the government can do no wrong," a view in sync with his position in handing down a 30-month sentence to Scooter Libby. Libby was convicted and sentenced in effect for not having had the same recollection of a many-months-old conversation that NBC's Tim Russert had regarding Plame's CIA employment.

(I digress. When Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson [D-Wash.] died, his colleague — New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. — was an obvious logical successor to Jackson as the lead strong defense Democrat. Moynihan, when he took office, had surrounded himself with strong anti-communist conservatives. However, Novak records that Moynihan's then-communications director Tim Russert nudged the New York senator to the left, and the "neocons" were soon gone.)

Novak opined that it was "a severe mistake by the Justice Department to [appoint] a special counsel in this case.... I would just hope the Justice Department would suck it up and make their own decisions, rather than handing difficult cases to a special prosecutor," in the future.

The Justice Dept. already knew the leaker

Novak
(narrating an abbreviated timeline of the Plame case's genesis): "The CIA refers this case to the Justice Department for action. The rank and file employees of the CIA caused a fuss about it because [they] are very anti-Bush [and generally very liberal — indeed, other information shows the CIA bureaucracy deliberately created the three-year brouhaha for the express purpose of throwing sand in the gears of the commander-in-chief's war on terror]."

Resuming Novak's narration: "John Ashcroft is Attorney General. John Ashcroft has had a hard time as Attorney General. He learns — I'm sure that he learns at this point — that they know who my source was. Armitage had turned himself in. So Armitage is a very senior government official. Ashcroft is under tremendous pressure from the Democrats and what is he going to do with this case? He recuses himself. He says he's too much involved in the politics of this thing. So he bucks it down to Deputy Attorney General [James] Comey. Now Comey could have handled the case himself. He knows who leaked it.

"There are several things he could do. He could say we're going to prosecute Mr. Armitage under the espionage agents act. He knows they don't have a case on that because [Plame] is not covered under that act. So what's the other option, then? You can say personally to Secretary Armitage that there's no crime committed. But the Democrats would have a fuss. They'd go crazy. They would say this is political. And what would happen to Armitage? Would Armitage have to resign if they'd learned he had leaked it? Or the third option is to keep it quiet and do nothing. That's not possible. You can't do it.

"So those are all tough decisions. So what does he do? He says, 'I'm not going to [fall on] my sword on this sort of thing. I'm going to name a special counsel to take care of it. Now we all thought the special counsel was being named to investigate who the source was. But they knew who the source was. The day Fitzgerald walked in, he knew who the source was. So Comey had just handed it off because he didn't want to exercise [his own authority]."

Plame case surreal from the start

Novak had several odd and/or exasperating experiences throughout this politically-staged case.

— Prior to Novak's column that identified Plame, a stranger — "a little man without tie or jacket" accosted him on the street and started questioning him about Wilson's Niger report. He endured the interrogation as the man walked alongside him long enough for Novak to blurt out (which he immediately regretted) that Wilson had been sent there by his wife who worked for the CIA. Novak thought the stranger was a stereotypical "political junkie" of the sort known to haunt Washington 24/7.

— A couple of days later, the columnist got a phone call from Joe Wilson, who informed him that the little man on the street was his friend and had briefed him on the short conversation. He apologized for his friend's behavior and said he had admonished him. The former ambassador nonetheless berated Novak for blurting out information on his wife to a perfect stranger. Novak agreed and apologized. Novak writes that in Wilson's own memoirs, the unemployed ambassador noted Novak's apology, but not his own.

— The conservative Novak was stung by articles in the Washington Post criticizing him for the way he handled the case — stung because that paper, arguably the most influential in the country, had carried his column for years, and continues to do so despite the Post's editorial liberalism. In The Prince of Darkness, the author refutes several glaring errors in the article by Mike Allen and Dana Priest, and labels their account "a reckless piece of journalism."

Limelight? You can have it

"Judging by my personal difficulties," Novak writes, "I probably should have ignored what Armitage told me about Mrs. Wilson. I am amused by people who described me as being delighted by being in the spotlight, by being a newsmaker instead of news chronicler. Those three little sentences resulted in a series of negative consequences for me. They eventually undermined my twenty-five year relationship with CNN, and kept me off Meet the Press for over two years. I had to pay substantial legal fees. I came under constant abuse from journalistic ethics critics, from some colleagues, and especially from bloggers."

However, the veteran newspaperman says these events are less important to him than "the love of my wife [Geraldine], my children, and my grandchildren. My conversion to the Catholic faith has put in perspective any personal petty difficulties."

Footnote: This column believes DOJ should have done the honorable thing and saved the taxpayers millions of dollars by announcing Armitage as the leaker and telling the Dems and the media to go fly a kite. Easy to say? Firestorm? Sure, but Bill Clinton brushed off anger over real scandals. Granted he had the media with him. But how can Republicans expect to accomplish much if they let the media and the Democrats push them around on a fake scandal and set the parameters of the debate? There's a difference between a scandal and a circus. Next — Part 2: Novak on wiretaps and political mud-wrestling.

© Wes Vernon

 

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