All the Resident's Men - Comments Page 2

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• 26 - Brian Flemming

  Oct 01, 2003 at 9:56 pm

  Good roundup, in attractive chart form, of excuses/defenses here.

• 27 - Steve Rhodes

  Oct 02, 2003 at 12:54 am

  
  It became a big story because it was announced the Justice dept. was investigating it.
  
  Chris, did you read any of the quotes I posted or what Johnson said? Plume was undercover. Printing her name in Novak's column blew her cover.
  
  As Josh Marshall points out, Novak was singing a different tune earlier:
  
  Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover
  
  NEWSDAY, July 22, 2003 Tuesday
  By Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce
  
  Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the
  information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They
  thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

• 28 - Brian Flemming

  Oct 02, 2003 at 2:32 am

  Salon:
  
  

  At least three key points of Novak's argument have all proven faulty: that the CIA officer in question is simply an analyst, not an undercover operative, so no harm came from making her identity known; that it was her idea to get her husband involved in investigation claims about Saddam Hussein; and that the unfolding leak investigation is "routine."

• 29 - Brian Flemming

  Oct 03, 2003 at 1:06 am

  Salon speculates on a prime leaker suspect:
  
  

  Criminal leak investigations are notoriously futile, and the identity of the administration officials who illegally blew the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame may never be known. But one name keeps coming up, and so far it hasn't provoked a specific, emphatic White House denial: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, assistant to the president and Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful chief of staff.
  
  
  On Wednesday the New York Daily News reported that "Democratic congressional sources said they would like to hear from Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby." On MSNBC's "Buchanan and Press" on Wednesday, Pat Buchanan asked an administration critic who claims to know the leaker's name point blank if "Scooter Libby" was the culprit (the critic wouldn't answer). And Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska made a veiled reference on CNBC this week, suggesting that President Bush could better manage the current crisis by "sitting down with [his] vice president and asking what he knows about it."
  
  
  
  
  
  
  But below the surface there's even more chatter. Says one former senior CIA officer who served under President Bush's father, "Libby is certainly suspect No. 1."
  
  Libby might feel more secure if the White House would issue a blanket denial about his involvement, the way it did for Bush's top political aide, Karl Rove, who was the focus of attention early in the week as the possible source. At a press briefing this week, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was adamant: "The president knows [Rove] wasn't involved ... It's simply not true."
  
  more

• 30 - Steve Rhodes

  Oct 03, 2003 at 1:50 am

  
  John Dean also writes in Salon than the Bush administration is even worse than Tricky Dick's.

• 31 - Brian Flemming

  Oct 03, 2003 at 2:18 am

  Just read the Dean article. It's an excellent idea:
  
  

  I thought I had seen political dirty tricks as foul as they could get, but I was wrong. In blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame to take political revenge on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for telling the truth, Bush's people have out-Nixoned Nixon's people. And my former colleagues were not amateurs by any means.
  
  For example, special counsel Chuck Colson, once considered the best hatchet man of modern presidential politics, went to prison for leaking false information to discredit Daniel Ellsberg's lawyer. Ellsberg was being prosecuted by Nixon's Justice Department for disclosing the so-called Pentagon Papers (the classified study of the origins of the Vietnam War). But Colson at his worst could barely qualify to play on Bush's team. The same with assistant to the president John Ehrlichman, a jaw-jutting fellow who left them "twisting in the wind," and went to jail denying he'd done anything wrong in ordering a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, where the burglars went and looked for, but did not find, real information to discredit Ellsberg.
  
  But neither Colson nor Ehrlichman nor anyone else I knew while working at the Nixon White House had the necessary viciousness, or depravity, to attack the wife of a perceived enemy by employing potentially life-threatening tactics.
  
  So let me share a bit of history with Ambassador Wilson and his wife. And, well aware that gratuitous advice is rightfully suspect, let me also offer them a suggestion -- drawn from some pages of Watergate history that till now I've only had occasion to discuss privately. Long before Congress became involved and a special prosecutor was appointed, Joe Califano, then general counsel to the Democratic National Committee and later a Cabinet officer, persuaded his Democratic colleagues to file a civil suit against the Nixon reelection committee. And that maneuver almost broke the Watergate coverup wide open. In seeking justice from the closed ranks of the Bush White House, Wilson and Plame should follow a similar strategy.

  
  
  Dean ought to know.
  
  more

• 32 - Steve Rhodes

  Oct 03, 2003 at 2:35 am

  
  I'm actually planning on seeing Ellsberg speak at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco at 7 pm on Friday. It should be interesting to hear what he has to say on all of this.