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h/t David
Ooops...lol. During Howard Kurtz's tribute to former CNN contributor "The Prince of Darkness" Robert Novak, someone forgot to bleep out his "bullshit" remark.
KURTZ: But it was the battle over the war and his friendship with such sources as Karl Rove that would prove his undoing. Rove was one of two White House sources who told Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of Bush critic Joe Wilson, was secretly employed by the CIA. And Novak's disclosure of that fact six years ago ignited a firestorm. He was called a traitor and worse.
Novak had little to say publicly about the leak investigation, even as he revealed his confidential sources to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
NOVAK: I don't think I did anything wrong, but as a practical matter, it wasn't a big scoop, you know. It was just a throwaway line, and the whole column was not abusive toward Joe Wilson in any way.
KURTZ: He began to seem a relic of an earlier era. CNN dropped "CROSSFIRE" and "CAPITAL GANG," and at one of his increasingly rare appearances, Novak lost his temper while arguing with James Carville.
JAMES CARVILLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: ... is watching you. Show them you're tough.
NOVAK: Well, I think that's bullshit. And I hate that. Just let me go.
ED HENRY, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: About this Senate race, James, that...
KURTZ: He left the network soon afterwards, joining Fox News, and published his memoir titled, fittingly enough, "The Prince of Darkness."
Thirteen months ago, the man who never seemed to stop arguing was sidelined by cancer.
Unsurprisingly, his friends are now eager to make us all forget this. Tim Carney's remembrance omits any mention of it whatsoever. And then there was Fred Barnes on Fox this morning, who simply followed in his friend's footsteps and flatly lied about the Plame case:
Barnes: Bob -- you know, Bob was unruffled by the whole thing. He had to get a lawyer, but, ah, you know, it was no problem to him.
Of course, it turned out that he was the first one to hear from anybody in the Bush administration about Valerie Plame, uhm, being a part, and her husband, you know, helping her husband get this, go to this trip to Africa, and then say that President Bush had -- what President Bush had said about Saddam Hussein seeking uranium in Africa was wrong.
They're still discussing it. It turns out that President Bush was right.
But anyway, Bob was caught up in this scandal, he'd heard about it first, and reported it in his column, and then was perfectly comfortable being the center of attention in a legal case that went on for years and years.
WTF? It's long been an established fact that Novak's reportage was wrong, and in fact was just a propaganda-driven smear on behalf of the Bush administration, since Plame in fact had nothing to do with Joe Wilson getting the Niger assignment. (George Tenet himself explained: "Mid-level officials in CPD [The CIA’s Directorate of Operations Counterproliferation Division] decided on their own initiative to [ask Joe Wilson to look into the Niger issue because] he'd helped them on a project once before, and he'd be easy to contact because his wife worked in CPD.")
And since when has it "turned out" that "Bush was right" about the Niger yellowcake? Not only was the report on which he based the claim he made in the State of the Union built from set of hoax documents, but the White House ignored warnings that this was likely the case. Moreover, there has been no subsequent evidence to suggest that Saddam indeed sought yellowcake from Niger.
Ah, but such things as facts and truthfulness matter little to people like Robert Novak and Fred Barnes. All they care about is covering their tracks. Lying is what they do, right up to their final breaths.
I will say here that I'm no more optimistic that Hillary Clinton's response would have been any different. The nature of power is such that one can always find a strong enough argument for retaining it "just in case" once it's been exercised. But then again, Clinton wasn't the one who sold herself to us on the basis of a new transparent era, either:
A document filed in federal court this week by the Justice Department offers new evidence that former vice president Richard B. Cheney helped steer the Bush administration's public response to the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson's employment by the CIA and that he was at the center of many related administration deliberations.
The administration's discussion of Wilson's link to the CIA was meant to undermine criticism by her husband of administration allegations that Iraq attempted to acquire uranium, a matter that her husband had probed for the CIA, according to testimony presented in a 2007 trial.
A list of at least seven related conversations involving Cheney appears in a new court filing approved by Obama appointees at the Justice Department. In the filing, the officials argue that the substance of what Cheney told special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in 2004 must remain secret.
No such agreement was reached between Fitzgerald and Cheney at the time of their chat, according to a 2008 Fitzgerald letter to lawmakers. But the Bush administration rejected requests by Congress and a nonprofit group for access to two FBI accounts of the conversation, saying the material was exempt from disclosure under subpoena or the Freedom of Information Act.
The Obama administration has since agreed that the material should not be disclosed. A Justice Department lawyer at one point last month argued that vice presidents and other White House officials will decline to be interviewed in the future if they know their remarks might "get on 'The Daily Show' " or be used as fodder for political enemies.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan expressed doubt about that argument. To counter Sullivan's skepticism, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a supporting affidavit to the new court filing that the department needs the ability to interview White House officials informally in future law enforcement investigations, and that if the Cheney interview summaries are made public, "there is an increased likelihood that such officials could feel reluctant to participate." Breuer served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater probe.
The nonprofit group pushing for disclosure, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, responded yesterday with a statement that the Justice Department has subpoenaed such officials without difficulty in the past. "It is astonishing that a top Department of Justice political appointee is suggesting other high-level appointees are unlikely to cooperate with legitimate law enforcement investigations. What is wrong with this picture?" said Melanie Sloan, head of the group.
That House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has badly bungled the imbroglio over what she knew and when about the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture is hard to dispute. Seemingly snatching PR defeat from the jaws of victory, Pelosi should have instead simply called the Republicans' bluff and insisted on investigations of torture architects, perpetrators and "accomplices" alike, letting the bipartisan chips fall where they may. But by savaging Pelosi for her statement that the CIA "misled" Congress, Bush's Republican water carriers are again exhibiting selective amnesia. After all, just two years ago it was the same raging right which insisted the CIA was an "anti-Bush cabal" behind a "bureaucratic coup d’état" seeking to "undermine" the President.
To be sure, the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband's revelations regarding President Bush's bogus claims that Iraq sought uranium in Niger prompted right-wing calls of betrayal by the agency. In March 2007, California Republican Darrell Issa accused Plame of perjury, insisting "She has not been genuine in her testimony before Congress." For his part, former Fox News host John Gibson argued that ending the classified career of CIA agent deeply involved in critical nuclear proliferation work and compromising her global network was essential because "this was about an anti-Bush cabal at the CIA" that needed to be "rooted out."
"I'm the guy who said a long, long time ago that whoever outed Valerie Plame should get a medal. And if it was Karl Rove, I'd pin it on him myself."
Among Speaker Pelosi's interlocutors now is former Intelligence Committee chairman, Republican Pete Hoekstra (R-MI). But as ThinkProgress detailed, years before he claimed Pelosi was "blaming the CIA," Hoekstra blasted "an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress." And when it came to the 2007 NIE which asserted Tehran halted its nuclear program in 2003, Hoekstra insisted the agency was holding back:
Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran's nuclear capability, saying that the members "didn't find [the briefers] forthcoming."
For his part, Newt Gingrich, who claimed that Nancy Pelosi had "disqualified herself" from the same Speaker's position he once held, took to the op-ed pages to make his case for her to "step down" and to the airwaves to defend Hoekstra. But while Gingrich today redefined what the meaning of "is" is by claiming Hoekstra "did not say the CIA routinely lies," back in December 2007 he accused the CIA of precisely that over the Iran NIE:
"[The NIE] is so professionally unworthy, so intellectually indefensible and so fundamentally misleading that it is damaging to our national security.
[The NIE appears to be a deliberate attempt to undermine the policies of President Bush by members of his own government by suggesting that Iran no longer poses a serious threat to U.S. national security because we apparently have credible reports that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003."
At the CPAC conference in February 2008, Ginggrich ratched up the inflammatory rhetoric. The Benedict Arnolds in the American intelligence community, he insisted to applause from the assembled, had essentially committed treason:
"The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran can only be understood as a bureaucratic coup d’état, deliberately designed to undermine the policies of the United States, on behalf of some weird goal." (Applause)
When President Bush issued holiday pardons for 19 miscreants past and present on Tuesday, former Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby wasn't among them. But with the two year campaign by right-wing pundits, GOP politicos and even Republican White House hopefuls now reaching a crescendo, Libby may yet get his slate wiped clean by the outgoing President. And to be sure, nothing in George W. Bush's past statements would suggest the Plamegate felon won't get the same Weinberger treatment the President's father offered the Iran-Contra crowd this week 16 years ago.
The drumbeat to save Scooter started anew on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. While Libby was convicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation into the retaliatory outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, the Journal portrayed the criminal as martyr and the President's July 2007 commutation of Libby's sentence as a "half measure." Bush, the WSJ argued, should undo the "injustice inflicted" on Libby:
The judgment by a Washington, D.C. jury was more a verdict on the Bush Administration than it was about the confusing facts of Mr. Libby's alleged deceit. The Plame affair was a proxy for the larger political dispute over Iraq, and Mr. Libby became the Beltway sacrifice. By trumpeting his guilt, critics were able to impugn Mr. Bush's policies by insisting the President had "lied us into war"...
...In this dark episode, an honest man became the fall guy in a larger political war over the war. Mr. Libby deserved better -- and Mr. Bush owes it to Mr. Libby, and to future occupants of the White House, to give him a full pardon.
Writing in U.S. News, reliable Republican mouthpiece Michael Barone regurgitated the Journal's dishonest plea to rehabilitate Libby from the taint of his own law-breaking.
Check out David Shuster's MSNBC reportage on the story dug up by Murray Waas yesterday regarding Dick Cheney's rewriting of White House talking points about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson.
Notice anything missing?
Yeah, we noticed it too: There's not a single mention of Murray or his reportage. Shuster briefly alludes to Joe Gandelman's Moderate Voice blog -- which was one of many who picked up and linked to the piece. And who does he have on to talk about it? A reporter from the Washington Post -- which so far has not even mentioned the story either in its pages or on its website. (And then he and the NBC reporter talk about it as if Cheney were admitting this as part of his media legacy tour -- when in fact it was dug up out of an FBI interview conducted several years ago.)
I mean: WTF?
I know that reporters in the mainstream media like to think of themselves as the real journalists in the evolving post-Internet world, while we dirty hippie bloggers are mere parasites who help distribute the information they create -- add-ons, as it were.
But the reality is that not only are bloggers doing a lot of real journalistic work these days, there are real journalists who have turned to blogging as the chief means to publishing their work. I happen to be one of these, and so does Murray.
If this had been carried in one of those mainstream outlets first, MSNBC and Shuster would certainly have credited them with the story -- or they'd have had to face the wrath of their colleagues. Failure to cite reporters who originate breaking and important news is considered a major ethical faux pas in the journalistic business.
Well, the same holds true for we dirty hippie bloggers, including those of us who happen to be actual journalists.
These people owe Murray Waas an apology. And they need to update their ethical standards to reflect the reality of the business they're in today.
UPDATE: Commenters have noted that Shuster took pains to credit Waas in later broadcasts. If so, it should be duly noted (we didn't catch those broadcasts); but the failure to do so in this case was also quite real.
UPDATE II: Editorial note: Shuster has in the past done excellent work and often credited Waas on previous stories, so we are working on the assumption that this was an anomaly and probably not a mistake created by Shuster, but rather the show's producers. We're not trying to single out Shuster here, but rather raising an issue that happens all too often to independent journalists working in the blogosphere.
Murray Waas has uncovered a major piece of evidence tying Vice President Dick Cheney to the efforts to attack Joe Wilson by exposing his wife as a CIA operative:
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.
Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.
Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney’s office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work.
Cheney revised the talking points on July 8, 2003– the very same day that his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and told Miller that Plame was a CIA officer and that Plame had also played a central role in sending her husband on his CIA sponsored trip to the African nation of Niger.
Go read it all. Cheney may believe he got off the hook in the Plame affair, but it may not be over yet.
News this morning that U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has indicted Democratic Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich predictably brought cheers from the conservative chattering classes. Blagojevich's arrest over the "pay for play" Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama and myriad other jaw-dropping corruption schemes Fitzgerald simply deemed "staggering" led the right-wing Hot Air blog among others to proclaim "Fitzmas arrives early this year." Of course, when the crime was obstruction and perjury over the outing covert CIA operative Valerie Plame as political payback by the Bush administration, the mouthpieces of the right slandered the Republican Fitzgerald as "politically motivated", "disgusting", "a lunatic" - and worse.
A walk down memory lane provides a rich history of the vitriol directed at Fitzgerald by conservatives circling the wagons around Karl Rove, Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby and the Bush White House. In December 2003, Deputy Attorney General James Comey (who later ran afoul of Bush loyalists over the President's illegal NSA domestic surveillance program) described his Plamegate Special Counsel appointee Fitzgerald as "an absolutely apolitical career prosecutor" with a "sterling reputation for integrity and impartiality." But as the noose began to tighten around Libby's neck during Fitzgerald's investigation into the outing of Plame by Robert Novak, the Republican amen corner went after the messenger.
In the fall of 2005, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison rushed to Libby's defense in the wake of his indictment by Fitzgerald. As the opening salvo of the tried and true "criminalization of politics" defense, Hutchison sneered at what she derided as Fitzgerald's "perjury technicality":
"That if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."
In the ensuing conservative war on Fitzgerald, former MSNBC host Tucker Carlson was among the first goose-stepping soldiers to volunteer. On October 24, 2005, Carlson regretted that the Bush White House hadn't started smearing Fitz much earlier. Carlson applauded Hutchison's line and said of President Bush, "He should have done that a long time ago," adding:
"I think politically [the Bush administration] did very much the wrong thing by saying nice things about Patrick Fitzgerald some months ago - 'he's a man of integrity,' 'he's a good guy,' 'we have complete confidence he's going do the right thing,' etc., etc. - making it now almost impossible for the White House, even on background, to attack the guy."
I didn't have a chance to get to this the other day. Mukasey is headed for trouble as outlined by Chairman Waxman in this video. He warns the Attorney General of a Scheduled Contempt Vote over Cheney:
Waxman; ...I have tried to investigate what really happened and the White House has resisted oversight every step of the way.
The committee's inquired has tried to penetrate the cloud surrounding VP Cheney's conduct. But today the President has asserted executive privilege and is withholding from the committee and the American people key evidence about the VP Cheney's actions. During our investigation we have learned that Mr. Libby told the FBI that it was possible that the Vice President instructed him to leak Miss Wilson's identity. That would be an extraordinary breach of trust. There is a key document that could explain what the VP knew and what he did. The report of the VP's interview with officials working from the FBI working for Mr. Fitzgerald. If there is one document that could pierce the cloud hanging over the VP, that is it.
Mr Mukasey decided that a different rule should apply to Republican Presidents than to Democratic Presidents.
The claim of executive privilege is ludicrous.
The President's actions have darkened the cloud over the VP and left important questions unanswered. As the committee considers its next steps, I hope the President and Vice President will also consider theirs. Congress and the American public are entitled to know what role the President and Vice President in the despicable outing of Miss. Wilson
AG Janet Reno provided this committee---the FBI interviews of both President Clinton and VP Gore a decade ago so what's the deal? Waxman is trying to find out what Cheney said to the FBI and is not too happy that Mukasey is blocking access to it. It sure looked like Scooter Libby was getting ready to hang Cheney out to dry unless Bush stepped in and gave him a get of jail card for free. Murray Waas wrote this great article about it a while ago:
Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report...read on
The Gavel: "Chairman Waxman writes Attorney General Mukasey that the Oversight Committee will vote to hold him in contempt unless the Attorney General produces a copy of the report of the FBI interview of Vice President Cheney in the investigation of the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA agent."
Mr. Fitzgerald removed any doubt about this important point last week. He wrote the Committee that "there were no agreements, conditions, and understandings between the Office of Special Counsel or the Federal Bureau of Investigation and either the President or Vice President regarding the conduct and use of the interview or interviews."
Do you think so? Appearing on MTP this morning, Scotty told Russert that Rove should have been fired over his roll in the Valerie Plame leak case. We all remember the changing narratives that Bush put forth in regards to how he would handle anybody that leaked Plame's name who were part of HIS administration.
MR. RUSSERT: The president said at the time that "if someone committed a crime, they'd no longer work in my administration." Do you believe the president should have fired Karl Rove?
MR. McCLELLAN: That's a, that's a question that the president had to make, and he chose not to.
MR. RUSSERT: But what do you think?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I, I think he should have stood by his word. I think the president should have stood by the word that we said, which is if you were involved in this any way, then you would no longer be in this administration. And Karl was involved in it. That would be a tough decision. I don't know if, if there was any crime committed. I don't--I say I just don't know that in the book. But we had higher standards at the White House. The president said he was going to restore honor, integrity. He said we were going to set the highest of standards. We didn't live up to that. When it became known that his top adviser had been involved, then the bar was moved. And the bar was moved to "if anyone is indicted, they would no longer be here." MR. RUSSERT: So you think they should've been dismissed.
MR. McCLELLAN: I think so. I mean, Scooter Libby was, and I, and I think that he should..
MR. RUSSERT: Well, he resigned. But you...
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes. But that was pushed out.
MR. RUSSERT: But you believe Rove--Rove should've, should've left?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think the president should've stood by his word, and that meant Karl should've left.
No one who knows the amiable Time correspondent, who doubles as an amateur stand-up comedian, would think so. Yet he faces imprisonment -- not for lying, cheating or committing journalistic fraud, but for refusing to testify about confidential sources.
Cooper didn't "out" Valerie Plame as a CIA operative -- that was columnist Robert Novak, who refuses to say whether he has been subpoenaed by a special prosecutor investigating which senior Bush administration officials leaked the information. Cooper wrote a follow-up piece questioning whether the administration had "declared war" on Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. But a federal judge has held Cooper in contempt of court, and he faces an unspecified period behind bars if Time's appeal fails.
