Plame Gossip - Monday

Always trying for the newest and latest news on Plame. Be sure to check the updates at the bottom as news breaks. (Big, Big Update below from the Wash Times claiming confirmation that Fitzgerald obtained the Italian report on the Niger forgeries.)

Let's start off with last night's NYTimes article, printed in this AM's NYTimes, which outlines the Republican spin points in defense of the probable indictments.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 - With a decision expected this week on possible indictments in the C.I.A. leak case, allies of the White House suggested Sunday that they intended to pursue a strategy of attacking any criminal charges as a disagreement over legal technicalities or the product of an overzealous prosecutor. .....

But allies of the White House have quietly been circulating talking points in recent days among Republicans sympathetic to the administration, seeking to help them make the case that bringing charges like perjury mean the prosecutor does not have a strong case, one Republican with close ties to the White House said Sunday. Other people sympathetic to Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said that indicting them would amount to criminalizing politics and that Mr. Fitzgerald did not understand how Washington works. .....

Congressional Republicans have also been signaling that they want to put some distance between their agenda and the White House's potential legal and political woes, seeking to cast the leak case as an inside-the-Beltway phenomenon of little interest to most voters.

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And Josh Marshall throws cold water on the theory that McNulty's Franklin/AIPAC investigation has been bundled into the Fitzgerald investigation. Marshall points out that despite hearing rumors from credible people confirming this, it looks likely that McNulty will be nominated by Bush to Deputy Attorney General. Marshall asks, "Would McNulty be nominated to a top AG post if he had been working closely with Fitzgerald?"
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And the WaPo is reporting that Fitzgerald flipped Novak early on. (Soooo glad he's no longer on CNN)

A critical early success for Fitzgerald was winning the cooperation of Robert D. Novak, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist who named Plame in a July 2003 story and attributed key information to "two senior administration officials." Legal sources said Novak avoided a fight and quietly helped the special counsel's inquiry, although neither the columnist nor his attorney have said so publicly.

And the same article contains this tantalizing tidbit:

By October 2004, Fitzgerald announced he was "for all practical purposes" finished. The final pieces he wanted were the testimony of Miller and Cooper, who had each discussed Plame with either Rove or Libby. Using a provision that allowed the submission of evidence in secret, Fitzgerald persuaded U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan, a Reagan appointee, to order the reporters to testify or face jail for contempt.

Miller and Cooper appealed, but three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals backed Hogan, including Clinton appointee David S. Tatel, considered one of the most liberal voices on the court. Public copies of Tatel's opinion included blank pages where the judge discussed the secret evidence. He called Fitzgerald's investigation "exhaustive" and said the testimony of the two reporters "appears essential to remedying a serious breach of public trust."

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The NY Daily News, decidedly anti-Bush, offers their view inside the current Bush White House.

Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it. Lately, however, some junior staffers have also faced the boss' wrath.

"This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help," said a source with close ties to the White House when told about these outbursts. "This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight." ....

At the same time, these sources say Bush, who has a long history of keeping staffers in their place, has lashed out at aides as his political woes have mounted.

"The President is just unhappy in general and casting blame all about," said one Bush insider. "Andy [Card, the chief of staff] gets his share. Karl gets his share. Even Cheney gets his share. And the press gets a big share."

The vice president remains Bush's most trusted political confidant. Even so, the Daily News has learned Bush has told associates Cheney was overly involved in intelligence issues in the runup to the Iraq war that have been seized on by Bush critics.

Bush is so dismayed that "the only person escaping blame is the President himself," said a sympathetic official, who delicately termed such self-exoneration "illogical."

A second senior Bush loyalist disagreed, saying Bush knows "some of these things are self-inflicted," like the Miers nomination, where Bush jettisoned contrary advice from his advisers and appointed his longtime personal lawyer.

"He must know that the way he did that, relying on his own judgment and instinct, was not good," another key adviser said.

UPDATE: The Wash Times(I know Moonies) claims to have confirmed via NATO sources that Fitzgerald has indeed obtained the Italian government's documentation on the Niger forgeries. This is the most major newssource to claim this.(I know Moonies.) But despite Josh Marshall's dismissal above, if this proves to be part of Fitzgerald's case, the magnitude of this could be unimaginable.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources. .....

The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald's team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. .....

There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.

And going back to Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com, the first place I came across this information, he had this to say today. (I gotta warn you, though, if you click through this link Raimondo can be a pretty rough read. He bars no holds in his writings that the Neocons are a cabal.)

No sooner had I written about this in my Wednesday column of last week than it was confirmed a couple of days later by MSNBC, which reported that Fitzgerald's investigation has led him to ask for the Italian parliamentary report on the Niger uranium forgeries, which, I am told, points directly at the identity of the forgers.

UPDATE 2: Rawstory is running a piece claiming the Plame name flow went from Wurmser to Libby to Rove, and that Wurmser was ordered, by the VP's office to leak that name to the press. I have a couple problems with that. For instance, if it was Wurmser's duty to leak Plame to the press, why would Libby and Rove get caught also doing it. Secondly, if Wurmser brought the name into the conspiracy, would he not know that leaking a CIA name might get him in trouble? So, I don't really buy this, but I'm putting it in here, because the Rawstory source appears to have been right on Hannah. Big grains of salt, but there it is.

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