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Arash

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Oct 28, 2005, 7:53:19 PM10/28/05

Washington Post
October 28, 2005

Cheney Adviser Indicted in CIA Leak Probe

Vice President Accepts Irv Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's Resignation 'With Deep Regret'

By William Branigin, Carol D. Leonnig & Christopher Lee

Washington -- Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Irv Lewis "Scooter" Libby
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/libby/libby.php), was indicted today by a federal
grand jury after a nearly two-year investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's
identity.

Capping a week of political turmoil in Washington, Lewis Libby promptly resigned and
left the White House. He expressed confidence that eventually he would be "totally
exonerated", and both Cheney and Bush praised his talent and dedication. "Obviously,
today is a sad day for me and my family", Libby said in a statement.

The grand jury did not return an indictment against another top administration
official who was caught up in the probe: Karl Rove
(http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/usa/karl-rove), Bush's top political strategist.
But the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Fitzgerald), said the investigation is "not
over" and that another grand jury would be kept open in case prosecutors decide to
press other charges.

Lewis Libby, 55, was indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and
making false statements. The five-count indictment charges that he lied to FBI agents
and to the federal grand jury about how and when he learned classified information
about the employment of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair), and disclosed that information to three
journalists. If convicted on all counts, Lewis Libby faces up to 30 years in prison
and a $1.25 million fine.

In brief remarks before flying to Camp David for the weekend, Bush said he had
accepted the resignation and praised Libby as an aide who "worked tirelessly on
behalf of the American people and sacrificed much in the service to this country". He
called the investigation "serious" and said the process now moves to a new phase,
leading to a trial.

"While we are all saddened by today's news, we remain wholly focused on the many
issues and opportunities facing this country", Bush said. "I got a job to do, and so
do the people who work in the White House." He did not take any questions from
reporters.

Dick Cheney said in a statement that he accepted Libby's resignation "with deep
regret." He called his aide "one of the most capable and talented individuals I have
ever known". Cheney added that "it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the
charges or on any facts relating to the proceeding".

The indictment was handed up today as the grand jury's term expired. Although no
indictment was announced for Karl Rove, 54, the White House deputy chief of staff,
today's proceedings did not remove him from legal jeopardy, since the investigation
is continuing.

"We're not quite done", Fitzgerald said in a news conference this afternoon. But he
refused to comment on whether anyone beside Libby would be charged in the case or
whether additional charges against Lewis Libby would be sought.

"I will not end the investigation until I can look anyone in the eye and tell them we
have carried out our responsibility sufficiently", Fitzgerald said.

Asked about what a reporter described as "Republican talking points" minimizing the
significance of today's charges, the prosecutor said lying under oath "is a very,
very serious matter" and a "serious breach of the public trust."

He said, "We didn't get the straight story, and we had to take action".

In the hour-long news conference this afternoon, Fitzgerald said that contrary to
what Lewis Libby told the FBI and the grand jury, he had held at least seven
discussions with government officials regarding the CIA agent before the day when he
claimed to have learned about her from Tim Russert
(http://www.nndb.com/people/070/000024995) of NBC News. "And in fact, when he spoke
to Tim Russert, they never discussed it", Fitzgerald said.

"At the end of the day, what appears is that Lewis Libby's story that he was at the
tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from
another, was not true", the special counsel said. "It was false. He was at the
beginning of the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this
information outside the government to a reporter. And then he lied about it
afterwards, under oath and repeatedly".

Earlier, Fitzgerald said in a statement, "When citizens testify before grand juries,
they are required to tell the truth. Without the truth, our criminal justice system
cannot serve our nation or its citizens. The requirement to tell the truth applies
equally to all citizens, including persons who hold high positions in government".

The indictment contains one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury
and two counts of making false statements. The charges involve testimony that Lewis
Libby gave to the grand jury and other statements he made regarding his conversations
with three journalists: Judith Miller (http://www.nndb.com/people/190/000050040) of
the New York Times, Matthew Cooper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cooper) of
Time magazine and Russert.

Libby is to be arraigned at a later date. The case has been assigned to U.S. District
Judge Reggie B. Walton, an appointee of President Bush.

A press release issued by the special counsel's office said that before Valerie Plame
Wilson's name appeared in the press in July 2003, her CIA employment was classified
and her affiliation with the agency "was not common knowledge outside the
intelligence community." It said that disclosing such information "has the potential
to damage the national security" by preventing the person from operating covertly in
the future, compromising intelligence-gathering and endangering CIA employees and
those who deal with them.

However, the indictment does not charge Lewis Libby with the original alleged offense
that the grand jury set out to investigate: illegally revealing the identity of a
covert agent in violation of a 1982 federal law.

The presentation of the indictment lasted less than five minutes from the time U.S.
Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson entered courtroom No. 4 on the second floor of
the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse at 12:35 p.m. Fitzgerald and 10 members
of his legal team, as well as the jury forewoman, had come to the courtroom about 15
minutes earlier, taking seats around a large wooden table near the center of the room
and talking quietly among themselves. The rest of the grand jury entered a few
minutes later. Neither Lewis Libby nor any of his attorneys was in the courtroom.

The grand jury included nine black women, four white women, three black men, two
white men and a Hispanic man. Most appeared to be middle-aged or older, and all wore
blank faces or serious expressions at today's proceeding. They sat quietly and did
not speak to each other before the indictment was announced.

An attorney for Karl Rove, Robert Luskin, said in a statement this morning, "The
Special Counsel has advised Rove that he has made no decision about whether or not to
bring charges and that Rove's status has not changed. Karl Rove will continue to
cooperate fully with the Special Counsel's efforts to complete the investigation. We
are confident that when the Special Counsel finishes his work, he will conclude that
Rove has done nothing wrong".

Karl Rove provided new information to Fitzgerald during eleventh-hour negotiations
that "gave Fitzgerald pause" about charging Bush's senior strategist, said a source
close to Rove. "The prosecutor has to resolve those issues before he decides what to
do."

This raised the prospect that a new grand jury or another existing one would continue
the probe, given the expiration today of the current grand jury's term.

As tension mounted ahead of the indictment, the White House adopted a
business-as-usual approach. Bush traveled to Norfolk, Virginia, today to deliver a
speech on the war on terrorism, and Cheney was in Georgia to attend several political
events.

The investigation by the federal grand jury in Washington was originally launched to
determine whether anyone illegally leaked the name of Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert
CIA agent, in an effort to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson
IV, in retaliation for his criticism of the war in Iraq. Ambassador Wilson began
criticizing the war and the Bush administration after a 2002 trip he took at the
behest of the CIA to the African country of Niger to look into reports that Iraq was
seeking materials to build nuclear weapons.

In a statement read by his lawyer this afternoon, ambassador Wilson said, "Whatever
the final outcome of the investigation and the prosecution, I continue to believe
that revealing my wife Valerie's secret CIA identity was very wrong and harmful to
our nation, and I feel that my family was attacked for my speaking the truth about
the events that led our country to war".

But he said the indictment was no reason to celebrate. "Today is a sad day for
America", Wilson said. "When an indictment is delivered at the front door of the
White House, the office of the president is defiled. No citizen can take pleasure
from that".

The indictment charges that Lewis Libby began acquiring information about ambassador
Wilson's trip in May 2003 after a New York Times column disputed the accuracy of a
Bush statement in his State of the Union address. The column said a former
ambassador, who was not named, found the statement to be false.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html

According to the indictment, Lewis Libby learned Valerie Plame Wilson's identity from
a senior State Department official in June 2003 and was told by Cheney that she
worked in the CIA's Counterproliferation Division.

The two key subjects of the inquiry -- Karl Rove and Lewis Libby -- have acknowledged
talking about Valerie Plame Wilson to reporters, but they have denied leaking her
name or committing other wrongdoing.

Lewis Libby testified that he did not identify Valerie Plame Wilson by name to
reporters or discuss her covert status with them. But Judith Miller of the New York
Times has testified that she believed she first learned of Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA
job from Lewis Libby, when the two spoke on June 23, 2003. Judith Miller said she and
Libby discussed Valerie Plame Wilson again in a meeting on July 8, 2003, and in a
phone conversation a few days later, on July 12. She has said she first learned
Valerie Plame Wilson's name from someone other than Libby but does not recall who it
was.

A lawyer who formerly served in the State Department and Defense Department, Lewis
Libby was the vice president's assistant for national security affairs in addition to
being his chief of staff.

The reported effort to discredit Wilson was rooted in a clash between the White
House -- notably Cheney -- and the intelligence bureaucracy in the CIA and State
Department over the war in Iraq. Grand jury testimony that has been disclosed
suggests that Bush administration officials suspected the CIA of trying to shift
blame for prewar intelligence failures to the White House.

The vice president played a central role in assembling the case for invading Iraq and
repeatedly pressed for intelligence that would bolster his arguments. Ironically, it
was a question from Cheney during an intelligence briefing that initiated the chain
of events that led to the grand jury investigation. He had received a military
intelligence report alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger and asked what
the CIA knew about it.

As a result, ambassador Wilson was dispatched in February 2002 to look into claims
that Iraqi President Saddam had attempted to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger for
use in developing nuclear weapons. Ambassador Wilson has said he found no evidence of
any such effort and reported that the claims were false.

Nevertheless, President Bush said in his January 2003 State of the Union address that
the British government had learned Hussein "recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa".

Two months later, Bush ordered U.S. troops into Iraq to depose Saddam and eliminate a
purported threat to the United States from Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction". No
such weapons were found, nor was there evidence that the Hussein regime had
reconstituted a nuclear weapons program.

In an opinion piece published in the July 6, 2003, New York Times
(http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm), ambassador Wilson criticized
Bush's State of the Union statement. Ambassador Wilson wrote that if his findings in
Niger were ignored because they did not fit the administration's "preconceptions
about Iraq", then a case could be made "that we went to war under false pretenses".
He said some intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear program was "twisted to
exaggerate the Iraqi threat". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake_forgery

On July 14, 2004 conservative political commentator Robert D. Novak wrote a
syndicated column that called Wilson's African mission into question, suggesting the
trip was instigated by ambassador Wilson's wife and did not have high-level backing.
Novak named Valerie Plame Wilson as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass
destruction" and said "two senior administration officials" had told him she had
suggested sending her husband on the Niger trip.
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/robertnovak/2003/07/14/160881.html

Ambassador Wilson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson) subsequently
complained that the Bush administration had compromised his wife's CIA career in
retribution against him.

The CIA then asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak. Fitzgerald, a
hard-charging U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed special counsel for the probe
in late December 2003. His charge was to determine whether anyone involved in the
leak violated federal law, including the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of
1982. The act makes it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a person
with access to classified information to intentionally disclose the identity of a
covert agent to anyone not authorized to receive classified information.

Indications later emerged, however, that Fitzgerald was looking into other possible
crimes related to the leak, including conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice.

As Fitzgerald was preparing to seek the grand jury indictments, the FBI conducted
last-minute interviews Monday night in Valerie Plame Wilson's Washington, D.C.,
neighborhood. The agents were attempting to determine if Valerie Plame Wilson's
neighbors knew she worked for the CIA before she was unmasked. Two neighbors said
they told the FBI they had been surprised to learn she was a CIA operative.

Valerie Elise Plame Wilson, 42, formerly worked undercover as an "energy analyst" for
a private company that was later identified as a CIA front. A graduate of
Pennsylvania State University and the London School of Economics, she married
ambassador Wilson, now 55, in 1998 while she was a covert agent. The couple has
5-year-old twins. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Valerie_Plame

Although the focus has been on Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney himself has
been publicly implicated in recent days in the chain of events that led to the
exposure of Valerie Plame Wilson. The New York Times reported Monday that Fitzgerald
possesses notes taken by Lewis Libby showing that he learned about Valerie Plame
Wilson from the vice president a month before she was identified by Novak. The White
House did not dispute the report.

Two lawyers involved in the case said Fitzgerald apparently has been aware of Lewis
Libby's June 12, 2003, conversation with Cheney since the early days of his
investigation.

Dick Cheney told NBC's Russert in September 2003 that he did not know ambassador
Wilson or who sent him on the trip to Africa.

Around the same time, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said any suggestion that
Karl Rove was involved in the leak was "ridiculous". McClellan said President Bush
has set "the highest of standards" for his administration and that if any officials
were involved in the leak, "they would no longer be in this administration."

Asked in June 2004 whether he would fire anyone who leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's
name, Bush replied in the affirmative.

But in July this year, Bush appeared to add a qualifier, telling reporters he would
dismiss anyone who "committed a crime" in the case. The White House refused to
clarify whether an indictment would trigger termination, or if that would require a
conviction.

During the investigation, Fitzgerald sought grand jury testimony from several
journalists who had spoken with administration officials about Valerie Plame Wilson,
and he came down hard on those who refused to cooperate.

The federal judge in the case, Thomas F. Hogan, ordered the New York Times's Judith
Miller held for contempt for refusing to identify a confidential source, and she
spent 85 days in jail in Alexandria, Virginia, before agreeing to testify about
conversations with Lewis Libby. Although she did not write an article about the case,
Judith Miller interviewed Lewis Libby about the Valerie Plame Wilson matter and
promised him anonymity. Judith Miller said she agreed to testify when Libby
specifically and personally released her from the confidentiality pledge.

Among those interviewed by Fitzgerald in the case have been Bush, Cheney and several
of their top aides and advisers.

* Washington Post staff writer Jim VandeHei contributed to this article.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102800153_pf.html