Suspicion centers on Lewis Libby
Dick Cheney's chief of staff helped hype the Iraq threat and discredit Joe Wilson. But while the White House has denied Karl Rove is the leaker, so far it's left Libby twisting slowly in the wind.
By Eric Boehlert
Oct. 3, 2003 | 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."
And later, McClellan dismissed as "ridiculous" any suggestions that Rove may have played a role, adding, "There is simply no truth to that suggestion. And I have spoken with Karl about it."
But when a reporter asked about Libby, McClellan cut him off with a non-response.
"Does [Bush] know whether or not the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby ..." the reporter began. McClellan interrupted: "Do you have any specific information to bring to my attention? Like I said, there has been nothing that's been brought to our attention."
Asked for a comment about speculation surrounding Libby, Cheney's spokeswoman Cathie Martin tells Salon, "This is a serious matter and we shouldn't be speculating in light of an ongoing investigation."
By all accounts, Libby was certainly at the heart of the administration's high-level arm-twisting in the intelligence community, trying to massage evidence to make the case that Iraq was an imminent danger to the world. He and his boss Cheney, along with a cadre of administration hawks, took the lead in trying to sell a number of bogus claims, from the notion that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger to the false assertion that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi spy before 9/11.
The Plame controversy, of course, stems from a New York Times opinion piece written by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, in July. In it, he revealed that in 2002 he traveled to Niger on an assignment for the CIA to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from the African nation. Wilson wrote that he reported back that the claims were likely bogus, yet President Bush still included mention of the uranium plot in this year's State of the Union address.
One week after Wilson's Op-Ed, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a piece defending the White House, arguing that Wilson's trip to Niger was arranged by his wife, Valerie Plame, "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
Novak wasn't the only journalist who received such a briefing back in July (five others reportedly got the same tip), but he was the only one who went public with the information. The leak was in violation of a 1982 federal law that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of the identity of a clandestine intelligence officer. And the guessing game has become heated.
Many of the clues pointing toward Libby come from Novak himself, who's provided a number of details about his source. (Yes, there were two Novak sources, but according to the columnist, after a senior administration source gave him Plame's identity, the second source merely confirmed that when Novak told him he knew.)
For instance, the source "is no partisan gunslinger," according to Novak's Wednesday column. That description would certainly rule out the hyper-political Rove. The "no partisan gunslinger" tag fits Libby better. A consummate Washington Republican insider, Libby rarely throws bombs in the press, or parades in front of the talking-head cameras. Instead, he's considered a behind-the-scenes power broker who bounces back and forth between senior government jobs and his lucrative Beltway law practice. Between 1995 and 2000 Libby served as fugitive billionaire Marc Rich's attorney.
And yes, Condi Rice seems to be off the hook; on TV Novak has referred to his source as "he."
But more significantly, it's important to remember what Novak was looking for when he dialed up his "senior administration source" last July. According to his accounts, Novak wasn't fishing for Plame's identity. Instead he was looking for an answer to the question: Why was Wilson chosen to go to Africa?
Novak told CNN he thought Wilson was a strange choice, since he'd donated to Democratic campaigns and had no experience with weapons of mass destruction.
Wilson's July Op-Ed appeared on a Sunday. "On Monday, I began to report on something that I thought was very curious," Novak told CNN. As he explained in his Wednesday column, "During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger."
The question is, where would have been the logical place for Novak to start his inquiry about Wilson's trip? One obvious answer is in Cheney's office. As Wilson had explained in his column, it was because of Cheney that he was sent to Niger: "In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office."
We don't know whether Libby served as an anonymous contact for Novak inside the VP's office. But courtesy of Time.com, we do know Libby was talking to reporters about Wilson at around the time Novak's column ran.
