California Conservative

The AP’s Peter Yost has just posted an article about a possibly big development in the CIA leak investigation. Here’s the most important sections in the article:

Notes by the New York Times’ Judith Miller that were turned over in a criminal investigation contain the name of a covert CIA officer, but the reporter has told prosecutors she cannot recall who disclosed the name, the newspaper reported Saturday.
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In response to questioning by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Miller replied that she “didn’t think” she heard Plame’s name from Cheney’s aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. “I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall,” Miller wrote…

It seems to me that Judith Miller would remember if she got information from such prominent people as Rove and Libby. The other thing that we can deduce from these notes is that she must have talked with others about Valerie Plame’s identity. You’d think that if she only talked with Libby and Rove about Plame’s identity, her notes would reflect that. Furthermore, she’d likely remember that.

Don’t look now but it’s quite possible that the “Will Rove or Libby get indicted?” gossip has just been answered.

UPDATE: The AP has filed an update to the original story that actually strengthen the case that Libby and Rove didn’t leak Plame’s name to Judith Miller. Here are the key paragraphs:

Miller and Libby met for breakfast at a hotel near the White House on July 8, 2003, two days after The Times published an opinion piece by Wilson criticizing the Bush administration. The notebook Miller used for that interview includes the reference to “Valerie Flame.” But Miller said that name did not appear in the same portion of her notebook as the interview notes from Libby. At the breakfast, Libby provided a detail about Wilson’s wife, saying she worked in a CIA unit known as Winpac. The name stands for weapons intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control. Miller said she understood this to mean that Wilson’s wife was an analyst rather than an undercover operative.
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Another variant on Plame’s name, “Victoria Wilson”, appears in Miller’s notes of a July 12, 2003, phone call with Libby. The newspaper’s account Saturday says that by the time of that phone call, Miller had called other sources about Wilson’s wife.
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Miller’s first-person account is a window into the bad relations between the White House and the CIA in 2003 stemming from the fact that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. Miller at the time was speaking to Libby after being assigned to write a story about the failure to find them.
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Miller said that in her grand jury appearances on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, she recalled Libby’s frustrations and anger in 2003 over what Libby called “selective leaking” by the CIA and other agencies in a “perverted war” with the White House over the conflict in Iraq. Libby, she said, accused the intelligence agencies of trying to distance themselves from what he recalled as unequivocal prewar assessments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Let’s recap this update: When Miller and Libby met for breakfast, Miller came to understand that Wilson’s wife wasn’t a covert operative but was an analyst.
When they talked again 4 days later, Miller had talked to other sources about Wilson’s wife.
We also learn of something that Fitzgerald might well focus on, specifically, that “the CIA and other agencies” were slectively leaking information in an attempt to distance themselves from their intelligence-gathering mistakes.
This leaking led to some awful relations between them and the Bush administration, with the result being Tenet stepping down and Piorter Goss stepping into the hornets nest of being the Director of Central Intelligence. Upon entering that job, Goss either pushed out or fired several agents.

Cross-posted at Let Freedom Ring

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 8:30 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Media, Washington, DC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.