Replies to post #6182 on Nothing But Politics

[thepennyking]

New Movie About the Bush Cabinet

[sylvester80]

Why am I not surprised... Their true name is the "pure-evil anti-Christian right".

[sylvester80]

NEWS: Inquiry widens in leak of CIA name; Possibility exists of charges other than for any illegal disclosure

Friday, April 2, 2004

By DAVID JOHNSTON AND RICHARD W. STEVENSON
THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON -- Prosecutors investigating whether someone in the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of a CIA officer have expanded their inquiry to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the case, lawyers involved in the case and government officials said.

In looking at violations beyond the original focus of the inquiry, which centered on a rarely used statute that makes it a felony to disclose the identity of an undercover intelligence officer intentionally, prosecutors have widened the range of conduct under scrutiny and, for the first time, raised the possibility of bringing charges peripheral to the leak itself.

The expansion of the inquiry's scope comes at a time when prosecutors, after a hiatus of about a month, appear to be preparing to seek additional testimony before a federal grand jury, according to lawyers with clients in the case. It is not clear whether the renewed grand jury activity represents a concluding session or a prelude to an indictment.

The broadened scope of the inquiry is a potentially significant development that represents exactly what allies of the Bush White House feared when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from the case last December and turned it over to Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago.

Republican lawyers worried that the leak case, in the hands of an aggressive prosecutor, might grow into an unwieldy, time-consuming and politically charged inquiry, like the sprawling independent-counsel inquiries of the 1990s, which distracted and damaged the Clinton administration.

Fitzgerald is said by lawyers involved in the case and government officials to be examining possible discrepancies between documents he has gathered in the case and statements made by current or former White House officials during a three-month preliminary investigation conducted last fall by the FBI and the Justice Department. Some officials spoke to FBI agents with their lawyers present; others met informally with agents in their offices and even at bars near the White House.

The White House last year took the unusual step of specifically denying involvement in the leak on the part of several top administration officials, including Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, has said repeatedly no one wants to get to the bottom of the case more than Bush.

But Bush himself has said he does not know whether investigators will ever be able to determine who disclosed the identity of the CIA officer, Valerie Plame, to Robert Novak, who wrote in his syndicated column last July that Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a CIA employee.

Wilson was a critic of the administration's Iraq policies. Democrats have accused the White House of leaking his wife's name in retaliation because Wilson, in a July 6, 2003, op-ed commentary in The New York Times, disputed Bush's statement in his State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear bomb and had sought to purchase uranium in Africa.

The suspicion that someone may have lied to investigators is based on contradictions between statements made by various witnesses in FBI interviews, the lawyers and officials said. The conflicts are said to be buttressed by documents, including memos, e-mail messages and phone records turned over by the White House.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/167388_leak02.html

[hk2]

Bush Aides Block Clinton's Papers From 9/11 Panel
By PHILIP SHENON and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: April 2, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/politics/02PANE.html

WASHINGTON, April 1 — The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said on Thursday that it was pressing the White House to explain why the Bush administration had blocked thousands of pages of classified foreign policy and counterterrorism documents from former President Bill Clinton's White House files from being turned over to the panel's investigators.

The White House confirmed on Thursday that it had withheld a variety of classified documents from Mr. Clinton's files that had been gathered by the National Archives over the last two years in response to requests from the commission, which is investigating intelligence and law enforcement failures before the attacks.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said some Clinton administration documents had been withheld because they were "duplicative or unrelated," while others were withheld because they were "highly sensitive" and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways. "We are providing the commission with access to all the information they need to do their job," Mr. McClellan said.

The commission and the White House were reacting to public complaints from former aides to Mr. Clinton, who said they had been surprised to learn in recent months that three-quarters of the nearly 11,000 pages of files the former president was ready to offer the commission had been withheld by the Bush administration. The former aides said the files contained highly classified documents about the Clinton administration's efforts against Al Qaeda.

The commission said it was awaiting a full answer from the White House on why any documents were withheld.
[...]