Did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld just buy himself a ticket to Fitzgerald's grand jury?

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday he could not recall if he spoke to Vice President Dick Cheney about outed CIA agent Valerie Plame.

...."How would I know if I ever spoke about it with the vice president over five years?" Rusmfeld said at a Pentagon press conference Tuesday. "I don't recall speaking with him about it, and I don't recall the department being involved. Is it possible? I mean, my goodness, that's -- that question is such a -- it's -- what is that game? Fish. Give me all your sevens or something. I mean, that's not for me."

[hat tip Patriot Daily.]

ABC reported this morning that Time Reporter Matt Cooper told Good Morning America that Lewis Libby had identified Valerie Plame Wilson as an undercover operative to him.

Bloggers knew this was a bogus report. ABC has now corrected its error. [Note: The article is still misleading in reporting that "One of the reporters at the center of the investigation into the leak of the identity of an undercover CIA officer, says he first learned the agent's name from President Bush's top political advisor, Karl Rove." Rove never used the name Valerie Plame when talking to Cooper.]

Bloggers on the ball: Firedoglake, Mark Kleiman (who posts the text of the original report)and Talkleft (see comments)

The transcript is not up on lexis yet, I searched. I think the ABC article got it wrong, but we'll see.

Patriot Daily was the first to alert me to the suspect article.

by TChris

Echoing yesterday’s TalkLeft request for Dick Cheney to come clean, Nicholas Kristof today urges the vice president to “clear the air” by answering six questions in a televised press conference. The NY Times no longer provides free online access to Kristof’s columns, but the questions merit discussion, so they are reproduced (from the print edition) here (Truthout provides a free link here):

Did you ask Scooter Libby to undertake his inquiries about Ambassador Joseph Wilson? Mr. Libby made such a concerted push to get information, from both the State Department and the CIA, that I suspect that you prodded him. Is that right? If so, why?

Why did you independently ask the CIA for information about the Wilsons? The indictment states that on June 12, 2003, you advised Mr. Libby that you learned, apparently from the CIA, that Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie, worked in the agency. So did you ask George Tenet, then the director, about Mr. and Mrs. Wilson? Did you review the related documents that the CIA faxed to your office?

NBC's Tim Russert, mentioned in the Lewis Libby Indictment as having provided a different version of his July 10, 2003 conversation with Libby than Libby gave to the grand jury, is attracting a lot of media attention of his own.

The New York Times today analyzes his role.

Bloggers are more critical of Russert. Arianna chastises the article for being one-sided. Yesterday, she Arianna chastised Russert and Meet the Press yesterday for saying nothing illuminating about the Libby indictment or the scandal surrounding it - and instead lets guests go on and on about how the Bush White House is planning a turnaround. Check out Arianna's timeline of Russert and NBC comments about Russert's call with Libby.

by TChris

Scooter Libby’s arraignment, where he is likely to enter a plea of not guilty, has been scheduled for Thursday. Vice President Cheney today replaced Libby with two staff members:

Cheney picked David Addington to serve as his chief of staff and John Hannah to take over Libby's duties as assistant to the vice president for national security affairs.

As TalkLeft noted here, Addington “attended strategy sessions in 2003 on how to discredit Wilson when the former ambassador publicly charged that the Bush administration misled the country in pushing its case for war,” and he “played a leading role in 2004 on behalf of the Bush administration when it refused to give the Senate Intelligence Committee documents from Libby's office on the alleged misuse of intelligence information regarding Iraq.” Addington seems to be Libby’s “mini-me,” and Hannah was also involved in the Plame outing, a fact that TalkLeft discusses here and here. Their new roles assure that it will be business as usual in Cheney’s office.

by TChris

David Corn asks: “Did Cheney know Plame was undercover?” Noting that the Libby indictment doesn’t answer the question, Corn probes Cheney’s role in the scandal:

As the Post piece notes, on July 12, 2003--six days after Wilson published his op-ed--Libby apparently discussed with Cheney what he should say to reporters, particularly Matt Cooper, about the Wilson imbroglio. The indictment does not disclose what Cheney said to Libby at this point. But the next day, Libby confirmed for Cooper that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. Would Libby have done so had Cheney told him to be careful not to identify a DO [Operations Directorate] officer when discussing the Wilson affair with reporters? Perhaps so. But it's not unreasonable to wonder if Libby was--inadvertently or knowingly--spreading classified information about an undercover officer with the tacit or explicit consent of his boss.

Corn joins others in demanding that Cheney give a full accounting of the role he played in the outing of Valerie Plame. More on Cheney's role here and here.

Murray Waas and Paul Singer, writing at the National Journal, have more on Cheney Counsel David Addington and his involvement in the Valerie Plame probe. They state that Addington did nothing criminally wrong. But, there are other issues.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller does not sound pleased with Addington, who has been mentioned in recent weeks as a likely replacement for Libby as Cheney's Chief of Staff.

Josh Marshall finds an archived version of today's Washington Post article on Lexis-Nexis that is different than the first edition of the article. The difference is this sentence which did not make it into the final version:

On July 12, the day Cheney and Libby flew together from Norfolk, the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson's credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source.

Why is this critical? Jane at Firedoglake thinks it means that Ari Fleischer was Robert Novak's source. Anonymous Liberal analyzes another part of the article and concludes that Ari Fleischer was Walter Pincus's source. While I think it's possible that Fleischer was Novak's source, providing information he learned from Libby at lunch on July 7, I don't think he was Pincus's source. In any event, I think the removed sentence from the WaPo article is significant for another reason. It seems to be another link in the chain of available information that says the attack on Wilson could have been ordered by Cheney -- and that may be the reason it was deleted from the final version of the article.

Digby nails it once again.

• Sept. 26, 2003...Plame Leak is referred to the Department of Justice for Investigation

• October 7, 2003...Rove to Bush: "Reporters do a very good job of protecting leakers, Mr President. Don't worry."

• October 8, 2003...Bush to America: I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers."

by Last Night in Little Rock

Tomorrow's NY Times, online now, has two intriguing articles about VP Cheney: In Indictment's Wake, a Focus on Cheney's Powerful Role and Indictment Gives Glimpse Into a Secretive Operation. The first is a political story, but the second is more interesting because, reading between the lines, it focuses on a potential conspiracy in the White House.

Karl Rove's latest version of his role in the Plame investigation is contained in this Los Angeles Times article by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger.

Lawyers familiar with the case believe these e-mails were one element of a broad, eleventh-hour review of evidence — coupled with negotiations by Rove's lawyers — that led Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald not to include him in Friday's action.

"In the normal back-and-forth between prosecutor and defense attorneys, some issues were raised that made the prosecutor step back and have pause for thought as far as his future activities," a source close to Rove said. "He thought, 'This is enough for me to hold off making decisions.'"

The article continues to describe the last minute interview with Adam Levine as an indicator that Fitzgerald may now believe Rove just had a faulty memory in failing to tell investigators or the grand jury intially about his July 11 conversation with Time Reporter Matt Cooper. My post about the Levine interview is here.

These reporters have reported on the case several times, using sources referred to as "Rove associates" or people familiar with Rove's perspective.

by TChris

The NY Times describes how, “in its clear, cold language, [the Libby indictment] lifts a veil on how aggressively Mr. Cheney's office drove the rationale against Saddam Hussein and then fought to discredit the Iraq war's critics.” The indictment offers a peek, but the full scope of Cheney’s involvement in Libby’s indicted wrongdoing remains an unanswered question.

It is Libby’s right to be presumed innocent until proof beyond a reasonable doubt overcomes that presumption in the minds of twelve jurors. Would Libby exercise his right to a trial, knowing that Fitzgerald might call Cheney as a witness to events described in the indictment (pdf)? And knowing that Karl Rove, Official A, will testify against him? Does Libby want to subject Cheney and Rove to cross-examination?