Emails link Cheney, Libby, Hadley, Rove & Bolton to Plame

(Crossposted on Dailykos)

Jason Leopold of Truthout has the scoop.

The White House confirmed Tuesday that it recently turned over to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald 250 pages of emails from the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney related to covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Bush administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence. The emails were not submitted three years ago when then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered White House staffers to turn over all documents that contained any reference to Valerie and Joseph Wilson.

Seems to me a three year delay is rather hard to explain isn't it? By comparison it took several years for some of the Rose Law Firm billing records to show up - as it turned out they were at Vince Foster's Place -- but those were hardcopies, and ultimately revealed no wrong-doing by the Former President or New York Senator Hillary Clinton.

There was no deliberate attempt to conceal because there was nothing damaging to hide -- but in the case of Vice-President Cheney and his Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby, there is a great deal to hide.

[Update: I bring the above point up to simply highlight the vast and important contrast between a pointless partisan witch-hunt and a genuine investigation of criminal wrong-doing by the executive branch. The nation endured years of bogus scandals involving the Clintons - from Whitewater to Filegate and Travelgate - but all of that is nothing compared to what Bush and Co have gotten away with without consequence... up until now that is]

The emails from Cheney's office that were turned over to Fitzgerald earlier this month were written by senior aides and sent to various officials at the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Office of the President. The emails were written as early as March 2003 - four months before Plame Wilson's cover was blown in a report written by conservative columnist Robert Novak. The contents of the emails are said to be damning, according to sources close to the investigation who are familiar with their substance. The emails are said to implicate Cheney in a months-long effort to discredit Wilson - a fact that Cheney did not disclose when he was interviewed by federal investigators in early 2004, these sources said.

The emails also show I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in October on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators related to his role in the leak, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, as well as former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton and other top officials in the vice president's office also took part in discussions about ways in which the administration could respond to Wilson's public criticism about the Bush administration's use of intelligence that claimed Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

Now one might argue that just attempting to argue with Wilson's claim isn't a crime. Never mind the fact that Wilson had actually bothered to go check on the facts by travelling to Niger himself, while these arm-chair chickenhawks simply sat at home and kavetched.

Just wait, it gets worse...

Other emails show that in mid-June 2003 these officials had sent emails that mentioned "Valerie Wilson" - not Valerie Plame - and her employment with the CIA, sources close to the leak investigation said.

One email about Wilson and his wife is said to have been sent by Libby to an unknown senior individual at the National Security Council in early June 2003, after Libby was told by Marc Grossman, then Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and that Grossman's colleagues told him that Plame Wilson was involved in organizing Wilson's trip to Niger in February 2002 to investigate whether Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country.

Ok, this is a pretty big smoking gun. It was in June of 2003 that the INR memo which made the exact same claim was drafted. One of Leopold's previous articles on this subject states that sources indicated that Libby discovered Plame's covert indentity in May of 2003 after the publishing of a scathing report on the Niger story by Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times.

Following that revelation to the Cheney team, there was nearly a month for this information to sit around and percolate. It was during June that Libby spoke to Times reporter Judith Miller, which according to the Fitzgerald indictment was the first linking of Plame's employement to Wilson's trip. Libby has claimed that he learned of Plame's CIA status from reporters, and testified to this effect before the Grand Jury and to FBI Investigators - but these long missing emails paint a completely different picture, one that isn't particularly Rosey for Libby, Hadley, Rove, Bolton or for that matter, the Vice-President.

Crossposted on Truth 2 Power.

[Update 2: Leopold has posted on my comments that he has added additional information to his report including a transcript of comments from Libby's attorney Ted Wells.

"I may say we are also told that there are an additional approximately 250 pages of documents that are emails from the office of the vice president. Your Honor, may recall that in earlier filings it was represented or alluded to that certain e-mails had not been preserved in the White House. That turns out not to be true. There were some e-mails that weren't archived in the normal process but the office of the vice president or the office of administration...

This comment relates to a previous report that the emails were "missing" which has been addressed many places, including Firedoglake. Next comes the money quote.

I guess [V. Yeah, right] it is has been able to recover those e-mails. Gave those to special counsel I think only on February 6 and those again are going to be produced to us. We don't know what's in there. We've been led to believe it's probably not anything startling in those e-mails but again we need to review those and that also may be the subject of a motion."

So Libby's people seem pretty hopeful that there's nothing damaging in the emails. Maybe there isn't - and maybe there is. My money is on the later. If I'm wrong there no loss, no foul to Fitzgerald's case -- but if I'm right the odds are that the information won't just be used in the Libby case (he's got more than enough to prove both Perjury and Obsruction of Justice on Libby).

It's very likely that any damaging information in these suddenly found emails will find it's way directly in front of the second Fitzgerald Grand Jury and into future charges against future defendants such as Bolton, Hadley and ...Cheney -- cases which would be greatly helped if Libby discovers just how tight a box he's really in and starts to talk about making a deal to save his slimy skin.

Stay tuned sports fans...this could get interesting.

[Update 3: From Annefrank in the comments it appears that Fitzgerald has filed an affidavit Today explaining why Libby's "Greymail" attempts should be thwarted in order to protect Grand Jury Secrecy in regards to privacy of other potential targets of the inquiry. So yes, there are indeed other targets, but Fitzgerald isn't telling who - yet]

Vyan