The idea that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is, as part of his investigation of the White House, casting a wider net is not necessarily new. Way back in March 2004, Newsday reported that Fitzgerald’s interests went far beyond just the original leak, and included subpoenas for records of Air Force One telephone calls, records created by the White House Iraq Group, and a transcript of an Ari Fleischer briefing in Nigeria
And while the Newsday piece gave us a hint as to what Fitzgerald finds interesting, the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei move the ball forward in a big way with a key front-page piece today.
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.
Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.
In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.
Talk about leaving no stone unturned, Fitzgerald isn’t screwing around.
The Post piece didn’t include any stunning revelations, but it did offer some helpful details to areas of interest. For example, there’s the mystery man who spoke to Bob Novak about Plame on a DC street.
In a strange twist in the investigation, the grand jury — acting on a tip from Wilson — has questioned a person who approached Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue on July 8, 2003, six days before his column appeared in The Post and other publications, Wilson said in an interview. The person, whom Wilson declined to identify to The Post, asked Novak about the “yellow cake” uranium matter and then about Wilson, Wilson said. He first revealed that conversation in a book he wrote last year. In the book, he said that he tried to reach Novak on July 8, and that they finally connected on July 10. In that conversation, Wilson said that he did not confirm his wife worked for the CIA but that Novak told him he had obtained the information from a “CIA source.”
Novak told the person that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA as a specialist in weapons of mass destruction and had arranged her husband’s trip to Niger, Wilson said. Unknown to Novak, the person was a friend of Wilson and reported the conversation to him, Wilson said.
It increasingly seems Novak’s leak wasn’t trivia, accidentally leaked by an unwitting journalist with a tip. Novak, as Josh Marshall noted, “knew just what he was doing when he printed Valerie Plame’s name.”
On a related note, the Post reported:
[Bill] Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson’s wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.
Harlow said that after Novak’s call, he checked Plame’s status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame’s name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.
In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to “asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause ‘difficulties’ if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson’s wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name.”
What a schmuck. The CIA told Novak not to publish Plame’s name, but Novak didn’t believe their request was forceful enough for him to comply. So he not only ruined an agent’s career, Novak also undermined national security and put Plame’s international contacts in jeopardy.
But the Harlow angle may be even more significant in this. After all, Harlow was directly involved with the internal administration struggle over blame for the 16-words debacle. The Post article explained that this, too, is part of Fitzgerald’s probe because “the effort to discredit Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy.”
In other words, the scope of Fitzgerald’s investigation may very well be as broad as the massive Bush administration fraud used to launch the invasion of Iraq. The Plame scandal is key, of course, but part of a larger political catastrophe. Fitzgerald seems to understand that quite well.
This is the kind of story that should keep the entire White House staff up at night.