There are any number of important updates on the Plame scandal in the major media today, but one stands out.
* The New York Times informs us that Rove and Libby “have been advised that they may be in serious legal jeopardy.” (Does this mean target letters? Probably.)
* The incomparable Murray Waas wrote another great National Journal piece explaining that Judith Miller appears to have gone out of her way to try to protect Scooter Libby, divulging her June 23, 2003 discussion “only after prosecutors showed her Secret Service logs that indicated she and Libby had indeed met that day in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.”
* The Washington Post reports that the White House is still generally in denial and burdened by an eerie internal silence, but some are making plans for a post-Rove presidency. Among the names in the mix to “help steady a shaken White House” are budget director Josh Bolten, lobbyist Ed Gillespie, and RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman.
But the most interesting Plame story may be the LA Times’ piece on Scooter Libby’s decision, in 2003, to “target” Joseph Wilson. To hear White House officials tell it, Libby became border-line obsessed about destroying the former ambassador.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was so angry about the public statements of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a Bush administration critic married to an undercover CIA officer, that he monitored all of Wilson’s television appearances and urged the White House to mount an aggressive public campaign against him, former aides say.
The story is filled with key insights from Libby’s current colleagues — suggesting again that they’ve decided to throw the guy overboard. Indeed, the picture the Bush gang paints of Libby is pretty disturbing.
Libby’s anger over Wilson’s 2003 charges has been known. But new interviews and documents obtained by The Times provide a more detailed view of the depth and duration of Libby’s interest in Wilson. They also show that the vice president’s office closely monitored news coverage.
On one occasion, the office prohibited a reporter from traveling with Cheney aboard Air Force Two, because the vice president’s daughter said Cheney was unhappy with that newspaper’s coverage.
Libby “would see something had appeared in the newspaper or on television and wanted to use the White House operation to counter it,” one former official said.
After Wilson published a book criticizing the administration in April 2004, during the closely fought presidential campaign, Libby became consumed by passages that he believed were inaccurate or unfair to Cheney, former aides said. He ordered up a meticulous catalog of Wilson’s claims and public statements going back to early 2003.
The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and television transcripts of Wilson’s statements that were divided into categories, such as “political ties” or “WMD.”
The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney “a lying son of a bitch.” It also highlighted Wilson’s answers to questions from television journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.
The intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan or its rationale, former aides said.
To write this story, the LA Times had to rely on several in-the-loop White House officials, all of whom seemed more than anxious to characterize Libby as a vengeful attack dog on an anti-Wilson crusade.
This is likely a good hint about the kind of public-relations justification the Bush gang will present if (when?) Libby gets indicted. The message will more or less be, “We wanted to leave Wilson alone, but Libby was obsessed. We didn’t realize the extent to which he wanted to take Wilson and Plame apart. He went too far.”
In other words, another Bush, another “out of the loop” defense.