For cryin’ out loud, what does a White House criminal investigation have to do to get some attention around here?
We know someone at the White House leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent. We also know that several top vice presidential aides are leading suspects, that the VP (without telling anyone) sat down with investigators to talk about the crime, and that the President has sought outside counsel.
Now we can add White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to the list of those who’ve been called to answer questions from federal investigators.
Gonzales testified yesterday before a federal grand jury investigating whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of a covert CIA officer last summer.
Gonzales was summoned before a grand jury that has been meeting for six months, taking testimony in an inquiry led by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan confirmed Gonzales’s appearance before the panel but said he had no information about why Gonzales was called or what he was asked. “The judge was pleased to do his part to cooperate,” McClellan said about the appearance.
Yeah, I bet. It’s a White House counsel’s dream to cooperate with a criminal investigation into which of his colleagues committed a felony and undermined national security.
I continue to believe that this story has to be the most under-reported scandal in recent memory. I suppose other Bush-related disgraces — his memos placing him above the law, his administration’s tolerance of torture, his pre-war lies about Iraq — are dominating the media’s attention, but I suspect most Americans have no idea that the Bush White House is currently under a criminal investigation and that most of the president’s top aides have been called to answer questions before a federal grand jury about a likely felony.
Watching some of the new rounds of Clinton criticisms over the weekend, I was reminded of how DC effectively shut itself down when Clinton offered testimony before his grand jury probe. Now we don’t even know if Bush has answered questions at all — and the president refuses to say either way.
Reporter: On another issue, have you been called to answer questions regarding the CIA leak? And have you retained the attorney —
Bush: You need to call — you need to call — you need to talk to the counsel over there.
No follow-up, no wall-to-wall coverage, no real interest. Bush won’t even let the public know if he’s been asked to answer questions and reporters seem to just accept that at face value. I can’t figure it out.
It seems the only way to get anyone to care about this is to argue that Valerie Plame wasn’t an undercover agent investigating weapons of mass destruction before being “outed,” but rather just a government employee that Bush hit on when no one was looking. Then Plame would be a household name. Exposing a CIA agent and endangering her contacts around the world just isn’t sexy enough.
And finally, John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel who thinks the Plame Game is a pretty big deal, suggested that the FBI could use the Patriot Act to storm the Oval Office and get to the bottom of this.
To make his point, while waiting for his book to come off the presses, Sam wrote in a Newsday article, “If, as now seems likely, top White House aides leaked the identity of an American undercover agent, they may have committed an act of domestic terrorism as defined by the dragnet language of the Patriot Act their boss wanted so much to help him catch terrorists.”
Under the Patriot Act, as Sam said to me with a chuckle, all the FBI has to do is tell a judge that it would “impede their investigation” to give the White House notice, and they could sneak into the Oval Office without warning — carrying approval from a secret court, granted in secret. “Maybe if the president or his aides were investigated under this law they would understand what they are doing,” Sam declared.