Last week, reports surfaced that David Wurmser, during his tenure as Dick Cheney’s Middle East advisor and an assistant to then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, became integrally involved with the Plame leak and ultimately struck a deal with Patrick Fitzgerald’s office.
Today, Raw Story follows up with some details about what Wurmser reportedly told investigators.
Those close to the investigation say that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been told that David Wurmser, then a Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on loan from the State Department, met with Cheney and his chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in June 2003 and told Libby that Plame set up the Wilson trip. He asserted that it was a boondoggle, the sources said.
Boondoggle? Wilson went to a Sub-Saharan, poverty-stricken nation — most of which is a “hot, dry, dusty” desert — on his own dime, and these guys believed it was a boondoggle? Are they insane? But I digress…
Libby then shared the information with Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, the sources said. Wurmser also passed on the same information about Wilson to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, they added.
Within a week, Wurmser, on orders from “executives in the office of the vice president,” was told to leak her name to a specific group of reporters in an effort to muzzle her husband, Wilson, who had become a thorn in the side of the administration, those close to the inquiry say. It is unclear who Wurmser had spoken with in the media, the sources said, but they confirmed he did speak with reporters at national media outlets about Plame.
“Libby wanted to discredit him right from the start,” one source close to the investigation told RAW STORY. “He used David Wurmser to help him do that.”
If accurate, this does flesh things out a bit in a way that makes sense.
Wurmser worked on Middle East intelligence and was in a position to learn about Plame’s CIA work. He was an active, vociferous proponent of the war, and Wilson was an obstacle.
Wilson went to Niger in 2002 to investigate the allegations and reported that the claims were unfounded. According to a Senate report, the mission grew out of a request by Vice President Cheney earlier that year. Vehemently denying that his boss had requested the trip, Libby became so incensed by Wilson that he sent word to Wurmser to find out who Wilson was and sought details of his trip, those familiar with the investigation say.
First, it sounds like WH sources are still holding out Libby as the one who’s supposed to take the fall for all of this. Second, Wurmser sounds like the kind of guy who’d be in a position to cut himself a pretty good deal with prosecutors.