Waxman to hold Plame hearing in House

March 8, 2007

When Clinton was president, congressional Republicans held thorough, high-profile hearings, especially in the House, with remarkable consistency. Henry Waxman once explained, “There was no accusation too minor to explore, no demand on the administration too intrusive to make.”

Republicans investigated whether the Clinton administration sold burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery for campaign contributions. They examined whether the White House doctored videotapes of coffees attended by President Clinton. They spent two years investigating who hired Craig Livingstone, the former director of the White House security office. And they looked at whether President Clinton designated coal-rich land in Utah as a national monument because political donors with Indonesian coal interests might benefit from reductions in U.S. coal production.

Committees requested and received communications between Clinton and his close advisers, notes of conversations between Clinton and a foreign head of state, internal e-mails from the office of the vice president, and more than 100 sets of FBI interview summaries. Dozens of top Clinton officials, including several White House chiefs of staff and White House counsels, testified before Congress. The Clinton administration provided to Congress more than a million pages of documents in response to investigative inquiries.

If Drudge ran an item in the morning about something that might be controversial about the Clinton White House, Republicans had scheduled hearings by the afternoon.

In July 2005, in reference to the Plame scandal, a Republican source told Tim Russert, “If this was a Democratic White House, we’d have congressional hearings in a second.”

But it wasn’t a Democratic White House, and it was a Republican Congress. And so, the Bush gang could expose the identity of an undercover CIA agent and lie about it without so much as a hearing from the House of Representatives.

That is, until now.

Good news this afternoon from the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Waxman.

Chairman Henry A. Waxman announced a hearing on whether White House officials followed appropriate procedures for safeguarding the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. At the hearing, the Committee will receive testimony from Ms. Wilson and other experts regarding the disclosure and internal White House security procedures for protecting her identity from disclosure and responding to the leak after it occurred. The hearing is scheduled for Friday, March 16.

In addition, the Committee today sent a letter to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald commending him for his investigation and requesting a meeting to discuss testimony by Mr. Fitzgerald before the Committee.

Plame has already agreed to participate.

Former CIA agent Valerie Plame has agreed to testify in a House hearing on the White House’s handling of her disclosure, two days after a guilty verdict was reached in the CIA leak trial involving former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-California, announced he would hold the hearings on March 16 that aim to investigate the “internal White House security procedures for protecting her identity from disclosure and responding to the leak after it occurred,” according to a statement released Thursday.

Waxman has also asked the Special Prosecutor of the CIA Leak investigation, Patrick Fitzgerald, to appear before the committee.

“The trial proceedings raise questions about whether senior White House officials, including the Vice President and Senior Advisor to the President Karl Rove, complied with the requirements governing the handling of classified information,” Waxman wrote to Fitzgerald in a letter dated Thursday. “They also raise questions about whether the White House took appropriate remedial action following the leak and whether the existing requirements are sufficient to protect against future leaks.”

Elections have consequences.

now that didn’t take long.

as you like to say, pass the popcorn.

  • Good for Waxman!

    I hope he goes broad enough, though. In his letter to Fitzgerald he says, “By necessity, your investigation had a narrow legal focus: ‘Were any federal criminal statutes violated by White House officials?” and that is only partly correct. The investigation was only of the very specific instances related to exactly the matter Ashcroft removed himself from – the specifics of the Novak leak. All the NIE situation needs at least as good and hard of a leak and it is all braided together.

    Fitzgerald could not have gone after the NIE leak if he wanted to – he was in-house DOJ, not an Independent Counsel, and his crew had a very very very narrow issue and focus. Libby’s lawyers made Fitzgerald agree to that narrow focus in connection with their attack on his appointment as violating the appointments clause, and Judge Walton specified in his opninion that the Spec Counsel had a narrow mandate that was limited to Plame and not to other illegal leaks he might have discovered.

    And I really hope Waxman specifically asks for the letter that Fitzgerald’s office sent to Rove clearing him.

    In March and April the filings were going on about Fitzgerald’s scope and mandate and that is when both Fitzgerald and Comey filed affidavits, and Fitzgerald filed briefs, that flat out said the Spec Pros could be removed at will and who within DOJ could do it. May is when there was all the Rove fiasco – was there a sealed indictment yada yada and then Boom, Luskin says Rove is walking (but won’t produce the letter) . Also about that time Libby’s lawyers back off from what had been a really aggressive push by them for Rove’s GJ testimony and one which the Judge had said he would reconsider later in the proceedings. And we never hear another word about the 200 emails that Fitzgerald’s team obtained from someplace OTHER THAN WH and OVP discovery responses.

    Who knows what happened, but I can’t buy Luskin wouldn’t have plastered the papers with that letter unless it had something in it he didn’t want out. I’d feel better knowing Waxman has his own copy and that I’m just overly suspicious. Bc after the firing of the USAttys, all of whom were keeping pretty quiet about it, you have to wonder if, but for the high profile of what was going on with Lam and also the stupid statements by McNulty to publically say they all had “performance” problems (like any lawyer wants that tag going into the public or poltical market), anyone would have heard or known anything about it?

    And I really really really want to hear someone on behalf of the WH or AG or WHCounsel come before Congress and defend planting the NIE cherrypicks, covertly, for domestic propaganda purposes and delegating the Executive authority, to Judy Miller (with no signed confidentiality agreements) to determine what pieces of the pieces she was given she would “declassify” by reporting. Engaging in covert domestic propaganda isn’t *declassification* and handing off authority to Judy Miller to print or not is also not “declassification.” The committee could/should start with Libbyas a witness, bc he wasn’t charged with that particular episode but a lot of facts about it are already in the public record. Maybe an independent counsel should be appointed?

    Here’s hoping Congressman Waxman!

  • This is exactly what we have all been waiting for from this Democratic congress. It was a venomous witch hunt all through the Clinton years with few tangible results. We know this administration will prove to be one of the most corrupt in history with the corruption often supported by the Republican congress and th GOP. Bush/Cheney have been installing non-qualified personnel in administrative positions as rewards and in nearly every instance their ineptitude has required cover-up as they screw up. So it’s a field day out there for investigations. The results are guaranteed. But like many I’ve been scratching my head and wondering what’s taking the Democrats so long? Glad to see Waxman understands this and is beginning to do it. Criminals are criminals regardless of party! But the last 8yrs. has produced the atmosphere criminals thrive in, and that is…NO OVERSIGHT.

  • Finally, with the Democrats in the majority position in Congress, there’ll be true oversight over the executive branch’s (read President George W. Bush’s administration’s) misconduct, corruption–in other words– malfeasance that has been long overdue. It’s obvious that George W. Bush doesn’t listen to anyone else except for his buddies. Let’s restore true democracy to our shores!!

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