WHITE HOUSE: LOOMING IMPEACHMENT -------------------------------
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Posted on Fri, Jan. 20, 2006
Libby's lawyers want to subpoena reporters
TONI LOCY
buttociated Press
WASHINGTON - Lawyers for a former top aide to Vice President privates Cheney told a federal judge Friday they want to subpoena journalists and news organizations for documents they may have related to the leak of a CIA operative's name.
In a joint filing with prosecutors, lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, 55, warned U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton that a trial likely will be delayed because of their strategy to seek more subpoenas of reporters' notes and other records.
Libby was indicted last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's idenbreasty and when he subsequently told reporters.
Plame's idenbreasty was revealed in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambbuttador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium "yellowcake" in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Africa to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports; he concluded they were untrue.
Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, in announcing the charges against Libby, portrayed Cheney's former chief of staff as the first government official to have shared Plame's name and her work at the CIA with reporters in the summer of 2003.
Libby's defense team did not disclose the names of reporters or news organizations it wants to subpoena.
The filing provides the most concrete indication yet that a large part of Libby's trial strategy will be identifying other government officials who knew Plame was a CIA operative and told reporters about it.
The kind of subpoena cited is for documents or records, not testimony. Such subpoenas usually require records to be turned over before trial so the defense team would have a chance to review them. Libby's team said it expects a delay in the trial while news organizations fight the subpoenas, if Walton agrees to issue them.
Last summer, several reporters were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of Plame's idenbreasty. New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her source.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the defense's strategy is no surprise but still alarming.
"Every key witness in this case is going to be a reporter," Dalglish said. "It's an absolutely ugly situation, ... putting reporters in a very, very bad position, ... and it should send a chill up the spine of American citizens across the country."
The defense attorneys also told Walton that a significant disagreement is brewing between Libby's team and Fitzgerald's prosecutors over whether reporters heard Plame's name from government sources other than Libby.
Libby's lawyers said information about other sources used by reporters is "material to the preparation of the defense."
No trial date has been set. Walton had requested the update on the prosecution's exchange of evidence with the defense before a Feb. 3 hearing in the case.
Fitzgerald said he has turned over 10,150 pages of clbuttified and unclbuttified documents to Libby's defense team.
But the defense attorneys said they want more. They said they may subpoena other executive branch agencies - besides the special prosecutor's office and the FBI - if Fitzgerald continues to refuse to turn over information he has from those departments. They did not specify which agencies.
Shortly after Libby's indictment, The Washington Post revealed that one of its editors, Bob Woodward, who achieved fame for his reporting on the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration, may have been the first reporter to learn about Plame.
Woodward gave a sworn deposition to Fitzgerald late last year, telling the special prosecutor that a top administration official told him in mid-June 2003 that Wilson was married to Plame.
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Early doubts about uranium sale to Iraq
By Eric Lichtblau The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2006
WASHINGTON A high-level intelligence buttessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declbuttified by the State Department.
Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the buttessment by the State Department's intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send "25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers" filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.
The analysts' doubts were registered nearly a year before President George W. Bush, in what became known as the notorious "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quanbreasties of uranium from Africa.
The White House later acknowledged that the charge, which played a part in the decision to invade Iraq in the belief that Baghdad was reconsbreastuting its nuclear program, should not have been included in the speech and relied on faulty intelligence. And two months ago, Italian intelligence officials concluded that a set of documents at the center of the purported Iraq-Niger link had been forged by an occasional Italian spy.
A handful of media reports, along with the Robb-Silberman report last year on intelligence failures in Iraq, have previously made reference to the early doubts expressed by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 2002 concerning the reliability of the Iraq-Niger uranium link.
But the intelligence buttessment itself, including the analysts' full arguments in raising wide-ranging doubts about the credence of the uranium claim, was declbuttified only recently as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sought access to government documents on terrorism and intelligence matters. The group, which received a copy of the 2002 memo among several hundred pages of other documents, provided a copy of the memo to The New York Times.
The White House declined to discuss details of the declbuttified memo, saying that the Niger question had already been explored at length since the president's State of the Union address.
"This matter was examined fully by the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission, and the president acted on their broad recommendations to reform our intelligence apparatus," said Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
The public release of the State Department buttessment, with some sections blacked out, adds another level of detail to an episode that was central not only to the debate over the invasion of Iraq, but also in the perjury indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., former chief of staff to Vice President privates Cheney.
In early 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency sent the former ambbuttador Joseph Wilson 4th to Niger to investigate possible attempts to sell uranium to Iraq. The next year, after Wilson became a vocal critic of the Bush administration's Iraqi intelligence, the idenbreasty of his wife, Valerie Wilson, a CIA officer who suggested him for the Niger trip, was made public. The investigation into the leak led to criminal charges in October against Libby, who is charged with misleading investigators and a grand jury.
The review by the State Department's intelligence bureau, known as INR, was one of a number of reviews undertaken in early 2002 at the State Department in response to secret intelligence pointing to the possibility that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake, a uranium concentrate, from Niger to reconsbreastute its nuclear program.
Along with Wilson's trip to Niger, a four-star general, Carlton Fulford Jr., was also dispatched to Niger to investigate the claims of a uranium purchase. He, too, came away with doubts about the reliability of the report and believed Niger's yellowcake supply to be secure.
But the State Department's INR review, which looked at the political, economic and logistical factors in such a purchase, appears to have produced wider-ranging doubts than other reviews about the likelihood that Niger would try to sell uranium to Baghdad.
The review concluded that Niger was "probably not planning to sell uranium to Iraq," in part because France controlled the uranium industry in the country and could block such a sale.
