Gold9472
02-15-2007, 05:52 PM
Cheney's Call
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0215nj1.htm
By Murray Waas, National Journal
Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007
Early on the morning of June 20, 2002, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., received a telephone call at home from a highly agitated Dick Cheney. Graham, who was in the middle of shaving, held a razor in one hand as he took the phone in the other.
The vice president's actions in 2002 helped set events in motion that led to the prosecution of Scooter Libby, his own chief of staff.
The vice president got right to the point: A story in his morning newspaper reported that telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency on September 10, 2001, apparently warned that Al Qaeda was about to launch a major attack against the United States, possibly the next day. But the intercepts were not translated until September 12, 2001, the story said, the day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Because someone had leaked the highly classified information from the NSA intercepts, Cheney warned Graham, the Bush administration was considering ending all cooperation with the joint inquiry by the Senate and House Intelligence committees on the government's failure to predict and prevent the September 11 attacks. Classified records would no longer be turned over to the Hill, the vice president threatened, and administration witnesses would not be available for interviews or testimony.
Moreover, Graham recalled in an interview for this story, Cheney warned that unless the leaders of the Intelligence committees took action to discover who leaked the information about the intercepts -- and more importantly, to make sure that such leaks never happened again -- President Bush would directly make the case to the American people that Congress could not be trusted with vital national security secrets.
"Take control of the situation," Graham recalls Cheney instructing him.
Graham told the vice president that he, too, was frustrated over the leaks. But his attempt to calm Cheney down was unsuccessful.
On that morning in June 2002, Cheney could not have known that his complaints to Graham about the leaking of classified information would help set events in motion that eventually would lead to the prosecution of his own chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as the result of a separate leak investigation.
Libby, who stands accused of trying to conceal his role in disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, in 2003, is now on trial in federal court in Washington on five counts of perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice. Testimony and evidence at Libby's trial has raised questions as to whether Cheney himself authorized the selective leaking or declassification of information, including whether Cheney may have encouraged Libby to disclose Plame's CIA identity to reporters.
And when Graham received Cheney's phone call nearly five years ago, he had no idea that the vice president was not acting on impulse or entirely out of anger. Although administration officials have said that the White House was legitimately concerned that the NSA intercept leak could harm the war on terrorism, they also saw the incident as an opportunity to undercut congressional oversight and possibly restrict the flow of classified information to Capitol Hill. Libby, two administration officials recalled in interviews, was among the aides advising Cheney on this strategy of neutralizing the Hill.
After Cheney ended his call with Graham that morning, the White House was far from done.
The private complaint was followed by a very public rebuke.
Later that day, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer read from a prepared statement: "The president [has] very deep concerns about anything that would be inappropriately leaked that could ... harm our ability to maintain sources and methods and anything else that could interfere with America's ability to fight the war on terrorism."
And Bush himself later said, in reference to an entirely different leak, that whoever in government disclosed details of his administration's covert NSA surveillance program had committed a "shameful act" that had the effect of "helping the enemy." Attorney General Alberto Gonzales raised the possibility of prosecuting journalists.
As a result of the White House pressure over the NSA intercept leak in June 2002 -- applied through Cheney's phone call -- Graham and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., asked the Justice Department to investigate whether any members of Congress (including themselves) or their staffs were responsible for the leak. Prosecutors and FBI agents later zeroed in on Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who was then the ranking member on Senate Intelligence, as the person most likely responsible for disclosing the information to the press.
After a lengthy investigation, the Justice Department did not charge Shelby. Later, Justice referred the matter to the Senate Ethics Committee, and in a referral letter dated July 20, 2004, the department said it had "investigated the unauthorized disclosure of classified information" and had "produced evidence and information" concerning Shelby's conduct. In November 2005, the Ethics Committee wrote Shelby to say it had "dismissed the matter referred to it by DOJ."
Shelby insists that he did not leak any classified information, and he in turn decried as prosecutorial abuse the leaks from federal law enforcement officials suggesting that he, Shelby, had done something wrong.
In a statement prepared in response to questions for this story, Shelby said: "At no time during my career as a United States senator and, more particularly, at no time during my service as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have I ever knowingly compromised classified information." He added: "We have provided the investigation with our full cooperation."
Boomerang
Although no charges were brought in the investigation of the leaked NSA intercepts, the probe helped to pave the way for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate leaks out of the White House and, specifically the Office of the Vice President, in the Plame matter, according to administration, congressional, and law enforcement officials interviewed for this story.
"They [the administration] set the prosecutorial machinery in motion themselves, and the public support for it, before it came back to bite them," said a federal law enforcement official.
Graham, for one, believes that Cheney and Libby's strident demands to investigate leakers in Congress made it all but impossible for the White House to do anything less than cooperate fully with any criminal investigation of the Plame leak.
"They [the administration] would have had a certain exposure to hypocrisy if they hid behind executive privilege" when the Plame investigation began, or if they had fought the appointment of a special prosecutor, Graham said. "It made it politically untenable to avoid having a strong investigation, because they had demanded it of us. With us, they said we should call out the meanest, leanest dogs. The example that they set with us became the boomerang that came around and hit them."
At Libby's trial, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has attempted to show that Libby lied about leaking Plame's identity in 2003 because Cheney's office wanted to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was a strong public critic of the administration's decision to go to war in Iraq.
Wilson had traveled to Niger in February 2002 on a CIA-sponsored mission to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein's regime had attempted to procure weapons-grade uranium from the African nation. Wilson reported to the CIA that from what he could learn the allegations were almost certainly untrue. In a July 6, 2003, op-ed in The New York Times, Wilson charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" intelligence information when it cited the alleged Niger-Iraq connection in the president's State of Union address earlier that year.
White House officials had claimed that they were not warned by the CIA that the agency had discredited the intelligence information before the president's speech.
As one part of an effort to counter Wilson's allegations and to discredit him, Libby and other Bush administration officials told reporters that Wilson's wife selected him to go on the CIA mission, suggesting nepotism.
Libby's trial has also brought Cheney's role to center stage. According to evidence and testimony, Cheney selectively leaked and declassified intelligence information to bolster the administration's case for war and later to defend against charges that he had misrepresented prewar intelligence.
Before the trial, both Cheney and Libby denied that the vice president had authorized or even known that Libby had spoken to reporters about Plame. But at the trial, FBI agent Deborah Bond testified that Libby said in an interview with her that on July 12, 2003, Libby might have spoken to Cheney about the possibility of divulging Plame's name to reporters before he actually did so later that day.
Would Journalists Testify?
In the leak investigation of the NSA intercepts, the FBI agent in charge of the probe, Jack Eckenrode, repeatedly complained to senior Justice Department officials that he was stymied because he could not compel interviews or grand jury testimony from the journalists who received the leak. Without obtaining such testimony, Eckenrode said, he stood little chance of identifying the culprit and bringing any charges.
Two senior Justice Department officials at the time, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson and Criminal Division head Michael Chertoff, refused to approve subpoenas for the journalists. They also argued that Eckenrode's case was circumstantial, according to sources close to the investigation. It is unclear whether then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was involved in decisions on whether to subpoena journalists. Chertoff, now secretary of Homeland Security, declined to comment for this story. Thompson, who is no longer at Justice, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Eckenrode and other investigators kept pressing the argument that they could not know whether they had a good case unless they compelled the testimony of journalists. Some investigators voiced concerns that two GOP political appointees -- Thompson and Chertoff -- had turned them down on subpoenas for a probe whose chief suspect was a Republican senator.
Later, when Eckenrode was placed in charge of the Plame investigation, he privately complained that once again he was coming close to cracking the case, only to have prosecutors fail to bring any charges because of their inability to question journalists.
Eckenrode scored an early success in the Plame investigation by convincing NBC Washington bureau chief and Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert to speak to him. The FBI agent worked Russert the same way Russert might work a news source: Eckenrode mentioned that he had met Russert when his church group had taken a tour of NBC's Washington studios, and he spoke about how both of them came from Irish-Catholic backgrounds.
What Russert had to say to Eckenrode was central to the Plame probe because Libby was telling the FBI that when he talked to reporters about Plame working at the CIA, he was merely repeating rumors that Russert had told him about Plame during a July 10, 2003, telephone conversation.
Russert responded that Libby was lying -- that, in fact, he and Libby had never discussed Plame at all.
But when Fitzgerald attempted to take Russert's testimony under oath, Russert initially refused and NBC sought to quash a subpoena from prosecutors. For Eckenrode, it was a replay of the NSA leak case, when a Fox News correspondent had identified Sen. Shelby as his source to the FBI, only to refuse to testify under oath.
For several months in 2003, the Justice Department oversaw the Plame leak investigation. As evidence mounted that Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove might have played roles in leaking information about Plame, two senior Justice Department officials -- Christopher Wray, who was then head of the Criminal Division, and James B. Comey, who had just been named deputy attorney general -- persuaded Ashcroft to recuse himself from the matter and to allow Comey to appoint a special prosecutor. (Rove had earlier served as a consultant to three of Ashcroft's political campaigns.)
Senate Democrats were also pressing for a special prosecutor. Because Cheney had personally pushed for a criminal investigation of senators and their staff over the NSA intercepts, the Democrats insisted that the White House endure similar scrutiny over the leak of Plame's identity, according to several senior congressional staffers involved in the process.
With Fitzgerald's appointment as special prosecutor, Eckenrode found a sympathetic ear for his complaint that leak probes often went nowhere because suspects knew that reporters would never be forced to testify. Although the men agreed that reporters should be compelled to testify only as a last resort, Fitzgerald assured Eckenrode that he would demand such testimony if necessary.
Fitzgerald's resolve was displayed later in the Plame case when he pursued contempt charges against then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller. She refused to testify after being subpoenaed and ended up spending 85 days in jail. Miller finally agreed to testify about her conversations with Libby about Plame -- after Libby called her in jail and encouraged her to do so.
End Part I
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0215nj1.htm
By Murray Waas, National Journal
Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007
Early on the morning of June 20, 2002, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., received a telephone call at home from a highly agitated Dick Cheney. Graham, who was in the middle of shaving, held a razor in one hand as he took the phone in the other.
The vice president's actions in 2002 helped set events in motion that led to the prosecution of Scooter Libby, his own chief of staff.
The vice president got right to the point: A story in his morning newspaper reported that telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency on September 10, 2001, apparently warned that Al Qaeda was about to launch a major attack against the United States, possibly the next day. But the intercepts were not translated until September 12, 2001, the story said, the day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Because someone had leaked the highly classified information from the NSA intercepts, Cheney warned Graham, the Bush administration was considering ending all cooperation with the joint inquiry by the Senate and House Intelligence committees on the government's failure to predict and prevent the September 11 attacks. Classified records would no longer be turned over to the Hill, the vice president threatened, and administration witnesses would not be available for interviews or testimony.
Moreover, Graham recalled in an interview for this story, Cheney warned that unless the leaders of the Intelligence committees took action to discover who leaked the information about the intercepts -- and more importantly, to make sure that such leaks never happened again -- President Bush would directly make the case to the American people that Congress could not be trusted with vital national security secrets.
"Take control of the situation," Graham recalls Cheney instructing him.
Graham told the vice president that he, too, was frustrated over the leaks. But his attempt to calm Cheney down was unsuccessful.
On that morning in June 2002, Cheney could not have known that his complaints to Graham about the leaking of classified information would help set events in motion that eventually would lead to the prosecution of his own chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as the result of a separate leak investigation.
Libby, who stands accused of trying to conceal his role in disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, in 2003, is now on trial in federal court in Washington on five counts of perjury, making false statements, and obstruction of justice. Testimony and evidence at Libby's trial has raised questions as to whether Cheney himself authorized the selective leaking or declassification of information, including whether Cheney may have encouraged Libby to disclose Plame's CIA identity to reporters.
And when Graham received Cheney's phone call nearly five years ago, he had no idea that the vice president was not acting on impulse or entirely out of anger. Although administration officials have said that the White House was legitimately concerned that the NSA intercept leak could harm the war on terrorism, they also saw the incident as an opportunity to undercut congressional oversight and possibly restrict the flow of classified information to Capitol Hill. Libby, two administration officials recalled in interviews, was among the aides advising Cheney on this strategy of neutralizing the Hill.
After Cheney ended his call with Graham that morning, the White House was far from done.
The private complaint was followed by a very public rebuke.
Later that day, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer read from a prepared statement: "The president [has] very deep concerns about anything that would be inappropriately leaked that could ... harm our ability to maintain sources and methods and anything else that could interfere with America's ability to fight the war on terrorism."
And Bush himself later said, in reference to an entirely different leak, that whoever in government disclosed details of his administration's covert NSA surveillance program had committed a "shameful act" that had the effect of "helping the enemy." Attorney General Alberto Gonzales raised the possibility of prosecuting journalists.
As a result of the White House pressure over the NSA intercept leak in June 2002 -- applied through Cheney's phone call -- Graham and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., asked the Justice Department to investigate whether any members of Congress (including themselves) or their staffs were responsible for the leak. Prosecutors and FBI agents later zeroed in on Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who was then the ranking member on Senate Intelligence, as the person most likely responsible for disclosing the information to the press.
After a lengthy investigation, the Justice Department did not charge Shelby. Later, Justice referred the matter to the Senate Ethics Committee, and in a referral letter dated July 20, 2004, the department said it had "investigated the unauthorized disclosure of classified information" and had "produced evidence and information" concerning Shelby's conduct. In November 2005, the Ethics Committee wrote Shelby to say it had "dismissed the matter referred to it by DOJ."
Shelby insists that he did not leak any classified information, and he in turn decried as prosecutorial abuse the leaks from federal law enforcement officials suggesting that he, Shelby, had done something wrong.
In a statement prepared in response to questions for this story, Shelby said: "At no time during my career as a United States senator and, more particularly, at no time during my service as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have I ever knowingly compromised classified information." He added: "We have provided the investigation with our full cooperation."
Boomerang
Although no charges were brought in the investigation of the leaked NSA intercepts, the probe helped to pave the way for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate leaks out of the White House and, specifically the Office of the Vice President, in the Plame matter, according to administration, congressional, and law enforcement officials interviewed for this story.
"They [the administration] set the prosecutorial machinery in motion themselves, and the public support for it, before it came back to bite them," said a federal law enforcement official.
Graham, for one, believes that Cheney and Libby's strident demands to investigate leakers in Congress made it all but impossible for the White House to do anything less than cooperate fully with any criminal investigation of the Plame leak.
"They [the administration] would have had a certain exposure to hypocrisy if they hid behind executive privilege" when the Plame investigation began, or if they had fought the appointment of a special prosecutor, Graham said. "It made it politically untenable to avoid having a strong investigation, because they had demanded it of us. With us, they said we should call out the meanest, leanest dogs. The example that they set with us became the boomerang that came around and hit them."
At Libby's trial, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has attempted to show that Libby lied about leaking Plame's identity in 2003 because Cheney's office wanted to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was a strong public critic of the administration's decision to go to war in Iraq.
Wilson had traveled to Niger in February 2002 on a CIA-sponsored mission to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein's regime had attempted to procure weapons-grade uranium from the African nation. Wilson reported to the CIA that from what he could learn the allegations were almost certainly untrue. In a July 6, 2003, op-ed in The New York Times, Wilson charged that the Bush administration had "twisted" intelligence information when it cited the alleged Niger-Iraq connection in the president's State of Union address earlier that year.
White House officials had claimed that they were not warned by the CIA that the agency had discredited the intelligence information before the president's speech.
As one part of an effort to counter Wilson's allegations and to discredit him, Libby and other Bush administration officials told reporters that Wilson's wife selected him to go on the CIA mission, suggesting nepotism.
Libby's trial has also brought Cheney's role to center stage. According to evidence and testimony, Cheney selectively leaked and declassified intelligence information to bolster the administration's case for war and later to defend against charges that he had misrepresented prewar intelligence.
Before the trial, both Cheney and Libby denied that the vice president had authorized or even known that Libby had spoken to reporters about Plame. But at the trial, FBI agent Deborah Bond testified that Libby said in an interview with her that on July 12, 2003, Libby might have spoken to Cheney about the possibility of divulging Plame's name to reporters before he actually did so later that day.
Would Journalists Testify?
In the leak investigation of the NSA intercepts, the FBI agent in charge of the probe, Jack Eckenrode, repeatedly complained to senior Justice Department officials that he was stymied because he could not compel interviews or grand jury testimony from the journalists who received the leak. Without obtaining such testimony, Eckenrode said, he stood little chance of identifying the culprit and bringing any charges.
Two senior Justice Department officials at the time, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson and Criminal Division head Michael Chertoff, refused to approve subpoenas for the journalists. They also argued that Eckenrode's case was circumstantial, according to sources close to the investigation. It is unclear whether then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was involved in decisions on whether to subpoena journalists. Chertoff, now secretary of Homeland Security, declined to comment for this story. Thompson, who is no longer at Justice, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Eckenrode and other investigators kept pressing the argument that they could not know whether they had a good case unless they compelled the testimony of journalists. Some investigators voiced concerns that two GOP political appointees -- Thompson and Chertoff -- had turned them down on subpoenas for a probe whose chief suspect was a Republican senator.
Later, when Eckenrode was placed in charge of the Plame investigation, he privately complained that once again he was coming close to cracking the case, only to have prosecutors fail to bring any charges because of their inability to question journalists.
Eckenrode scored an early success in the Plame investigation by convincing NBC Washington bureau chief and Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert to speak to him. The FBI agent worked Russert the same way Russert might work a news source: Eckenrode mentioned that he had met Russert when his church group had taken a tour of NBC's Washington studios, and he spoke about how both of them came from Irish-Catholic backgrounds.
What Russert had to say to Eckenrode was central to the Plame probe because Libby was telling the FBI that when he talked to reporters about Plame working at the CIA, he was merely repeating rumors that Russert had told him about Plame during a July 10, 2003, telephone conversation.
Russert responded that Libby was lying -- that, in fact, he and Libby had never discussed Plame at all.
But when Fitzgerald attempted to take Russert's testimony under oath, Russert initially refused and NBC sought to quash a subpoena from prosecutors. For Eckenrode, it was a replay of the NSA leak case, when a Fox News correspondent had identified Sen. Shelby as his source to the FBI, only to refuse to testify under oath.
For several months in 2003, the Justice Department oversaw the Plame leak investigation. As evidence mounted that Libby and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove might have played roles in leaking information about Plame, two senior Justice Department officials -- Christopher Wray, who was then head of the Criminal Division, and James B. Comey, who had just been named deputy attorney general -- persuaded Ashcroft to recuse himself from the matter and to allow Comey to appoint a special prosecutor. (Rove had earlier served as a consultant to three of Ashcroft's political campaigns.)
Senate Democrats were also pressing for a special prosecutor. Because Cheney had personally pushed for a criminal investigation of senators and their staff over the NSA intercepts, the Democrats insisted that the White House endure similar scrutiny over the leak of Plame's identity, according to several senior congressional staffers involved in the process.
With Fitzgerald's appointment as special prosecutor, Eckenrode found a sympathetic ear for his complaint that leak probes often went nowhere because suspects knew that reporters would never be forced to testify. Although the men agreed that reporters should be compelled to testify only as a last resort, Fitzgerald assured Eckenrode that he would demand such testimony if necessary.
Fitzgerald's resolve was displayed later in the Plame case when he pursued contempt charges against then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller. She refused to testify after being subpoenaed and ended up spending 85 days in jail. Miller finally agreed to testify about her conversations with Libby about Plame -- after Libby called her in jail and encouraged her to do so.
End Part I