By now, with sacrificial-lamb-Libby indicted and out of the White House and with Rove still by his side, Bush was hoping the scandal would just die out. Not so fast Junior, not so fast.
One of the most famous American journalists of all time, one-half of the team of journalists who brought down Nixon's administration by fiercely and unrelentingly reporting on the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward, has revealed that he was told about Valerie Plame's identity a whole month before Robert Novak's column first outed her.
He seems to support the administration's take that it was only mentioned to him casually and he, shockingly, holds that the outing of an undercover CIA spy in charge of WMDs during wartime isn't a big deal, and that no big consequences followed the revelation.
I beg to disagree. If he was told around the same time as other reporters were, and by a third high-level official in the White House, then the conspiracy charges pursued by special prosecutor Fitzgerald in his case against Libby are very well funded. Why? Because now we know that there were several administration officials engaged in divulging top secret information to reporters from widely distributed publications.
Furthermore, now we have a third White House official who endangered national security during a time of war. Woodward, in fact, said it wasn't Libby and it wasn't Rove, and he hasn't said who yet, although it looks like it's Hadley, the current National Security Adviser to Bush and former deputy of Rice when she held that position. This is certainly more problematic and damaging for the administration, since another one of the leakers is constantly by the president's side, advises him on national security (while having absolutely no respect for it) and enjoys the top-most level of clearance.
We'll see if he now gets subpoenaed by Fitzgerald (he stated he didn't come clean earlier because he didn't want to be subpoenaed or go to jail -- wait, I thought he said it was a casual conversation, if there was nothing serious about it, why worry? Why hide?)
In the end, this dark cloud is still hovering over the White House and it doesn't look like it will dissipate anytime soon, for our good luck (I hope at least it stays there until next year's midterm elections.)
No comments:
Post a Comment