https://youtu.be/ICW-dGD1M18
Known for the 2003 “CIA leak scandal,” Valerie Plame is claiming in an ad for her 2020 congressional campaign that President Trump pardoned the man who “took revenge against my husband and leaked my identity.”
However, the man to whom she refers is former Dick Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, while the admitted leaker turned out to be State Department official Richard Armitage. Libby was charged not with leaking, but with lying to the FBI. Then-President George Bush commuted Libby’s 30-month prison sentence but didn’t pardon him. President Trump pardoned Libby in 2018.
In his “Fact Checker” column for the Washington Post on Tuesday, Glenn Kessler gave Plame three Pinocchios out of four for blaming Libby and for exaggerating her role in the CIA.
Plame claims in the video:
I was an undercover CIA operative. My assignment was preventing rogue states and terrorists from getting nuclear weapons. You name a hot spot, I lived it. [images of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and North Korea] Then Dick Cheney’s chief of staff took revenge against my husband and leaked my identity. His name: Scooter Libby. Guess who pardoned him last year?
The question is followed by an image of President Trump.
Kessler noted the ad “strongly suggests that Plame was an undercover operative in places such as Iran and North Korea, when that was not the case. She was under diplomatic cover in Greece.”
Further, when her name was publicly disclosed in a July 14, 2003, Robert Novak column, she was working at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and was not an undercover operative.
Kessler gives Plame three Pinocchios instead of four because Bush administration officials were “certainly eager to discredit Wilson, who had emerged as a damaging critic about the failed search to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” meaning one could possibly “draw a fuzzy line from Libby’s inquiries about Wilson’s role, the State Department memo and Libby’s conversations with administration officials to the eventual leak of Plame’s name.”
A spokesman for Plame’s campaign responded to the Post.
“From his trial, it was clear that Libby gave Valerie’s name to New York Times reporter Judith Miller,” the campaign said. “Please recall that Scooter Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice because he attempted to hide information from the prosecutors. He obstructed justice, perjured himself and was held accountable until Donald Trump pardoned him. No one suggested he leaked it.”
Dubious narrative
The special counsel appointed by then-deputy attorney general James Comey to investigate the matter, Patrick Fitzgerald, asserted that Libby lied to prosecutors. The former Cheney aide insisted it was merely a matter of mistaken memory. Libby’s claim was backed by the veteran Times reporter Miller, who served three weeks in prison in the case for refusing to divulge sources.
Moreover, even the Washington Post’s editorial board came to the conclusion that the person most responsible for outing Plame was her husband, Joseph Wilson.
The narrative that had been advanced by establishment media was that Cheney and Libby deliberately blew the cover of Plame in retaliation for Wilson’s 2003 New York Times op-ed contradicting the Bush administration’s famous assertion that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain yellowcake uranium in Niger to build an atomic bomb. The CIA had commissioned Wilson to travel to Niger in February 2002 to check out the allegations.
White House defenders insisted Bush officials were simply were setting the record straight about Wilson, seeking to put his credibility in context by pointing out it was Plame who helped him get the CIA consulting job. Wilson denied his wife’s role initially, but a bipartisan report by the Senate panel documented it.
Wilson declared in the Times column that his trip revealed the Iraq-Niger connection was dubious. But his oral report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence actually corroborated the controversial “16 words” in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Fitzgerald knew early in his investigation that it was Armitage who leaked Plame’s identity, but the special counsel made it clear his target was Cheney: The prosecutor promised to drop all charges if Libby would testify that the vice president had ordered the leak.
Deadly consequences of ‘rigged case’
The Times’s Miller later wrote a book, “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey,” in which she explained how she came to recant her testimony about a conversation she had with Libby that Fitzgerald seized on to prosecute the former Cheney aide.
When Miller’s book was published, Arthur Herman, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote in a column for National Review that the reporter presented solid evidence that Fitzgerald not only “rigged the case against Libby” but that his prosecution “inadvertently condemned thousands of Americans to be killed and maimed needlessly in Iraq.”
Herman explained that in the summer of 2003, Libby was “the one person of the seven in the president’s War Council arguing for a change in strategy in the American occupation of Iraq to deal with mounting violence and a growing Sunni insurgency.”
Libby, he noted, argued for a counterinsurgency using both U.S. and Iraqi forces. Eventually, the U.S. admitted failure and adopted the counterinsurgency strategy, “but only after we had lost more than 3,000 lives, and the public’s patience with the war was exhausted.”
No ‘cover’ was blown
The Fitzgerald probe focused on a 1982 act that made it illegal to blow a covert U.S. agent’s cover.
But at the time of the investigation, WND spoke to the Washington attorney who spearheaded the drafting of the law, Victoria Toensing, who argued that Plame’s circumstances didn’t meet the statute’s criteria.
Plame, according to Toensing – who worked on the 1982 CIA-related legislation in her role as chief counsel for the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – most likely was not a covert agent when White House aides mentioned her to reporters.
The federal code says the agent must have operated outside the United States within the previous five years. But Plame had given up her role as a covert agent nine years before the leak controversy, according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
Kristof said the CIA brought Plame back to Washington in 1994 because the agency suspected her undercover security had been compromised by turncoat spy Aldrich Ames.
Wilson’s own book, “The Politics of Truth,” states he and Plame both returned from overseas assignments in June 1997 and never again were stationed overseas – placing them in Washington at least six years before the 2003 “outing.”
Moreover, asserted Toensing, for the law to be violated, White House aides would have had to intentionally reveal Plame’s identity with the knowledge that they were disclosing a covert agent.
