What Ashcroft Was Told By Murray Waas, National Journal

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0608nj1.htm

> CIA LEAK INVESTIGATION
> What Ashcroft Was Told
>
> By Murray Waas, National Journal
> © National Journal Group Inc.
> Thursday, June 8, 2006
>
> Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft continued to oversee the Valerie Plame-CIA leak probe for more than two months in late 2003 after he learned in extensive briefings that FBI agents suspected White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of trying to mislead the FBI to conceal their roles in the leak, according to government records and interviews. Despite these briefings, which took place between October and December 2003, and despite the fact that senior White House aides might become central to the leak case, Ashcroft did not recuse himself from the matter until December 30, when he allowed the appointment of a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, to take over the investigation.
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> According to people with firsthand knowledge of the briefings, senior Justice Department officials told Ashcroft that the FBI had uncovered evidence that Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, had misled the bureau about his role in the leaking of Plame's identity to the press.
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> By November, investigators had obtained personal notes of Libby's that indicated he had first learned from Cheney that Plame was a CIA officer. But Libby was insisting in FBI interviews that he had learned Plame's name and identity from journalists. Libby was also telling investigators that when he told reporters that Plame worked for the CIA, he was only passing along an unsubstantiated rumor.
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> Officials also told Ashcroft that investigators did not believe Libby's account, according to sources knowledgeable about the briefings, and that Libby might have lied to the FBI to defend other -- more senior -- administration officials.
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> Ashcroft was told no later than November 2003 that investigators also doubted the accounts that Rove, President George W. Bush's chief political adviser, had given the FBI as to how he, too, learned that Plame was a CIA officer and how he came to disclose that information to columnist Robert Novak..........(lots more --and details)

Plame (July 14, 2003, by Novak) and the entire CIA counter-proliferation network that she headed, with the Brewster-Jennings front company (July 22, 2003, also by Novak), and the coverup which involved Rove concocting a story with Novak to deflect blame from Rove on leaking Plame's identity, and Libby telling lies to protect Cheney and for other purposes--much of it apparently from insider FBI sources. The main focus of the article is the failure of John Ashcroft (then AG) to recuse himself in a timely fashion, and there being so many RNC operatives in the Dept. of Justice that hardly anyone could be found to investigate top WH aides who wasn't tight with the Bush crime family (as Mike Malloy calls them). Ashcroft was apparently avidly soaking up the details of these top aides' crimes, and (my surmise) had more than sufficient motive to keep Bush, Cheney and their top aides well-informed of the information that the FBI was gathering against them. Ashcroft's failure to recuse himself from this case and briefings on the case was a serious breath of ethics--par for the course with Bushites, but worth pointing out anyway. (Ah, for the old Republic, when men were honorable!) But the narrative on Rove and Libby is the most fascinating part.

One trepidation this article gave me is that, if Fitzgerald wasn't being hampered in some way from indicting Rove, these details wouldn't be coming out. Just a worry. There may be other reasons for the disclosures--perhaps having to do with Ashcroft, I'm not sure. Ashcroft tipping off the perps? Maybe that's what this is about--that Ashcroft successfully tipped off Rove; Rove consequently devised a cleverer strategy to cover up his cover up than Libby did, and Fitzgerald is having a hard time penetrating it. So these FBI sources are going for broke, to at least get this info out there in the public venue. A further thought: If the FBI thought Libby was lying to protect Cheney, then (it follows that) the FBI investigators think Cheney is a perp in the case.

Zarqawi and anyone near him, innocent or otherwise, may have paid for these disclosures with 500 lbs. bombs on their heads this week. Which brings me to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. I still feel that what we're getting in general--and in this Murray Wass narrative--is just the front row of the conspiracy: Cheney (and Bush if he was sober), Libby and Rove (and whoever kept putting the lie that wouldn't die--the Niger forgeries--into Bush's speeches). The back row--the mover, the mastermind: Rumsfeld. I think there is a lot more to this story than Cheney countering Wilson's public dissent and trying to silence him by outing his CIA agent wife. And I'm not kidding about Zarqawi. Things like this are no accidents. The Zarqawi bombing in particular has a smell to it--and facts to back it up--that it was POLITICALLY strategic, and that the moment was carefully chosen (and arranged by mastermind Rumsfeld). I'm with Michael Berg (Nick Berg's father) on the Zarqawi bombing--I cannot applaud the slaughter of another human being (and, with 500 lb bombs, who knows how many they slaughtered?). But I hope that what it means--in terms of reading Bushite entrails--is that something yet bigger is coming soon in the Fitzgerald investigation (--to be backpaged by the corporate news monopoly bloodfest over Zarqawi's remarkably clean, in tact corpse).