Here are the critical quotes in Ari Fleisher's two statements, one on July 7, 2005, right before Air Force One took off, and the other at the Hospital. In addition, after Air Force One took off, another statement was issued in Fleisher's name. That one I haven't found.
Press Gaggle July 7 Ari Fleischer - right before the plane takes off for Africa.
Q Can you give us the White House account of Ambassador Wilson's account of what happened when he went to Niger and investigated the suggestions that Niger was passing yellow cake to Iraq? I'm sure you saw the piece yesterday in The New York Times.
MR. FLEISCHER: Well, there is zero, nada, nothing new here. Ambassador Wilson, other than the fact that now people know his name, has said all this before. But the fact of the matter is in his statements about the Vice President -- the Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger. The Vice President's office was not informed of his mission and he was not aware of Mr. Wilson's mission until recent press accounts -- press reports accounted for it.
So this was something that the CIA undertook as part of their regular review of events, where they sent him. But they sent him on their own volition, and the Vice President's office did not request it. Now, we've long acknowledged -- and this is old news, we've said this repeatedly -- that the information on yellow cake did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect.
MR. FLEISCHER: And that's way, again, he's making the statement that -- he is saying that surely the Vice President must have known, or the White House must have known. And that's not the case, prior to the State of the Union. (my emphasis)
Q He's saying that surely people at the decision-making level within the NSC would have known the information which he -- passed on to both the State Department and the CIA.
MR. FLEISCHER: And the information about the yellow cake and Niger was not specifically known prior to the State of the Union by the White House.
Q What does that say about communications?
MR. FLEISCHER: We've acknowledged that the information turned out to be bogus involving the report on the yellow cake. That is not new. You can go back. You can look it up. Dr. Rice has said it repeatedly. I've said it repeatedly. It's been said from this podium on the record, in several instances. It's been said to many of you in this room, specifically.
Q But, Ari, even if you said that the Niger thing was wrong, the next line has usually been that the President's statement was deliberately broader than Niger, it referred to all of Africa. The national intelligence estimate discusses other countries in Africa that there were attempts to purchase yellow cake from, or other sources of uranium --
MR. FLEISCHER: Let me do this, David. On your specific question I'm going to come back and post the specific answer on the broader statement on the speech. [Note: This is the statement that was issued later that I can't find]
The next day, July 8, Condi Rice (with Ari present)gave an unusual hour long press briefing on Air Force One, in which she says she didn't know that Wilson went to Niger until she heard him on television:
DR. RICE: The IAEA reported it I believe in March. But I will tell you that, for instance, on Ambassador Wilson's going out to Niger, I learned of that when I was sitting on whatever TV show it was, because that mission was not known to anybody in the White House. And you should ask the Agency at what level it was known in the Agency.(my emphasis)
Q When was that TV show, when you learned about it?
DR. RICE: A month ago, about a month ago.
Now for the subpoenaed transript from the July 12 press gaggle:
Fleischer: He had previously obtained yellow cake from Africa. In fact, in one of the least known parts of this story, which is now, for the first time, public -- and you find this in Director Tenet's statement last night -- the official that -- lower-level official sent from the CIA to Niger to look into whether or not Saddam Hussein had sought yellow cake from Niger, Wilson, he -- and Director Tenet's statement last night states the same former official, Wilson, also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official, Wilson, meet an Iraqi delegation to discuss expanding commercial relations between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.
This is in Wilson's report back to the CIA. Wilson's own report, the very man who was on television saying Niger denies it, who never said anything about forged documents, reports himself that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger about sales.
What's the relevance of all this? Former CIA Director George Tenet said in his statment of July 11, 2003, in which he took blame for the false 16 word claim about Iraq buying uranium from Niger, that Wilson's findings had been widely distributed - though he could not be certain that Bush or Cheney or other high officials had been directly informed.
Joseph Wilson said he believed that his concerns with the Iraq-uranium claim were circulated not only at the CIA, but also at the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. He told Meet the Press that Cheney's office requested and received a report on Wilson's mission from the CIA.
More inconsistencies: Andrea Mitchell reported on CNBC on July 11, 2003: (lexis.com)
MITCHELL: But, in fact, other U.S. officials tell NBC News Tenet did warn the White House that the information was not reliable in October, more than three months before the State of the Union speech. NBC News has learned that Tenet personally told Condoleezza Rice's top deputy, Stephen Hadley, to remove a reference to the Niger uranium from the speech the president gave in Cincinnati on October 7.
Vince Cannistraro, the Former Chief of Operations and Analysis, CIA Counterterrorism Center, testified before the Democratic Policy Committee that Libby and Cheney made unusual trips in or after December, 2001 to CIA headquarters to meet with desk-level analysts about WMDS and Iraq. How could they not have known that Joseph Wilson was going to Niger or known about Valerie Plame, when she sent a memo saying he'd be a good person for the CIA to send?
Toward December of 2001, intelligence report was received in Washington that alleged that Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire yellow cake uranium ore in Niger and two other African countries. The vice president of the United States and other senior officials in the administration seized on this information as a proof that Saddam was that clear and present danger and needed to be addressed immediately in order to eliminate that danger.In Feb., 2002, Joseph Wilson was sent by the Agency to check it out. He tthough the orders had came from high up.
The vice president and his chief of staff went out to CIA headquarters on a number of occasions -- at least on two occasions -- specifically to address the questions of weapons of mass destruction and the attempt to acquire a nuclear capability. These meetings, I'm told secondhand, were contentious, but the vice president insisted that there must be some support for this reporting of the yellow cake acquisition attempt. CIA analysts, I'm told, didn't have any independent data to verify that, but as a result of the insistent pressure being applied to the analysts and particularly to the nonproliferation center, the CIA did send, as they've said publicly, Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson on a fact-finding mission to Niger.
Wilson writes in his book:
I am not prepared to argue that Republicans per se endorse the practice of government officials lying and distorting the facts, but it may be that Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff do. The man attacking my integrity and reputation -- and, I believe, quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity -- was the same Scooter Libby .... He is one of a handful of senior officials in the administration with both the means and the motive to conduct the covert inquiry that allowed some in the White House to learn my wife's name and status, and then disclose that information to the press.
...According to my sources, between March 2003 and the appearance of my article in July, the workup on me that turned up the information on Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in administration and neoconservative circles.
....Apparently, according to two journalist sources of mine, when Rove learned that he might have violated the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby and made it clear that he held them responsible for the problem they had created for the administration. The protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks considerable tension between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President.
My instincts continue to tell me that it's Cheney and/or his staff, and possibly Rove, that Fitzgerald is after, and he thinks Ari Fleischer's statements can support his theory and thatJudith Miller can deliver the goods. From my post:
I think that whatever the source told her makes a case for the Government on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to commit perjury and obstruction of justice and conspiracy to leak a CIA undercover operative's identity. And Miller is the only one who can make the case because Cooper and Novak weren't told the same thing, even if their sources were the same. In other words, Miller was told more.....Miller's source told her something he didn't tell the others, and that information makes the crime(s).
Again, I'm just trying to follow where Fitzgerald is headed, I'm not saying anyone committed a crime. One clue: The International Herald Tribune reported on April 3, 2004:
Fitzgerald is said by lawyers involved in the case and government officials to be examining possible discrepancies between documents he has gathered in the case and statements made by current or former White House officials during a three-month preliminary investigation conducted last fall by the FBI and the Justice Department. Some officials spoke to FBI agents with their lawyers present; others met informally with agents in their offices and even at bars near the White House.
...The suspicion that someone may have lied to investigators is based on contradictions between statements made by various witnesses in FBI interviews, the lawyers and officials said. The conflicts are said to be buttressed by documents, including memos, e-mail messages and phone records turned over by the White House.
At the same time, Fitzgerald is said to be investigating whether the disclosure of Plame's identity came after someone discovered her name among classified documents circulating at the upper echelons of the White House.
And one more from the Associated Press on July 11, 2003:
One of the mysteries congressional investigators seem intent to explore is how much Cheney knew. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Monday that Cheney was not informed nor aware of the CIA report casting doubt on the British allegations. But Wilson, the former envoy who helped the CIA write the report, said in an NBC-TV interview last Sunday that Cheney's office requested and received from the CIA a report on Wilson's mission.
[All unlinked sources are available on Lexis.com]
