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Bob Novak Blasts Armitage, Wilsons Add Armitage to Lawsuit

Bob Novak has a new column today disputing Richard Armitage's version of the Valerie Plame leak.

First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he ''thought'' might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson. Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column.

Novak writes that June, 2003 was the first time Armitage had sought him out. Before this, Armitage had rebuffed him:

A peculiar convergence had joined Armitage and me on the same historical path. During his quarter of a century in Washington, I had no contact with Armitage before our fateful interview. I tried to see him in the first 2 years of the Bush administration, but he rebuffed me -- summarily and with disdain, I thought.

Then, without explanation, in June 2003, Armitage's office said the deputy secretary would see me. This was two weeks before Joe Wilson surfaced himself as author of a 2002 report for the CIA debunking Iraqi interest in buying uranium in Africa.

I sat down with Armitage in his State Department office the afternoon of July 8 with tacit rather than explicit ground rules: deep background with nothing said attributed to Armitage or even an anonymous State Department official....

Late in my hourlong interview with Armitage. I asked why the CIA had sent Wilson -- lacking intelligence experience, nuclear policy or recent contact with Niger -- on the African mission. He told the Washington Post last week that his answer was: ''I don't know, but I think his wife worked out there.''

Neither of us took notes, and nobody else was present. But I recalled our conversation that week in writing a column, while Armitage reconstructed it months later for federal prosecutors. He had told me unequivocally that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIA's Counter-Proliferation Division and that she had suggested her husband's mission. As for his current implications that he never expected this to be published, he noted that the story of Mrs. Wilson's role fit the style of the old Evans-Novak column -- implying to me it continued reporting Washington inside information.

Novak asks, if Armitage did not mention Valerie Wilson's identity and employment, why did he, on October 1, offer his resignation out of fear that he might have been the leaker?

Novak also takes a shot at the left, and misses the point by a mile. He continues to believe that the disclosure that Armitage was the leaker clears the White House officials like Libby and Rove. It doesn't.

Fitzgerald is still investigating whether there was a concerted effort by the White House to impugn the Wilsons. Libby is charged with lying, not leaking. Since when do alleged perjurers get a pass because someone else came forward as the source of the information they lied about?

The Wilson's civil suit should shed more light on what really happened and why Rove and Libby called six reporters to spin the Wilson op-ed as a boondoggle. Today, they added Richard Armitage as a defendant.

CREW's executive director Melanie Sloan said today, "The addition of Armitage as a defendant in no way reduces the culpability of the three original defendants. Separate and apart from Armitage's actions, Libby, Rove and Cheney engaged in an intentional and malicious conspiracy to expose Mrs. Wilson's identity as a covert operative for the CIA in order to punish Mr. Wilson for his public statements about the President's justifications for the war against Iraq." Sloan continued, "this case was and remains about one issue -- the abuse of government power."

I couldn't agree more.

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    how chatty novak has become all of the sudden. looks like armitage may have been set up as the fall guy and novak's worried that that narrative isn't holding.

    Good for the Wilsons. The more these people keep talking, the more spin they try, the deeper they dig their holes. Novak loves the limelight, and when it seems that he is being forgotten, he comes up with another explanation that will give him some attention. I keep hoping that Fitz is giving them time to eventually hang themselves with their own words.

    Re: Bob Novak Blasts Armitage, Wilsons Add Armitag (none / 0) (#3)
    by Sailor on Wed Sep 13, 2006 at 01:22:20 PM EST
    So novak admits he was told where she worked, what her job was and said himself she was an 'operative.' Isn't he (once again) contradicting himself? And no, it doesn't affect the fact that cheney was out to get Plame and Wilson (by his own words) and thereby trading political payback for the safety of the US.

    Re: Bob Novak Blasts Armitage, Wilsons Add Armitag (none / 0) (#4)
    by jimcee on Wed Sep 13, 2006 at 10:04:34 PM EST
    This case will forever amaze me. There was a three year investigation that led to a perjury charge against against a mid-level VP operative. Some say the GJ is still open.(?) So why isn't the SP calling Armitage into the dock and why isn't TL calling for the Ass't Secretary's scalp? After all Ms Wilson according to you was covert and her exposure put the Wilson family in danger. Armitage exposed her role in the Niger affair so following your argument he should be frog-walked into the court house. So where are the indictments? Where are the calls for Armitage being charged with...well whatever. The Plame affair has been nothing more than a political exercise in futility. It's only purpose has been to feed red-meat to the anti-Bushies on the fringe and it has done that well. The only thing more pitiful than the Left's charade of faux outrage over the Plame kerfuffle is that Joe Wilson is still dining out on this fiction and it is nice of TalkLeft to help pay for his dinner.

    I think part of the problem is that the law is written in a very narrow way (specifically to prevent disgruntled CIA agents from turning and revealing other agents). Novak found a way through the back door and now we're all bemused that no one has been charged with the original crime.

    I don't see how the Armitage revelation says anything about the guilt or innocence of Cheney, Rove etc. The New York Times and Washington Post have implied the story is over. Who is pushing the Spin that everybody is now "clean", except Armitage, and maybe Powell? This seems to be a fantasy. Some are saying Rove deserves an apology. An apology for what? I do not know of what public statements Rove has made in his own defense. If "not indicted" equals innocence, there are alot of interesting apologies due to Clinton, Nixon, and members of certain crime families. Lets save our apologies until after Libby's trial and the Plame lawsuit. Conservative blogs seem to have thought this out better than I can, with well written explanations of why this case is over. But I can't see it. How much credibility is there to their claim that Wilson outed his own wife? That leaks were inadvertant? This still looks like a huge story to me. The publicity of the trial will give the networks "cover" to do their own primetime investigations of the facts surrounding this case. Big media did not have any great interest in this story during the 2004 election. On the other hand if the Bush administration is totally honorable in this affair, I would not be offended by another "Bring them on" challenge from President Bush.

    Re: Bob Novak Blasts Armitage, Wilsons Add Armitag (none / 0) (#8)
    by jimakaPPJ on Thu Sep 14, 2006 at 09:15:04 AM EST
    marlin - The SP was charged with determining if she was covert and who outed her. We now know what we knew from the beginning that she was not covert. We also know that the SP knew who outed her, yet continued to investigate.

    Re: Bob Novak Blasts Armitage, Wilsons Add Armitag (none / 0) (#9)
    by soccerdad on Thu Sep 14, 2006 at 09:41:24 AM EST
    marlin - The SP was charged with determining if she was covert and who outed her. We now know what we knew from the beginning that she was not covert.
    no matter how many times you repeat this lie does not make it true.

    Re: Bob Novak Blasts Armitage, Wilsons Add Armitag (none / 0) (#10)
    by Sailor on Thu Sep 14, 2006 at 10:32:33 AM EST
    The SP was charged with determining if she was covert
    Nope, not a bit true. She was already determined to be covert by the CIA IG, that's why the case was given to the DoJ and why the case was persued by the DoJ The SP's task was only about the disclosure, not her status.
    I hereby delegate to you all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department's investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity
    See, the disclosure was alleged, not her status, that's been determined she was covert.
    We now know what we knew from the beginning that she was not covert.
    That's a lie, disproven over and over.
    We also know that the SP knew who outed her
    Armitage would dispute that, he says he didn't know or reveal her status and novak has changed his story several times about it. novak also said that 2 admin sources had given him her name. The CIA also tried to discourage novak from running the article because she was covert.

    Re: Bob Novak Blasts Armitage, Wilsons Add Armitag (none / 0) (#7)
    by Richard Aubrey on Thu Sep 14, 2006 at 10:33:09 AM EST
    This case was solely a club to beat Bush. It had no other purpose, and to test the hypothesis, now that Bush cannot be bashed, the left is dropping it. The Minuteman blog (McGuire) has dissected every jot and tittle of this most complicated and confusing case for years. The commenters are frequently quite knowledgeable and intelligent. If you haven't been paying attention like it was your job, you couldn't follow it. Now that it's clear and simple, Chris Matthews has wiped his chin and said it's "too complicated" a story to keep telling. The WSJ marketwatch tells me that the current discount for lefties' insistence on their sincerity is 92%, but that may be subject to a dead cat bounce.

    he's so completely insane! i wish they had an actual individual picture for him, but these guys made a trading card for mister novak -- a friend of mine sent me a deck awhile ago, and it's perfect: for every snarky comment there's a lot of truth about the power this asshat has. still.

    Questions I want answered: The memo that Armitage was given was prepared by Marc Grossman (I think) and at the behest of V.P. Cheney. Why was this memo shopped around and why was it given to Armitage? Novak asked Armitage (State Department) about Wilson's trip to Niger when it was the CIA, not State that sent him. Why did Novak think that Armitage would have any information about Wilson's Niger trip? Also, Novak's column doesn't say if he called State for the interview, and he doesn't say, but implies, through omission, that State contacted him. Very slippery and clever wording:
    "A peculiar convergence had joined Armitage and me on the same historical path. During his quarter of a century in Washington, I had no contact with Armitage before our fateful interview. I tried to see him in the first 2 years of the Bush administration, but he rebuffed me -- summarily and with disdain, I thought. Then, without explanation, in June 2003, Armitage's office said the deputy secretary would see me. This was two weeks before Joe Wilson surfaced himself as author of a 2002 report for the CIA debunking Iraqi interest in buying uranium in Africa."
    So, who called whom? Just asking!