Redstate

in this episode novak takes armitage's lunch money

By streiff Posted in The White House — Comments (24) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The actions of both Richard Armitage and Patrick Fitzgerald increasingly appear to be malicious. Armitage because he did not disclose the central nature of his role in l’affaire Plame when his coming forward could have prevented an investigation from taking place at all.

Fitzgerald because his actions seem calculated to simply rack up an indictment, no matter how shabby, of a senior political appointee in the Bush Administration. Make no mistake about it, I am not saying that Fitzgerald went after Libby but that Fitzgerald began his investigation with the determination to indict someone and Libby was “elected”, so to speak.

In fact, knowing what we know today Fitzgerald really has to answer why Richard Armitage was not indicted because the case against him is not materially different that the case against Libby.

Read on.

For those who haven’t read Bob Novak’s column refuting Armitage’s account of events, you should.

There are several key facts which have been missing.

First and foremost, Armitage used the good offices of Ken Duberstein to arrange for Armitage to speak with Novak. As Novak says,

A peculiar convergence had joined Armitage and me on the same historic path. During his quarter of a century in Washington, I had had no contact with Armitage before our fateful interview. I tried to see him in the first 2 1/2 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 outed 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 to an anonymous State Department official.

The second key fact is that Armitage seems to have not accidentally dropped Plame’s name to Novak. Armitage describes the event:

He described a more direct conversation with Novak, who was the first to report on the issue: "He said to me, 'Why did the CIA send Ambassador Wilson to Niger?' I said, as I remember, 'I don't know, but his wife works out there.'"

Novak avers it was a conscious act.

Late in my hour-long interview with Armitage, I asked why the CIA had sent Wilson -- who lacked intelligence experience, nuclear policy expertise or recent contact with Niger -- on the African mission. He told The 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 Counterproliferation Division and that she had suggested her husband's mission. As for his current implication 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 that it continued reporting Washington inside information.

Why Armitage would encourage Novak to publish this information when, according the timeline Fitzgerald presents in his indictment of Libby, he had only recently reported the same information to Libby’s office raises some interesting possibilities. Given Armitage’s long history of antipathy towards Libby and his staff it is hard to believe this was anything less than an act calculated to harass the vice president’s staff because they would surely be the most likely source of the leak.

As to Armitage, I think now we have a full measure of the man. He kept silent for three months as this scandal gathered momentum when at any point he could have come forward to stop it. Novak echoes RedState on this subject:

Armitage's silence for the next 2 1/2 years caused intense pain for his colleagues in government and enabled partisan Democrats in Congress to falsely accuse Rove of being my primary source. When Armitage now says he was mute because of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's request, that does not explain his silent three months between his claimed first realization that he was the source and Fitzgerald's appointment on Dec. 30, 2003. Armitage's tardy self-disclosure is tainted because it is deceptive.

And when he did speak it was filled with self-serving half-truths and, seemingly, falsehoods.

Now to Patrick Fitzgerald.

Libby has been indicted for lying to a grand jury. Those lies are nothing more than three reporters having a different account of their interviews with Libby than Libby provided. Overhanging this basic he-said-she-said are 1) the assumption that because Libby can be shown to have been told by others that Plame was employed at CIA that he remembered that as the source and 2) the assumption that Libby deliberately mischaracterized a sequence of events over a three week period rather than actually recalling the events incorrectly. To give Fitzgerald the benefit of a doubt, let’s assume that he is right on all counts. That Libby deliberately misled the grand jury.

Assuming Armitage that he told the grand jury the same story as he did the national media, and right now I will be the first to admit that is becoming a leap of faith, there was a huge gap between Armitage’s story and that told by Novak.

(One can’t completely discount the possibility that Novak is making up today’s story out of whole cloth in the same way one can’t completely discount alien abductions, but one doesn’t have to take that possibility very seriously either.)

In fact, taken in their worst light Libby’s statements are no more damning that Armitage’s. In fact, the difference between an “inadvertent slip” described by Armitage and Novak’s description of being encouraged to identify Plame in print are impossible to resolve. Either Armitage told the truth to the grand jury and is lying now, or he lied to the grand jury and was given the opportunity to change his story later on while continuing to lie to us, or he lied to the grand jury and is continuing to lie to us.

Why Fitzgerald didn’t pursue this line of inquiry is certainly a subject for speculation. Why he continued to pursue the chimeric violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in this case when it was obvious from Day One that the elements of proof in that case simply did not exist is also a subject for speculation.

But enough damage has been done by speculation. It is time for Armitage and Fitzgerald to answer some questions of their own before a grand jury.