Interesting news today that Fitzgerald is now looking into the forged Niger documents:
The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.
[…]The second is that NATO sources have confirmed to United Press International that Fitzgerald?s team of investigators has sought and obtained documentation on the forgeries from the Italian government.
The article itself is a bunch of liberal trash trying to spin it against Bush, but I don’t see how this can be interpreted any other way then hurting the left. As AJStrata points out, Wilson was caught redhanded knowing way more about these documents then he should have.
All the early stories by him and Kristof and Pincus refer to names and dates that were in error on the Niger documents. If this was a case of Wilson knowing more than he should after the fact it is bad enough. If it is a case that he knew details about the forgeries earlier than he should it is a really big deal.
AJ appears to have called this development a few weeks ago on Oct 7th:
Tom links to Dan McLaughlin, the Baseball Crank, for the statute:
One new approach appears to involve the possible use of Chapter 37 of the federal espionage and censorship law, which makes it a crime for anyone who ?willfully communicates, delivers, transfers or causes to be communicated? to someone ?not entitled to receive it? classified information relating the national defense matters.
Under this broad statute, a government official or a private citizen who passed classified information to anyone else in or outside the government could potentially be charged with a felony, if they transferred the information to someone without a security clearance to receive it.
Not to toot my own horn, but I too have been saying the most likely indictments would be ones associated with the transfer of classified information (beyond telling some one Plame?s employer). The case surrounding the exposure of Plame?s employer has been weak in too many ways to be worth two years of a grand jury and jailing Miller. And recall, Miller only left jail after Fiztgerald agreed to limit his questions to her discussions with Libby so she could protect other sources.
And as I have been saying for some time now, I believe the left is going to sorely disappointed when Wilson, Plame and her cronies are indicted instead of Rove and Libby. It’s appearing more and more that this was a operation against the President by the CIA.
More:
Cliff Kincaid makes some great points here about Miller. Another good article here by Michael Barone.
Investors.com has this to say:
there’s a back story to this case that should not be ignored.
It’s about the CIA itself.
This is a story that most of the media will be trying hard not to cover. They share former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s stated desire to see Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald “frog-march” Rove out of the White House in handcuffs.
So Congress should leave the media no choice. Hold hearings. Put the CIA on the spot and blow the lid off any politically motivated funny business. Bring some transparency to what has become a very murky issue.
We believe that someone needs to answer the questions raised recently by Joseph F. DiGenova, a former federal prosecutor and independent counsel:
Was there a covert operation against the president?
If so, who was behind it?
These aren’t the musings of the tinfoil-hat brigade. A sober-minded case can be made that at least some people in the CIA may have acted inappropriately to discredit the administration as a way of salvaging their own reputations after the intelligence debacles of 9-11 and Iraqi WMD.
DiGenova, in a conversation with columnist Cliff Kincaid of the conservative group Accuracy in Media, pointed to the oddness of the event that got the current scandal rolling: The recommendation from now-unmasked CIA agent Valerie Plame that her husband, ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, be sent on a trip to Africa to check out reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program from the country of Niger.
“It seems to me somewhat strange, in terms of CIA tradecraft,” DiGenova said, “that if you were really attempting to protect the identity of a covert officer, why would you send her husband overseas on a mission without a confidentiality agreement, and then allow him when he came back to the United States to write an op-ed piece in The New York Times about it.”
Another angle worth investigating is the CIA’s own possible use of leaks. When columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame’s identity, someone leaked the news that the CIA sent a referral to the Justice Department seeking an investigation. The referral was classified, writes Stephen Hayes in The Weekly Standard, and anyone who divulged it would have been breaking the law.
So who leaked the referral, and why doesn’t the CIA refer this matter to Justice, as it did the Plame matter?
Check out JustOneMinute, Michelle Malkin, Moonbat Central, Tigerhawk, & A Blog For All for more.
And as I have been saying for some time now, I believe the left is going to sorely disappointed when Wilson, Plame and her cronies are indicted instead of Rove and Libby. It’s appearing more and more that this was a operation against the President by the CIA.
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