“I know, that’s–”
“Hadley and Bob Joseph know,” Armitage continued. “It’s documented. We’ve got our documents on it. We’re clean as a fucking whistle. And George [Tenet] personally got it out of the Cincinnati speech of the president.”
“Oh, he did?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah.”
“It was taken out?”
“Taken out. George said you can’t do this.”
“How come it wasn’t taken out of the State of the Union then?” Woodward asked.
“Because I think it was overruled by the types down at the White House. Condi doesn’t like being in the hot spot. But she [unintelligible]–”
“But it was Joe Wilson who was sent by the agency. I mean that’s just–”
“His wife works in the agency.”
“Why doesn’t that come out?” Woodward asked. “Why does–”
“Everyone knows it,” Armitage said, talking over Woodward.
“–that have to be a big secret?”
“Everyone knows. . . . Yeah. And I know [unintelligible] Joe Wilson’s been calling everybody. He’s pissed off because he was designated as a low-level guy, went out to look at it. So, he’s all pissed off.”
“But why would they send him?”
“Because his wife’s a fucking analyst at the agency.”
“It’s still weird.”
“It–it’s perfect. This is what she does. She is a WMD analyst out there.”
“Oh, she is.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I see.”
“[unintelligible] look at it.”
“Oh, I see. I didn’t–”
“Yeah. See?”
“Oh, she’s the chief WMD?”
“No she isn’t the chief, no.”
“But high enough up that she can say, ‘Oh yeah, hubby will go,’ ” Woodward suggested.
“Yeah, he knows Africa.”
“Was she out there with him?”
“No.”
“When he was ambassador?”
“Not to my knowledge. I don’t know. I don’t know if she was out there or not. But his wife is in the agency and is a WMD analyst. How about that shit?”
The Woodward tape suggests that Armitage’s motive was to use the information to distance the State Department and CIA from the White House–blaming the latter for the sixteen words and insisting “we” are “clean as a . . . whistle.” While not using her name or suggesting explicitly that she was a covert agent, Armitage freely identified Wilson’s wife as a CIA WMD expert, so much so that Woodward said he assumed she was not covert and that the information wasn’t classified. It wasn’t clear what Armitage meant when he said “everyone knows it”–the two seem to have been talking past each other at that point–but Woodward took it to mean that everyone knew Wilson was the former ambassador sent to Niger, not that everyone knew his wife worked for the CIA. Woodward didn’t think this revelation amounted to much of a story. He said he’d passed on the information about Wilson’s wife to his
Post
colleague Walter Pincus (who’d never mentioned this in his testimony to Fitzgerald, and subsequently denied that Woodward did mention it to him). Woodward said he’d also briefed
Post
executive editor Leonard Downie–and showed him a transcript of the Armitage tape. But no story resulted.
Woodward also described a lengthy interview with Libby on June 27, also for his book, but didn’t recall any discussion of Wilson’s wife. He said his four pages of notes made no mention of her, although in this instance he didn’t tape the conversation. Nor did a tape of his subsequent interview with Andrew Card contain any mention of Wilson’s wife.
In this regard, Woodward added nothing to the case against Libby. But the revelation threw new and unflattering light on Armitage. He had evidently turned to Novak after failing to generate any coverage from Woodward. Could Armitage really have forgotten such a conversation with Bob Woodward, a conversation Woodward himself clearly remembered? When confronted by Woodward, he hadn’t claimed to have forgotten the conversation, only the date. (A material omission is also a criminal violation of Section 1001.) Fitzgerald and Eckenrode interviewed Colin Powell again, at his home, and Powell said Armitage had never told him about Woodward. Even Powell, a staunch Armitage defender, agreed it was hard to fathom that Armitage could have forgotten such an interview with Woodward. Powell added that the Woodward revelation had plunged Armitage into depression.
The date of Armitage’s leak to Woodward seemed significant: just days after the State Department’s INR report circulated identifying Wilson’s wife as a CIA agent, and the day after Kristof’s second column criticizing the vice president. It also established that it was Woodward, not Miller and certainly not Novak, who first learned of Plame’s identity.
On November 19, Fitzgerald convened a new grand jury to continue investigating the Plame affair, and called Armitage to testify for the third time. Armitage told essentially the same story, which was that he’d forgotten the Woodward conversation until Woodward himself jogged his memory. He emphasized, as he had before, that he didn’t know Wilson’s wife was a covert agent.
Fitzgerald had already concluded that it would be difficult to prosecute Armitage under the protected identities act. Woodward’s testimony hadn’t changed that; indeed, he weakened the potential case by saying his impression was that Valerie Wilson was not covert. That left possible perjury or obstruction charges. However unlikely that Armitage would have forgotten the Woodward interview, he had come forward as soon as he heard from Woodward. Woodward never said he would publicly identify a confidential source without Armitage’s consent. Armitage had also identified himself as Novak’s primary source. He hadn’t concocted a false story. On February 24, 2006, Fitzgerald wrote Armitage, “Absent unexpected developments, I do not anticipate seeking any criminal charges against you.” He had barely escaped prosecution.
A
fter a fifth appearance by Rove before the grand jury, Fitzgerald finally resolved the case against Rove. Fitzgerald sent Rove a letter on June 13 informing him no charges would be brought. Rove’s lawyer, Luskin, issued a statement saying he hoped the resolution would end “baseless speculation” about Rove. Out of deference to the ongoing investigation, he said Rove would have no further comment.
Rove felt neither elation nor relief. “I was still in shock,” he later said. Neighbors brought him a cake with the word “Congratulations” on top in blue icing. But soon after, with his name now cleared, he began thinking about leaving the White House. Perhaps it was time.
Fitzgerald informed Novak’s lawyers that he was now free to discuss his role in the case. In fact, Novak had always been free to discuss it; nothing in grand jury secrecy rules prevents a witness from discussing his testimony. Miller and Cooper promptly disclosed their appearances, ignoring any request from Fitzgerald not to do so. But Novak’s lawyer was probably shrewd to advise him to remain silent while the firestorm raged over whether journalists were bound to protect their confidential sources, since he had revealed his and testified before the grand jury long before the courts ruled against Miller, Cooper, and Russert. Given the vindictive mood in the press, Novak would likely have been eviscerated.
Novak described his decision to testify in a July 12 column: “When I testified before the grand jury, I was permitted to read a statement that I had written expressing my discomfort at disclosing confidential conversations with news sources. It should be remembered that the special prosecutor knew their identities and did not learn them from me.” He named Rove in the column, but not his primary source because “he has not come forward to identify himself.”
His identity was revealed in
Newsweek
in late August. In “The Man Who Said Too Much” Michael Isikoff solved the mystery, drawing on an account in
Hubris
, a book he cowrote with David Corn of the
Nation
. “ ‘I’m afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole thing,’ [Armitage] later told Carl Ford Jr., State’s intelligence chief,” Isikoff wrote. “Ford says Armitage admitted to him that he had ‘slipped up’ and told Novak more than he should have. ‘He was basically beside himself that he was the guy that f–ed up. My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat,’ Ford recalls.”
Armitage himself finally came forward and acknowledged his role in an interview with the
Washington Post
’s R. Jeffrey Smith that ran on September 8. He said he’d received permission from Fitzgerald to discuss his involvement and stressed that he’d never known Plame was a covert agent and had never before seen a covert agent’s name mentioned, even in a classified document. The article concluded: “Armitage said he deeply regrets embarrassing Powell, the State Department, his friends and family, and the Wilsons.” He said nothing about embarrassing or causing trouble for the CIA, the White House, Rove, or Libby.
T
he trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby opened on January 23, 2007. The courtroom was on the sixth floor of the Prettyman building. It had taken four days to choose a jury. The defense team was looking for jurors who weren’t hostile to the Bush administration or the Iraq War–no small feat in heavily Democratic Washington–and who were open-minded about the possibility of memory loss, which was already emerging as the centerpiece of Libby’s defense. The nine women and three men who filed in included a singer, an art historian, a postal worker, a retired math teacher, a Web page designer, and, curiously, a
Washington Post
reporter who had worked with Bob Woodward. Ten were white, an anomaly in the heavily African American District of Columbia. It was a well-educated, reasonably affluent group that pledged to weigh the facts with an open mind.
The defense team was deferential toward Judge Reggie Walton, though not especially happy about his selection as the presiding judge. Walton was a Reagan appointee with a reputation for being tough on criminals. A former college football player, he’d once jumped out of his car to subdue a man attempting to beat a cabdriver. Dark gray suits and white shirts were the order of the day for both prosecution and defense, with only their ties–Fitzgerald’s a solid blue, Libby’s a patterned tan–to distinguish their attire. Libby’s hair was grayer than when he entered the White House, but he looked trim and had shed his crutches. His wife, Harriet Grant, sat directly behind him, and the two occasionally exchanged glances.
In preparation for the trial, Fitzgerald had read Libby’s novel,
The Apprentice
. Apart from a few bizarre sex scenes (including copulation with a bear and a freshly killed deer), Fitzgerald was struck by how much of it was a cautionary tale about covering up a crime, which in the novel was a murder. It seemed ironic that Libby himself was now accused of covering up his leaks of Plame’s identity.
“May it please the court, the defense team, the government team, members of the jury, good morning,” Fitzgerald began. “It’s Sunday, July 6, 2003. It’s the last day of a three-day Fourth of July weekend. The fireworks are over, except a different kind of fireworks are about to begin. When people wake up, they open up the Sunday paper, the Sunday
New York Times
. On the page opposite the editorial page appears a column, a column written by a man named Joseph Wilson.”
In his surprisingly dramatic narrative account, Fitzgerald walked the jurors through the complicated events that provided the backdrop for Libby’s alleged crimes: the State of the Union address, the invasion of Iraq, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the finger-pointing among the White House, CIA, and State Department. “Let me stop right there and remind you of something very, very important,” Fitzgerald said at one point. “You won’t be asked to decide nor consider in this case whether or not the war in Iraq was made properly or not. That’s just the background of this case.”
As his narrative reached May and June of 2003, Fitzgerald alluded to the Kristof article in the
Times
, and claims by the unnamed former ambassador that his intelligence warnings had been ignored. “This got some attention. People in the government began asking questions. Who is this former ambassador? What did he do? Where did he go? Who sent him? The defendant was one of those people asking those questions.” Fitzgerald detailed the incidents in which Libby was told explicitly about Wilson, his wife’s position in the CIA, and her alleged role in sending him on the mission: from his conversation with the vice president, on June 10 or 11, to briefings by Marc Grossman, Bob Grenier, Cathie Martin, and Craig Schmall–five different government officials–by June 14. And Fitzgerald described Libby’s interview with Miller on June 23.
Then came the Wilson column, and a “firestorm” ensued, Fitzgerald said. “The evidence will show that Mr. Wilson accused the vice president of allowing the president to mislead the country. . . . And it was on an issue that could not be more important: someone being accused of lying about the justification for war.”
Noting that Vice President Cheney had carefully saved the article and underlined it, Fitzgerald said, “The vice president wasn’t going to take it lying down, nor was the defendant. The defendant was the vice president’s right-hand man. He was his chief of staff, and he also had the job of national security adviser to the vice president. The defendant worked very, very closely with the vice president on many issues, including the war in Iraq. Wilson’s charges hit close to home.”