Fitzgerald files Libby Papers: Hints at Cheney Involvement

Removing any doubt about the status of Valerie Plame when Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and Dick Armitage started leaking her name out to the press, the CIA releases an unclassified summary of her employment history:

An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame's employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was "covert" when her name became public in July 2003.

The summary is part of an attachment to Fitzgerald's memorandum to the court supporting his recommendation that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's former top aide, spend 2-1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation.

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(Images taken from original PDF)

Just trying to make it easy reading for those of you that might hate PDFs as much as I do!

Dan Froomkin spells it out for those of you that don't understand how serious the leak of Valerie Plame's identity by Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and Dick Armitage is:

In Friday's eminently readable court filing, Fitzgerald quotes the Libby defense calling his prosecution "unwarranted, unjust, and motivated by politics." In responding to that charge, the special counsel evidently felt obliged to put Libby's crime in context. And that context is Dick Cheney.

Libby's lies, Fitzgerald wrote, "made impossible an accurate evaluation of the role that Mr. Libby and those with whom he worked played in the disclosure of information regarding Ms. Wilson's CIA employment and about the motivations for their actions."

It was established at trial that it was Cheney himself who first told Libby about Plame's identity as a CIA agent, in the course of complaining about criticisms of the administration's run-up to war leveled by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. And, as Fitzgerald notes: "The evidence at trial further established that when the investigation began, Mr. Libby kept the Vice President apprised of his shifting accounts of how he claimed to have learned about Ms. Wilson's CIA employment."

The investigation, Fitzgerald writes, "was necessary to determine whether there was concerted action by any combination of the officials known to have disclosed the information about Ms. Plame to the media as anonymous sources, and also whether any of those who were involved acted at the direction of others. This was particularly important in light of Mr. Libby's statement to the FBI that he may have discussed Ms. Wilson's employment with reporters at the specific direction of the Vice President." (My italics.)

Not clear on the concept yet? Fitzgerald adds: "To accept the argument that Mr. Libby's prosecution is the inappropriate product of an investigation that should have been closed at an early stage, one must accept the proposition that the investigation should have been closed after at least three high-ranking government officials were identified as having disclosed to reporters classified information about covert agent Valerie Wilson, where the account of one of them was directly contradicted by other witnesses, where there was reason to believe that some of the relevant activity may have been coordinated, and where there was an indication from Mr. Libby himself that his disclosures to the press may have been personally sanctioned by the Vice President." (My italics.)

Two suggestions:

• Scooter Libby should buy a few years supply of "soap on a rope"
• cheney should put a fresh battery in his pacemaker.

It's going to be a rough ride for both of them.

And I would be unrealistic if I didn't point out the FACT that what this all adds up to is that the 3 people that admitted to the leaking, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and Dick Armitage, did in fact provide aid and comfort to the enemy, whether purposefully or not, by taking down a CIA operative that was serving in Counter Proliferation Duties (CPD) under Non official Cover (NOC), pretty much as dangerous as it can get working for the CIA.

I may just have to start a Technorati tag called "Republican Terrorists" with how many of them there are out there to keep track of... That is a sad statement about the state of the Republican party today.