On Monday, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer -- who has been given immunity -- began testifying just after noon, with the early focus on his private lunch with Libby on July 7, 2003, in which the name of CIA staffer Valerie Plame came up in conversation. Libby told Fleischer she worked at the CIA and that this was hush-hush information.
After this first go-round, the trial broke for lunch. When everyone returned, attention shifted to the president's trip to Africa right after that lunch. Fleischer said White House communications chief Don [sic -- Dan]Bartlett brought up Plame's name on Air Force One. Later, Fleischer passed along the news to reporters that they ought to look into Plame getting the CIA, where she worked, to send her husband to Africa on his now-famous probe. He identified them as David Gregory of NBC, Tamara Lippert of Newsweek and John Dickerson of Time.
He said their initial reaction was, "so what?" But later in his testimony it was suggested that very quickly Gregory's boss back in Washington (Tim Russert) and Dickerson's colleague at Time (Matt Cooper) somehow knew about the Wilson/Plame link.
Fleischer also said he called Walter Pincus of The Washington Post about this matter but said he did not mention Plame.
There was one apparent strong conflict: Fleischer said he mentioned Plame by name and said she worked at the CIA. Dickerson has said, and repeated Monday in an interview, that Fleischer simply suggested that the reporters look into who sent Wilson.
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Fleischer in his testimony also said that about two months after exiting his White House job in July 2003, he read in the papers about the outing of Plame and feared he may have had a role in it himself. "I was absolutely horrified to know I had played a role," Fleischer said. "I thought, 'Oh my God. Did I play a role in somehow outing a CIA officer. . . . Did I just do something that I could be in big trouble for.' "
He then contacted a lawyer and this led to his immunity agreement.
Supposedly Fleischer realized that technically his involvement could constitute a capital offense. I don't know why, but I find that hilarious. Nobody's going to hang for high crimes for this. I'd be surprised if anyone besides Libby does any time, and even he won't do more than a couple years in Club Fed. Probably not even that.
It just doesn't matter -- the interest of the DC pols and the media weasels in this up to their greasy jowls militates toward punting this one as some inside-baseball sort of thing. There's no upside for either group to help unravel this mess, because it would clarify the real situation, that the latter group happily permitted themselves to be useful idiots for a mendacious administration that needed to micromanage the narrative, and get the war they wanted.
This Wilson mess has become more labyrinthine than Bizantine politics. However, just to point out another messy entangled detail, if Libby told Ari it was hush-hush, then why would Fleischer tell not one, but three reporters that Plame worked at the Agency? Surely he's not stupid, and he's not forgetful either -- at least, not about that.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what the people at Firedoglake make of that.
Right, and Dickerson, for one, has already taken pains to distinguish his side of the story from Fleischer's. The whole thing is a pretty transparent "nobody here but us chickens" act, but obviously, it's all about what can be proven.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to think that Fitzgerald found it advantageous to let Fleischer squirm away in the hopes of landing a bigger fish, but the guy's got the ultimate poker face, so it's hard to tell.