Cheney's Staff Focus of Valerie Plame Probe

[cjbuchanan]

Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.


http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/02/17/National/Cheneys.Staff.Focus.Of.Probe-598606.shtml

[Brucey]

1. Well, we all knew it would come down to Cheney.

May he and Novaks rot in hell.

[Just Me]

30. Cheney to Libby to Hannah,...

,...Cheney ALWAYS avoided any direct involvement, delegating the dirties to the second or third "in command" in order to cover his big, broad, soft, greedy butt *LOL*. My hope: as one is marched towards the plank, he will grab the next in line who will grab the real culprit, the criminal-in-chief, CHENEY. My hope is that they all clutch onto one another for air as they sink to the bottom. That is my hope. My concern,...Hannah is too freakin' scared to clutch onto the real bad guys.

<edit for misspelling, go figure :)>

[Avalon Sparks]

37. Your hope...

as one is marched towards the plank, he will grab the next in line who will grab the real culprit,

Well since they are Republicans there's a good chance of that happening - they are a bunch of squealing assholes.

[LeighAnn]

40. I'm genuinely surprised

I thought it would be Karl Rove

:^P

[leesa]

42. You think it's not?

I'm certain KKKarl was involved. Will we ever find the truth? Of course not.

[stevedeshazer]

2. oooohhhh!

What's that I hear?

[truthisfreedom]

3. bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaa

watch that blood pressure, cheney. and now for scalia...

[Stevendsmith]

4. Bring it!

Wheeeeewwwww!

[chiburb]

5. So riddle me this:

What's in it for Rev. Moon for Cheney or Scooter to go down? Insight mag is sister publication of UPI, hence the question...

"Richard Sale is an intelligence correspondent for UPI, a sister wire service of Insight magazine."

[BOSSHOG]

6. Any sacrificial lamb to protect bush

however, the lambs are thinning out.

[tom_paine]

7. The Busheviks had 78 days to shred evidence and intimidate witnesses

I hate to say it, but I don't think anything will be found and no one will dare to risk Ultimate Imperial Wrath (which ofttimes leads to plane crashes or falls from unscreened windows more than 50 feet onto hard surfaces) by coming forward.

[lancdem]

15. They have to come forward

they're being subpoenaed by a grand jury. That's where all this evidence came from; the grand jury's been hearing testimony for a couple of weeks now.

[jpak]

8. Pardon me - said Scooter to the Chimp

and the Chimp granted his wish.

It's coming...

[TacticalPeek]

9. Related thread.

Evidence of Possible Criminal Misconduct in Plame Affair

[ThoughtCriminal]

10. John Hannah's name will come up again

He's one of Cheney's advisors that was providing questionable intellegence from Iraqi opposition groups to the VP.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3660169/
<snip>
The memo, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney’s top foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info—including defectors’ claims about WMD and terror ties—to bolster the case that Saddam’s government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability of defectors supplied by the INC.

For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC
<snip>

[Oilwellian]

13. Ohhh!

And the plot thickens! This is the first I've heard of INC memos being sent to Cheney's staff. Time to google.

Hahaha...the last part of the article says the following:

"A Pentagon official also denied Luti directly got INC intel reports, suggesting the author of the memo was just “dropping names” to drum up support for the INC on Capitol Hill."

Oh, the irony. :eyes:

[Just Me]

31. Say what!!!! INC memos to Dick?!?!?

The web is getting smaller and smaller.

Shit, Dick,...you're in bed with the INC? Do you and that criminal Chalabi do hot tubs, too?

Good, gawd, already *LOL*!!! What a "ho"-towin' lot *rollin'*!!

[HereSince1628]

11. Hannah was the V.P.'s contact man with Chalabi and the INC

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3660169/

Serious pressure on his manhood might yeild all sorts of interesting information. I love hearing neocons squeal.

[MidwestTransplant]

12. I wonder if Cheney

is about to have "health problems."

[Bozola]

17. Shades of Bill Casey....

[leesa]

43. Oh, absolutely! They will boot him out on the premise that he's too sick

and then he will escape prosecution because he's such a sick man! I wonder if he has a real cardiac condition at all. Could be yet another scam by these thugs.

[Oreegone]

14. Did Cheney act alone?

He may not want to be the Titanic....could get interesting in a hurry

[DoctorMyEyes]

16. This article is bass-ackwards

at least in this paragraph:

Wilson was sent by the Bush administration in March 2002 to check on an allegation made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address the previous winter that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from the nation of Niger. Wilson returned with a report that said the claim was "highly doubtful."


Wilson turned his report in months before the SOTU address. This is really sloppy reporting. Or deliberate disinformation?

[jackstraw45]

19. Wow that's bad journalism....

WOW.

[fishnfla]

18. Cheney screwed up this admin is how many ways now?

wow, the puppetmaster is evrywhere, behind every F***-up in this show. Once again, props to DUers, these 2 bozos were pegged here way back when....

[callous taoboy]

20. Hair and teeth

.

[reprobate]

38. Don't forget the eyeballs. All over the white house.

[rocktivity]

21. Well, Cheney was out the door anyway

what with his "health" problems :eyes:.

With a couple of foot soliders "taking a bullet" on this Plame thing--which he knew of course knew nothing about :eyes: --he can resign in style. But will be like being the unofficial power behind the throne? Rove doesn't mind, but I think Cheney would.


rocknation

[tinrobot]

23. I think so, too...

They desperately need someone to take the fall.

Expect a new VP candidate come the convention.

[Just Me]

33. I want to see him walk out that solid door to the barred variety,...

,...he's a criminal who should "do the time for his crime",...and, considering the tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions lost in his collusion with the rest of the neocon cabal,...he should be walking Dubya's version of "the green mile" along with the whole lot of them. Of course, I will still advocate against their death sentence and demand they serve their whole lives in prison :D. I'll bet they would really appreciate folks like us in those circumstances, huh *LOL*!!!

[West Coast Democrat]

22. This was also mentioned on the Talking Points site

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

There's been plenty of chatter over recent days that some indictments were coming down the pike in the Plame matter. Now UPI's Richard Sale seems to have the goods.

This from a story just out ...

Federal law enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year.
The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby were the two Cheney employees.

"We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law enforcement officer said.

Calls to the vice president's office were not returned. Hannah and Libby did not return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time," as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law enforcement official said.



This is, to put it mildly, awfully big news if it bears out.

We're sitting on some other key developments in the case which we're hoping to post late this afternoon or this evening.

-- Josh Marshall

[dusty64]

24. How many more

crimes can they commit with impunity? This has loooooong been beyond unbelievable.

[ignatius]

25. TRAITORS...I hope they all end up in a dank,dark, prison

cell loaded with big, hairy men named Bubba. Oh yeah, take that traitorous bastard Novack with you!!!

[rocktivity]

26. WHO GAVE THE ORDER?

Or are we supposed to believe that these guys came up with the idea themselves. Would they have the names of the undercover agents? WHO GAME THEM PLAME'S NAME?


rocknation

[reprobate]

39. Cheney is the one who spent so much time at the CIA.

And Plame was on the WMD task force. That's where he got the name.

[Snappy]

27. What Cheney knew and when.

This creep is one of the most dispicable of the Neo Fascists. Dubya the Dunce is a puppet but that will no excuse for his criminal acts. Cheney needs to be indicted ASAP.

[PaDUer]

32. They ALL should be

indicted, every one of them, wives included...I refuse to believe that they're innocent of anything!

[Whoa_Nelly]

28. So who's the boss?

From article posted at:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=348309&mesg_id=348309

"Hannah, by the way, is a "senior national security aide" for Cheney"

Who tells aides, even a senior aide, to "talk" and commit a crime...or would these aides just take it upon themselves to act without Cheney's knowledge? Yeah...right...Cheney has had to have known about this all along, may be proven to be the instigator...these are the fall guys...the real criminal needs to take the fall.

[Whoa_Nelly]

29. Salon.com reported on Lewis in Oct, 2003

Suspicion centers on Lewis Libby
Dick Cheney's chief of staff helped hype the Iraq threat and discredit Joe Wilson. But while the White House has denied Karl Rove is the leaker, so far it's left Libby twisting slowly in the wind.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Eric Boehlert

Oct. 3, 2003 | Criminal leak investigations are notoriously futile, and the identity of the administration officials who illegally blew the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame may never be known. But one name keeps coming up, and so far it hasn't provoked a specific, emphatic White House denial: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, assistant to the president and Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful chief of staff.

On Wednesday the New York Daily News reported that "Democratic congressional sources said they would like to hear from Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby." On MSNBC's "Buchanan and Press" on Wednesday, Pat Buchanan asked an administration critic who claims to know the leaker's name point blank if "Scooter Libby" was the culprit (the critic wouldn't answer). And Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska made a veiled reference on CNBC this week, suggesting that President Bush could better manage the current crisis by "sitting down with vice president and asking what he knows about it."

But below the surface there's even more chatter. Says one former senior CIA officer who served under President Bush's father, "Libby is certainly suspect No. 1."

,,,and further down in article:
<snip>
By all accounts, Libby was certainly at the heart of the administration's high-level arm-twisting in the intelligence community, trying to massage evidence to make the case that Iraq was an imminent danger to the world. He and his boss Cheney, along with a cadre of administration hawks, took the lead in trying to sell a number of bogus claims, from the notion that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger to the false assertion that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi spy before 9/11.

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/libby.html

Will Libby be taking the fall for the WMD lies, too...or at least some part of it so Rove, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz don't have to?
A must read article.


on edit:
After rereading the article, am asking a serious, but also somewhat rhetorical, question:

Why has it taken so long to really start getting into the meat of this treason especially when back in Oct. 2003, Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA and the State Department, stated on MSNBC, "I know the name of the person that spoke with Bob Novak," and that the person worked "at the White House," and more specifically, "in the Old Executive Office Buildings." ???

Sure...plenty of time for CYA, and now the fall guy, but this has to go further now. More will be forthcoming, am sure.

[yellowcanine]

34. Cheney chicken hawk traitor

Soes anyone doubt that Dick "I had other priorities" Cheney had to know about this? Let the prosecutions and resignations begin.

[suegeo]

35. Hannah

A quick search turned up that Hannah was a former member of the Washington Policy Institute for Near East Policy

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/

The web site shows that the same cast of neo-con fascists is on the Board of Advisors:

Jeane Kirkpatrick (the woman who ate Nicaragua for lunch one day)
Bud McFarlane (Iran-Contra jackass)
Dick Perle (prince of darkness)
Paul Wolfowitz (you know...)
George Schultz (Reagan's sec. of state???)
Jimmy Woolsey (CIA?)
and
Warren Christopher (a Carter dude??)

At a protest during the lead up to Herr Dictator Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, one chant went "Hey Hey Ho Ho. Reagan's cabinet has got to go."

Yep, they sure do.

ON EDIT, a bland co-incidence?:

A member of the staff that keeps popping up all over the Washington Institute's web site is one Dr. Clawson

From the web site: Dr. Clawson graduated with a doctoral degree from the New School for Social Research and a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College.

If I am keeping all my stories straight, the New School is now being headed by former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry. The same guy who is gonna "interview" Condiliar Rice about the 9.11.01 attacks, of course, NOT under oath, nor will we -- as members of the great unwashed hordes -- ever get to hear what Condiliar has to say (lie about) in said interviews...

[Whoa_Nelly]

36. This needs a kick

:kick:

[TacticalPeek]

41. Kudos to DUer skip fox for sniffing this out early!

DU thread, 03 Oct 03

"Teaser: Reports originally said (erroneously, as it turned out) that Wilson was sent by VP. Who would Novak have called first?"

TraitorGate. Who leaked first and why. Under our noses all along.

:toast:


(To be fair, Tweety was on this then, too.)

[No Passaran]

44. Just sent an email to CNN from my US.Army.Mil Account

My email to CNN:

"As you can see, I'm a soldier and while I was deployed to fight this war in Iraq for our "freedom", what do we do at home? We have one of your reporters, Robert Novak, sleazy and undeserving of CNN association, publishing Valerie Plame's name as a CIA operative and endangering her life and our National Security.

He needs to be fired for promoting the politics of his "friends" and being totally unprofessional.

Good night to all of you and God Bless America."