Robert Novak said Wednesday that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald knows who outed a CIA agent to the Chicago Sun-Times columnist but hasn't acted on the information because Novak's source committed no crime.
Novak also hinted that he personally didn't rely on the Fifth Amendment -- which protects people from testifying against themselves -- in Fitzgerald's investigation.
[...]
Novak also claimed that investigators know who leaked the information, although he did not say how they know.
"The question is, does Mr. Fitzgerald know who the source was?" Novak asked. "Of course. He's known for years who the first source is. If he knows the source, why didn't he indict him? Because no crime was committed."
Novak said he doesn't believe his source violated laws forbidding the disclosure of a CIA agent's identity.
A spokesman for Fitzgerald declined to comment on Novak's remarks.
At an appearance in December, Novak said President Bush knows his source, too. On Wednesday, he called those remarks "indiscreet."
How can Novak make that claim in a way that is legally sound? Fitzgerald has already stated in his indictments of Libby that Plame was a covert agent, thus her status was classified. Yet, Novak believes otherwise. There is just no way to reconcile that.
Novak tried, back in October, 2003:
To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.
Novak also offered this back then:
During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: "Oh, you know about it." The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.
At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.
A "senior administration official" who "was no partisan gunslinger"?
This investigation has been going on for a very long time now and speculation has been rampant about Novak's source, yet most of it that I've read has related to the most prominent, partisan members of the Bush administration - from Bush, to Cheney, to Libby and Rove etc. Who is this partisanless "gun slinger" that many of us seem to have forgotten about and why would Novak claim that no crime was committed (other than to perhaps absolve himself in the matter)?
Bob Woodward echoed the same thoughts in his November, 2005 interview with Larry King:
I'm working on a book, "Bush's Second Term." I'm trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. There are things I know that I'm just not going to talk about involving that research.
So, it's an ongoing process and to take a snapshot, which is fair, when that was asked of me I knew in the back of my mind how offhand and casual this was and I was trying to make the underlying point, which I think is very important that it seemed to me there was no crime, underlying crime in this investigation.
[...]
WOODWARD: Because I, you know, I was focused on getting the book done. You know the significance of this is yet to be determined and what's the good news in all of this is when it all comes out, and hopefully it will come out, people will see how casual and offhand this was.
Remember, the investigation and the allegations that people have printed about this story is that there's some vast conspiracy to slime Joe Wilson and his wife, really attack him in an ugly way that is outside of the boundaries of political hardball.
The evidence I had firsthand, small piece of the puzzle I acknowledge, is that that was not the case.
[...]
WOODWARD: ... I guess a few weeks later. So I said to this source [who told Woodward about Valerie Plame], long substantive interview about the road to war. You know, at the end of an interview like this, after you're doing an interview on television, you might just shoot the breeze for a little while. And so, I asked about Wilson, and he said this.
Woodward claims his source wasn't Libby and that he hadn't interviewed Cheney during that period. Who else would he have spoken to during that time about "the road to war" who might have been the non-partisan that Novak referred to?
In October, 2005, Woodward said:
Now there are a couple of things that I think are true. First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign that it actually -- when the story comes out I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned that Joe Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal.
Woodward's public assertions on King's shows have been gone over with a fine tooth comb by Media Matters and others because it's widely accepted that his journalistic ethics were lacking when he offered opinions about the Plame affair knowing he had information vital to the case.
Still, that leaves the matter of this administration source who, it seems, is connected to both Woodward and Novak. We all know by now that the use of the phrase "senior administration official" can actually refer to anyone, thanks to Judy Miller's revelations that she ascribed various positions to her sources that were actually false and misleading. Have Novak and Woodward done the same? It's possible. But, this "no partisan gunslinger" quote by Novak leaves me wondering...
Time for more research. Who knows? Maybe the real source was actually Laura Bush. Now that would be something.
Then again, how about Colin Powell? Both reporters did use "he".
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