Plamegate Chroniclers Corn and Waas

Murray Waas, a noted writer on Plamegate and the Libby trial for the National Journal — you saw him on the CIA Leak panel at last summer’s YearlyKos Convention that featured Joe Wilson, Larry Johnson and moderator Jane Hamsher (video at Fora.TV) — will prepare and write The United States v. I. Lewis Libby, which “will include testimony and original reporting.” The paperback, to be published by Sterling Publishing’s Union Square Press, will be co-prepared by Waas’s friend, Jeff Lomonaco, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Waas’s editor, Philip Turner, also edited books by Joe Wilson and Tyler Drumheller, says Waas at his blog, Whatever Already! (More details: CBS News and Wonkette.)

At the end, I tossed in snippets from Maureen Dowd’s latest column on her friendship with Juror No. 9. But first, there’s David Corn, who with Michael Isikoff already has a book out on Plamegate, and who has a new in-depth article at The Nation magazine: “Cheney On Trial” (how we wish):

It was fall 2003. The news had broken that the Justice Department, at the request of the CIA, was investigating the leak that outed Valerie Wilson as an undercover intelligence officer, and FBI investigators were targeting White House officials. With a firestorm under way, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, went to see his boss. Libby hadn’t passed any information about Valerie Wilson to right-wing columnist Robert Novak, who first published the leak in a July 14, 2003, column. But he had talked to other reporters about Valerie Wilson and her CIA connection before the leak occurred. And he also knew that Karl Rove, White House über-strategist, had spoken to Novak about her days before the leak column. That is, Libby knew a fair bit about the episode.

Libby told Cheney he had not been one of Novak’s two Administration sources for the leak, and he offered to disclose to the Vice President everything he knew. But Cheney did not want to hear it; Libby said no more.

Shortly after that, Libby, responding to a request from investigators, came across a note in his files indicating that in early June 2003–weeks before the Wilson affair began–Cheney had told him that the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson worked at the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division, a unit of the agency’s clandestine operations directorate. (At that point, the former envoy had spoken only privately to two reporters about his CIA-sponsored trip to Niger, during which he had concluded there was not much to the intelligence report that Iraq had been uranium-shopping there.) The note was a significant discovery. A key issue in the investigation was who in the Bush Administration had spread information about Wilson’s wife to undermine Wilson’s charge that the White House had twisted the prewar intelligence (a criticism Wilson made public in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed). And Libby had uncovered evidence showing that Cheney had conducted his own research on Joseph Wilson early on, learned about Valerie Wilson’s CIA job and shared the information with Libby. Cheney apparently was the first White House official to discuss Valerie Wilson’s specific place of work. …

Keep reading “Cheney On Trial.”

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P.S. Maureen Dowd has her “very own juror”. A snippet for those of you who don’t pay to read MoDo:

[...]

I went to Nativity grade school in D.C. with Juror No. 9, Denis Collins. I had an unrequited crush on his brother when I was in seventh grade. His dad was my dad’s lawyer, and both were Irish immigrants. My brother Kevin coached his brother Kevin in touch football. Our moms were in the Sodality together. His mom once chastised me for chatting up a little boy in church. We started in journalism together, Denis at The Washington Post as a sportswriter and Metro reporter, and me at The Washington Star as a sportswriter and Metro reporter.

This was a sure thing. I could get him to come over to my house and spill all the secrets of the jury that had convicted the highest-ranking White House official to be found guilty on a felony since Iran-contra days.

Unfortunately, Denis spilled them on the way over. By the time he got to my house, he was already so overexposed he announced, “I’m sick of hearing myself talk.”

From the moment he stepped out of the courthouse and into the press mob in his green Eddie Bauer jacket, Denis became the unofficial jury spokesman, bouncing from Larry King to Anderson Cooper and “Good Morning America.” I thought there still might be enough jury dish for me until I heard him say “Huffington Post blog.”

“Blogs are the future, right?” he said, explaining that he’d already posted his diary of adventures in federal court — right down to our incestuous Catholic past, which came up in the voir dire, when he also mentioned living across the alley from Tim Russert and working at The Post for Bob Woodward, and his nonfiction book about spying and the C.I.A.

“I was the perfect storm,” he said. Instead of me milking him for information, he tried to milk me for information. He asked about the pitfalls of being in a media maelstrom.

“Somebody called me up today and said: ‘Turn on Rush Limbaugh. He’s saying terrible things about you.’ ”

I empathized. One of my brothers always used to call Mom and tell her: “Turn on Rush Limbaugh. He’s saying terrible things about Maureen.”

Also, Denis’s wife, Pam, told him gleefully that someone on TV was making fun of his jacket. “Somebody said, ‘What’s with the green coat? It looks like something he got in high school.’ ” I asked him if he’d used any lessons from the nuns. “Accountability,” he said. “Do the right thing or get whacked over your head with the bell by Sister Mary Karen.”

Was Scooter’s fall Shakespearean? “He’s too many steps away from the king,” he said. “One of the jurors said, ‘He was too busy looking out for No. 1; he should have been looking out for No. 2 and then he wouldn’t have gotten in trouble.’ One of the witnesses told us that Libby spent more time with Cheney than he did with his own wife and kids.”

What did the jurors think of Scooter’s wife? “Well, the alleged wife,” Denis corrected me. This was a very skeptical jury, then?

“We didn’t know anything about her,” he said, adding: “I said, ‘So, that’s Scooter Libby’s wife?’ and another juror jokingly said, ‘Do you have any evidence?’ ” So the jurors began calling her “the alleged wife.” …