The Washington Post
Prosecutor in CIA Leak Case Casting a Wide Net
Wed Jul 27, 2005 14:59
64.140.158.65
Prosecutor in CIA Leak Case Casting a Wide Net
By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
The Washington Post
Wednesday 27 July 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/26/AR2005072602069.html
White House effort to discredit critic examined in detail.
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a
wider range of administration officials than was previously known,
part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a
White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that
President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war,
according to several officials familiar with the case.
Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet
and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill
Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who
approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street. In doing so,
special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about
how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the
administration went about shifting responsibility from the White
House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of
the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa.
Most of the questioning of CIA and State Department officials
took place in 2004, the sources said.
It remains unclear whether Fitzgerald uncovered any wrongdoing
in this or any other portion of his nearly 18-month investigation.
All that is known at this point are the names of some people he has
interviewed, what questions he has asked and whom he has focused on.
Fitzgerald began his investigation in December 2003 to determine
whether any government official knowingly leaked Plame's identity as
a CIA employee to the media. Plame's husband, former ambassador
Joseph C. Wilson IV, has said his wife's career was ruined in
retaliation for his public criticism of Bush. In a 2002 trip to
Niger at the request of the CIA, Wilson found no evidence to support
allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from that African country
and reported back to the agency in February 2002. But nearly a year
later, Bush asserted in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had
sought uranium from Africa, attributing it to British, not U.S.,
intelligence.
Fitzgerald has said in court that he had completed most of his
investigation at a time he was pressing for New York Times reporter
Judith Miller to break her silence and testify about any
conversations she had with a specific administration official about
Plame during the week before Plame's identity was revealed.
Miller, who never wrote a story about the matter, is in jail for
refusing to comply with a court order to testify. Court records show
Fitzgerald is seeking information about communications she had with
the Bush official between July 6 and July 13, 2003, when the White
House was attempting to discredit Wilson and his allegations.
Fitzgerald appears to believe that Miller's conversations may
help him get to the bottom of the leak and the damage-control
campaign undertaken by senior Bush officials that week.
Using background conversations with at least three journalists
and other means, Bush officials attacked Wilson's credibility. They
said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his
wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect.
One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had
arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated
matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post.
Miller's role remains one of many mysteries in the leak probe.
It is unclear to whom, if anyone, she spoke to about Plame, and why
she emerged as a central figure in the probe despite never having
written a story about the case. Also murky is the role of Novak, who
first publicly identified Plame in a syndicated column published
July 14, 2003.
Lawyers involved in the case have confirmed that Novak discussed
Plame with White House senior adviser Karl Rove four or more days
before the column identifying her ran. But the identity of
another "administration"
source cited in the column is still unknown. Rove's attorney has
said Rove did not identify Plame to Novak.
In a strange twist in the investigation, the grand jury --
acting on a tip from Wilson -- has questioned a person who
approached Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue on July 8, 2003, six days
before his column appeared in The Post and other publications,
Wilson said in an interview. The person, whom Wilson declined to
identify to The Post, asked Novak about the "yellow cake" uranium
matter and then about Wilson, Wilson said. He first revealed that
conversation in a book he wrote last year. In the book, he said he
tried to reach Novak on July 8, and they finally connected on July
10. In that conversation, Wilson said he did not confirm his wife
worked for the CIA but that Novak told him he had obtained the
information from a "CIA source."
Novak told the person that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA as a
specialist in weapons of mass destruction and had arranged her
husband's trip to Niger, Wilson said. Unknown to Novak, the person
was a friend of Wilson and reported the conversation to him, Wilson
said.
Novak and his attorney, James Hamilton, have declined to discuss
the investigation, as has Fitzgerald.
Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday
that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations
he had with Novak at least three days before the column was
published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was
permitted to use without revealing classified information, that
Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did
write about it, her name should not be revealed.
Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status
and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he
called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him
was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not
tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was
classified information.
In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA
official he spoke to "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."
Harlow was also involved in the larger internal administration
battle over who would be held responsible for Bush using the
disputed charge about the Iraq-Niger connection as part of the war
argument. Based on the questions they have been asked, people
involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this
bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part
of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy.
Wilson unleashed a multimedia attack on Bush's claim on July 6,
2003, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," in an interview in The
Post and writing his own op-ed article in the New York Times, in
which he accused the president of "twisting" intelligence.
Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks:
one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the
blame for allowing the 16 words to have remained in Bush's speech.
As part of this effort, then-national security adviser Stephen J.
Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA
responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency
did not believe Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a
person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by
prosecutors in the leak case, but it is not clear whether he
appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.
On July 9, Tenet and top aides began to draft a statement over
two days that ultimately said it was "a mistake" for the CIA to have
permitted the 16 words about uranium to remain in Bush's speech. He
said the information "did not rise to the level of certainty which
should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should
have ensured that it was removed."
A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's
statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley
on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were
accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official
said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said
Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.
The prosecutors have talked to State Department officials to
determine what role a classified memo including two sentences about
Plame's role in Wilson's Niger trip played in the damage-control
campaign.
People familiar with this part of the probe provided new details
about the memo, including that it was then-Deputy Secretary of State
Richard L. Armitage who requested it the day Wilson went public and
asked that a copy be sent to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
to take with him on a trip to Africa the next day. Bush and several
top aides were on that trip. Carl W. Ford Jr., who was director of
the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the time and who
supervised the original production of the memo, has appeared before
the grand jury, according to a former State Department official.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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Go to Original
Ex-White House Aide on Periphery of Leak Inquiry
By Anne E. Kornblut
The New York Times
Wednesday 26 July 2005
Pound Ridge, NY - From the road, it is barely possible to see
the home where Ari Fleischer lives. Tucked away behind a secured
fence and a thicket of shrubbery, Mr. Fleischer, the former White
House press secretary, is where he wants to be these days: nearly
invisible.
For the two years since he left the White House - on the very
day in July 2003 that Robert D. Novak printed the name of a Central
Intelligence Agency operative in his syndicated newspaper column -
Mr. Fleischer has been caught up in the investigation of who
supplied that information to the columnist and whether it was a
crime. The prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, called Mr.
Fleischer to appear before the grand jury that is investigating the
leak.
One person familiar with Mr. Fleischer's testimony said he told
the grand jury that he was not Mr. Novak's source. And Mr.
Fleischer, who was never shy about championing his Republican
bosses, seems not to fit Mr. Novak's description, in a subsequent
column, of his primary source as "no partisan gunslinger."
But Mr. Fleischer was in the middle of the developments that
surrounded the White House's response to the criticism leveled by
Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat, who on July 6, 2003,
publicly said the administration had "twisted" intelligence about
the nuclear ambitions of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
In the week that followed Mr. Wilson's assertions in an Op-Ed
article in The New York Times, Mr. Fleischer played a central role
as the White House acknowledged that six months earlier, President
Bush should not have cited intelligence about Iraqi efforts to
acquire uranium from Africa in his State of the Union address.
Mr. Wilson, who had traveled to the African nation of Niger in
2002 at the request of the C.I.A. to look into the uranium reports,
had challenged Mr. Bush's statement.
A White House telephone log shows that Mr. Fleischer received a
call from Mr. Novak on July 7, 2003, but a person familiar with Mr.
Fleischer's testimony said he told prosecutors he never returned the
call. Mr.
Fleischer was aboard Air Force One with Mr. Bush and several other
senior administration officials as they traveled across Africa that
week.
And while a classified State Department memorandum that
identified Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, as a C.I.A. operative,
was also on board, Mr. Fleischer has told the grand jury that he
never saw the document, according to the person familiar with his
testimony.
"I'm cooperating with the investigators, and refer all
questions to them," Mr. Fleischer said on Tuesday, after turning
away a reporter at his house on Monday.
The people who discussed the testimony of Mr. Fleischer and
other witnesses asked not to be named because Mr. Fitzgerald, the
special prosecutor, has asked anyone involved in the case not to
talk about it. At least one person who provided an account of Mr.
Fleischer's role did so in the belief that it would remove suspicion
from Mr. Fleischer.
As the investigation has progressed, according to people who
have been officially briefed on the inquiry, investigators have
lessened their interest in Mr. Fleischer's activities and those of
other top White House press aides at the time as more senior
administration figures have attracted greater attention. Those
figures include Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, and I.
Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
With Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, in jail
for refusing to divulge her source for the same information about
Ms. Wilson, and the grand jury set to expire in October, the outcome
of the investigation remains unclear.
[In an interview on the CNN program "Inside Politics" on
Tuesday, Mr.
Novak said he could not discuss any role he had had in the case. He
added, "I can't tell anything I ever talked to Karl Rove about
because I don't think I ever talked to him about any subject, even
the time of day, on the record."]
Mr. Fleischer, as White House spokesman, delivered the
administration's pronouncements about the Iraq war in the weeks
after the invasion began in March 2003. But he was never part of Mr.
Bush's inner circle, and he was not the only member of the Bush
communications team trying to counter Mr.
Wilson's critique.
Dan Bartlett, the most senior communications strategist in the
White House, has also told investigators that he did not know who
Ms. Wilson was, according to a person who has been briefed on the
case.
Few if any reporters who traveled with Mr. Fleischer, Mr.
Bartlett and the White House entourage that week have been called to
testify before the grand jury. A background briefing during the trip
in which Mr. Bartlett spoke with reporters and urged them to look
into the C.I.A.'s role in sending Mr. Wilson to Niger has not drawn
substantial interest from prosecutors recently.
One source familiar with the case said Mr. Fitzgerald knew
about the briefing but was apparently not pursuing it as a
significant lead.
A different person, who has been briefed on the investigation,
said, "If Bartlett spoke to the issue, it was to suggest to
reporters to inquire at the C.I.A. because it was the C.I.A. that
had control of the issue."
That individual added that Mr. Bartlett did not see the
classified State Department memorandum.
On Tuesday, Mr. Bartlett repeated that administration
officials "are fully cooperating with the investigators in this
process, at the direction of the president."
When he left the White House on July 14, 2003, Mr. Fleischer
was newly married and ready to return to the small, affluent town of
Pound Ridge in Westchester County, where he was raised. He has
largely kept a low profile, speaking to groups around the country
but staying off the television talk-show circuit.
Earlier this year, Mr. Fleischer's memoir, "Taking Heat: The
President, the Press, and My Years in the White House," was
published. In it, he made no mention of the leak but took note of
the story roiling the White House the day he left.
"A controversy raged over the accuracy of a claim the president
had made
By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
The Washington Post
Wednesday 27 July 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/26/AR2005072602069.html
White House effort to discredit critic examined in detail.
The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a
wider range of administration officials than was previously known,
part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a
White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that
President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war,
according to several officials familiar with the case.
Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet
and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill
Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who
approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street. In doing so,
special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about
how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the
administration went about shifting responsibility from the White
House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of
the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa.
Most of the questioning of CIA and State Department officials
took place in 2004, the sources said.
It remains unclear whether Fitzgerald uncovered any wrongdoing
in this or any other portion of his nearly 18-month investigation.
All that is known at this point are the names of some people he has
interviewed, what questions he has asked and whom he has focused on.
Fitzgerald began his investigation in December 2003 to determine
whether any government official knowingly leaked Plame's identity as
a CIA employee to the media. Plame's husband, former ambassador
Joseph C. Wilson IV, has said his wife's career was ruined in
retaliation for his public criticism of Bush. In a 2002 trip to
Niger at the request of the CIA, Wilson found no evidence to support
allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from that African country
and reported back to the agency in February 2002. But nearly a year
later, Bush asserted in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had
sought uranium from Africa, attributing it to British, not U.S.,
intelligence.
Fitzgerald has said in court that he had completed most of his
investigation at a time he was pressing for New York Times reporter
Judith Miller to break her silence and testify about any
conversations she had with a specific administration official about
Plame during the week before Plame's identity was revealed.
Miller, who never wrote a story about the matter, is in jail for
refusing to comply with a court order to testify. Court records show
Fitzgerald is seeking information about communications she had with
the Bush official between July 6 and July 13, 2003, when the White
House was attempting to discredit Wilson and his allegations.
Fitzgerald appears to believe that Miller's conversations may
help him get to the bottom of the leak and the damage-control
campaign undertaken by senior Bush officials that week.
Using background conversations with at least three journalists
and other means, Bush officials attacked Wilson's credibility. They
said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his
wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect.
One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had
arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated
matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post.
Miller's role remains one of many mysteries in the leak probe.
It is unclear to whom, if anyone, she spoke to about Plame, and why
she emerged as a central figure in the probe despite never having
written a story about the case. Also murky is the role of Novak, who
first publicly identified Plame in a syndicated column published
July 14, 2003.
Lawyers involved in the case have confirmed that Novak discussed
Plame with White House senior adviser Karl Rove four or more days
before the column identifying her ran. But the identity of
another "administration"
source cited in the column is still unknown. Rove's attorney has
said Rove did not identify Plame to Novak.
In a strange twist in the investigation, the grand jury --
acting on a tip from Wilson -- has questioned a person who
approached Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue on July 8, 2003, six days
before his column appeared in The Post and other publications,
Wilson said in an interview. The person, whom Wilson declined to
identify to The Post, asked Novak about the "yellow cake" uranium
matter and then about Wilson, Wilson said. He first revealed that
conversation in a book he wrote last year. In the book, he said he
tried to reach Novak on July 8, and they finally connected on July
10. In that conversation, Wilson said he did not confirm his wife
worked for the CIA but that Novak told him he had obtained the
information from a "CIA source."
Novak told the person that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA as a
specialist in weapons of mass destruction and had arranged her
husband's trip to Niger, Wilson said. Unknown to Novak, the person
was a friend of Wilson and reported the conversation to him, Wilson
said.
Novak and his attorney, James Hamilton, have declined to discuss
the investigation, as has Fitzgerald.
Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday
that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations
he had with Novak at least three days before the column was
published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was
permitted to use without revealing classified information, that
Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did
write about it, her name should not be revealed.
Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status
and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he
called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him
was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not
tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was
classified information.
In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA
official he spoke to "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."
Harlow was also involved in the larger internal administration
battle over who would be held responsible for Bush using the
disputed charge about the Iraq-Niger connection as part of the war
argument. Based on the questions they have been asked, people
involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this
bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part
of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy.
Wilson unleashed a multimedia attack on Bush's claim on July 6,
2003, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," in an interview in The
Post and writing his own op-ed article in the New York Times, in
which he accused the president of "twisting" intelligence.
Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks:
one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the
blame for allowing the 16 words to have remained in Bush's speech.
As part of this effort, then-national security adviser Stephen J.
Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA
responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency
did not believe Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a
person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by
prosecutors in the leak case, but it is not clear whether he
appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.
On July 9, Tenet and top aides began to draft a statement over
two days that ultimately said it was "a mistake" for the CIA to have
permitted the 16 words about uranium to remain in Bush's speech. He
said the information "did not rise to the level of certainty which
should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should
have ensured that it was removed."
A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's
statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley
on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were
accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official
said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said
Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.
The prosecutors have talked to State Department officials to
determine what role a classified memo including two sentences about
Plame's role in Wilson's Niger trip played in the damage-control
campaign.
People familiar with this part of the probe provided new details
about the memo, including that it was then-Deputy Secretary of State
Richard L. Armitage who requested it the day Wilson went public and
asked that a copy be sent to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
to take with him on a trip to Africa the next day. Bush and several
top aides were on that trip. Carl W. Ford Jr., who was director of
the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the time and who
supervised the original production of the memo, has appeared before
the grand jury, according to a former State Department official.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------
Go to Original
Ex-White House Aide on Periphery of Leak Inquiry
By Anne E. Kornblut
The New York Times
Wednesday 26 July 2005
Pound Ridge, NY - From the road, it is barely possible to see
the home where Ari Fleischer lives. Tucked away behind a secured
fence and a thicket of shrubbery, Mr. Fleischer, the former White
House press secretary, is where he wants to be these days: nearly
invisible.
For the two years since he left the White House - on the very
day in July 2003 that Robert D. Novak printed the name of a Central
Intelligence Agency operative in his syndicated newspaper column -
Mr. Fleischer has been caught up in the investigation of who
supplied that information to the columnist and whether it was a
crime. The prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, called Mr.
Fleischer to appear before the grand jury that is investigating the
leak.
One person familiar with Mr. Fleischer's testimony said he told
the grand jury that he was not Mr. Novak's source. And Mr.
Fleischer, who was never shy about championing his Republican
bosses, seems not to fit Mr. Novak's description, in a subsequent
column, of his primary source as "no partisan gunslinger."
But Mr. Fleischer was in the middle of the developments that
surrounded the White House's response to the criticism leveled by
Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat, who on July 6, 2003,
publicly said the administration had "twisted" intelligence about
the nuclear ambitions of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
In the week that followed Mr. Wilson's assertions in an Op-Ed
article in The New York Times, Mr. Fleischer played a central role
as the White House acknowledged that six months earlier, President
Bush should not have cited intelligence about Iraqi efforts to
acquire uranium from Africa in his State of the Union address.
Mr. Wilson, who had traveled to the African nation of Niger in
2002 at the request of the C.I.A. to look into the uranium reports,
had challenged Mr. Bush's statement.
A White House telephone log shows that Mr. Fleischer received a
call from Mr. Novak on July 7, 2003, but a person familiar with Mr.
Fleischer's testimony said he told prosecutors he never returned the
call. Mr.
Fleischer was aboard Air Force One with Mr. Bush and several other
senior administration officials as they traveled across Africa that
week.
And while a classified State Department memorandum that
identified Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, as a C.I.A. operative,
was also on board, Mr. Fleischer has told the grand jury that he
never saw the document, according to the person familiar with his
testimony.
"I'm cooperating with the investigators, and refer all
questions to them," Mr. Fleischer said on Tuesday, after turning
away a reporter at his house on Monday.
The people who discussed the testimony of Mr. Fleischer and
other witnesses asked not to be named because Mr. Fitzgerald, the
special prosecutor, has asked anyone involved in the case not to
talk about it. At least one person who provided an account of Mr.
Fleischer's role did so in the belief that it would remove suspicion
from Mr. Fleischer.
As the investigation has progressed, according to people who
have been officially briefed on the inquiry, investigators have
lessened their interest in Mr. Fleischer's activities and those of
other top White House press aides at the time as more senior
administration figures have attracted greater attention. Those
figures include Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, and I.
Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
With Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, in jail
for refusing to divulge her source for the same information about
Ms. Wilson, and the grand jury set to expire in October, the outcome
of the investigation remains unclear.
[In an interview on the CNN program "Inside Politics" on
Tuesday, Mr.
Novak said he could not discuss any role he had had in the case. He
added, "I can't tell anything I ever talked to Karl Rove about
because I don't think I ever talked to him about any subject, even
the time of day, on the record."]
Mr. Fleischer, as White House spokesman, delivered the
administration's pronouncements about the Iraq war in the weeks
after the invasion began in March 2003. But he was never part of Mr.
Bush's inner circle, and he was not the only member of the Bush
communications team trying to counter Mr.
Wilson's critique.
Dan Bartlett, the most senior communications strategist in the
White House, has also told investigators that he did not know who
Ms. Wilson was, according to a person who has been briefed on the
case.
Few if any reporters who traveled with Mr. Fleischer, Mr.
Bartlett and the White House entourage that week have been called to
testify before the grand jury. A background briefing during the trip
in which Mr. Bartlett spoke with reporters and urged them to look
into the C.I.A.'s role in sending Mr. Wilson to Niger has not drawn
substantial interest from prosecutors recently.
One source familiar with the case said Mr. Fitzgerald knew
about the briefing but was apparently not pursuing it as a
significant lead.
A different person, who has been briefed on the investigation,
said, "If Bartlett spoke to the issue, it was to suggest to
reporters to inquire at the C.I.A. because it was the C.I.A. that
had control of the issue."
That individual added that Mr. Bartlett did not see the
classified State Department memorandum.
On Tuesday, Mr. Bartlett repeated that administration
officials "are fully cooperating with the investigators in this
process, at the direction of the president."
When he left the White House on July 14, 2003, Mr. Fleischer
was newly married and ready to return to the small, affluent town of
Pound Ridge in Westchester County, where he was raised. He has
largely kept a low profile, speaking to groups around the country
but staying off the television talk-show circuit.
Earlier this year, Mr. Fleischer's memoir, "Taking Heat: The
President, the Press, and My Years in the White House," was
published. In it, he made no mention of the leak but took note of
the story roiling the White House the day he left.
"A controversy raged over the accuracy of a claim the president
had made
Main Page - Wednesday, 07/27/05
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