May 9, 2008 at 16:33:46

Lost E-Mails Obscure 'Plame-gate'

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By Jason Leopold (about the author) Page 3 of 4 page(s)

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“As subsequent media accounts indicated, the evidence contained ‘crude errors,’ such as a ‘childlike signature’ and the use of stationery from a military government in Niger that has been out of power for over a decade,” Waxman wrote.

Waxman demanded “a full accounting of what you knew about the reliability of the evidence linking Iraq to uranium in Africa, when you knew this, and why you and senior officials in the Administration presented the evidence to the UN Security Council, the Congress, and the American people without disclosing the doubts of the CIA.”

Bush didn’t respond to Waxman. Two days later – on March 19, 2003 – Bush ordered U.S. military forces to invade Iraq.

Now, more than five years later, it appears internal White House e-mails that could shed light on what Bush and his circle knew about the unreliability of their evidence on Iraq’s WMD may have been lost in an electronic black hole.

The black hole also may have swallowed internal e-mail traffic relating to the then-escalating conflict with former Ambassador Wilson as he edged toward going public with his inside knowledge about the unreliability of the Niger suspicions.

The Early Plame-gate Affair

On May 6, 2003, a New York Times column http://www.cnncom/2003/US/05/06/nyt.kristof/ by Nicholas Kristoff used Wilson as an anonymous source to report that the administration may have knowingly used the phony Niger documents to win support for the war.

“I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger,” Kristoff wrote.

“In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted – except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.”

Two months later, on July 6, 2003, Wilson attached his name to his Niger accusations in a New York Times op-ed. By then, the White House was working aggressively behind the scenes to cast doubt on Wilson’s credibility, including the suggestion that his CIA wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, had arranged Wilson’s trip to Niger as a junket.

When Novak blew Plame’s cover 10 days later, CIA officials were outraged, leading to their demand for the leak investigation which began in September 2003. That, in turn, prompted misleading White House statements about the non-involvement of key figures, such as Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

However, the leak investigation took a surprise turn in December 2003 when Attorney General Ashcroft recused himself over a conflict of interest and Deputy Attorney General James Comey named U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor.

Fitzgerald approached the investigation more aggressively and eventually secured the indictment and conviction of Libby on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. In the aftermath, Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence, sparing him from 30 months in jail.

Since then, the Plame-gate affair has faded from public attention, but it now appears that historians, too, will be denied anything approaching a full record of the scandal.

Payton, the White House chief information officer, said any further attempt by U.S. Magistrate John M. Facciola to force the administration to retain all e-mails on the White House network would "yield marginal benefits at best, while imposing substantial burdens and disruptions."

But David Gewirtz, an expert on e-mail, and the author of the book Where Have All the Emails Gone? believes the loss of e-mails covering the March to May 2003 period is suspicious.

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Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org, and the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time (more...)

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