Media’s Complicity in Leak Cover-Up

As Tom Oliphant notes in today’s Boston Globe, the CIA leak coverup “worked” by stalling any outcome until well past the November 2004 presidential election.

And that coverup was actively abetted by insider journalists, among them Bob Woodward, Cokie Roberts, Chris Matthews, and William Safire. So it’s something of a pleasant surprise to read this today from the editorial board of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

There is a cancer on the presidency, and it cannot be exorcised by the resignation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

There, in that sentence, is the echo of the words of John Dean to his then-president, Richard Nixon. But while Dean continues to fight “cancers” as he sees them, a once-dogged, truth-seeking reporter who helped uncover that “cancer” has sold his soul in exchange for access inside the White House. Last Friday night, Bob Woodward minimized the outing of a CIA NOC/analyst on CNN’s Larry King:

BOB WOODWARD: [T]his 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 …

— from Larry Johnson’s “Bob Woodward, Lost in Cronyism?”

Oliphant, linked at Salon‘s Daou Report, wrote today:

NO ONE really noticed, but Patrick Fitzgerald made an unassailable point last week about the timing of the indictment that his CIA leak investigation has produced so far.

”I would have wanted nothing better,” he said, ”that when the subpoenas were issued in August of 2004, witnesses testified then, and we would have been here in October of 2004 instead of October of 2005.”

… the quixotic pursuit of a nonexistent right or privilege by some news organizations is one reason President Bush was reelected last year.

Beyond Scooter Libby’s lies, it was insider journalists — more concerned with their networks of sources than with the illegal disclosure of classified information — who stalled Fitzgerald’s investigation until after the November 2004 election. And it’s insider journalists (unlike Tom Oliphant and the Seattle PI‘s editors) who are continuing to minimize Fitzgerald’s work and failing to see their own complicity in the stall and the coverup:

COKIE ROBERTS on ABC’s This Week last Sunday:

The one good piece of news in terms of our trade (journalism) is that Fitzgerald did not indict under the espionage act, he did not say that leaking classified information was found because that would dry up sources so completely that we would never have a conversation again. (Crooks & Liars has the video.)

Cokie Roberts, who uttered that amoral concern for protecting her sources, is the daughter of the long-deceased former Democratic majority leader Hale Boggs who, during the early 1970s. outspokenly railed against J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon’s handling of the Watergate scandal.

Then there’s now-retired NYT columnist William Safire who, last July, said that “he was afraid to rigorously condemn a ‘chilling’ assault on journalism by the courts [Fitzgerald], fearing reprisals against a colleague jailed for contempt of court.” On Meet The Press October 30, Safire accused Fitzgerald of stepping outside the law and beyond his role as a prosecutor:

We’re talking about something that’s happened here that I think is a body blow to the freedom of the press in America, and that is the tendency of a prosecutor who is now a media darling but who will be seen in future years as someone who went too far in exposing the press to the need to carry out the laws.

Perhaps most astonishingly, a few minutes later, Tim Russert smeared Judge Hogan as a “Clinton appointee”:

TIM RUSSERT: … the interesting thing is one of the judges who was appointed by President Clinton, who’s for a federal shield law, said it wouldn’t apply in this case because it was an investigation into national security.

Below the fold are more of Safire’s and Russert’s assertions of clubby protectionism for elite journalists against a (let’s face it) non-elite prosecutor and a Clinton judge.

Shifting back to today, briefly: As you’ve also noted, the media is abetting the White House’s drive to change the focus from “‘Bush the victim’ [and “Scooter the Indicted”] to the ‘Bush rebound'” (Pre$$titutes) … Continued below:
As Pre$$titutes, linked at the Daou Report, points out today:

BUSH’S REBOUND: The Libby indictment was an inflection point, marking a nadir in Bush’s political fortunes. Going forward, the new media narrative – and the White House’s raison d’etre – has shifted from “Bush the victim” to the “Bush rebound.” A hasty SCOTUS pick to appease the distressed base, a roll-out of Avian Flu strategy, upcoming elections in Iraq, more terror speeches and who knows what else. All these are part of a concerted p.r. offensive with a single objective: to show an uptick in Bush’s approval ratings. Once that occurs, and it likely will, the media and the rightwing noise machine can create a self-reinforcing loop by using the poll numbers to cement the ‘rebound’ narrative. [Read More]

Lest we allow the press to rush headlong into the White House-propelled “Bush is recovering” meme, let’s pass around Oliphant’s column today in which the elegant writer makes clear that Patrick Fitzgerald went to great lengths to be “sensitive to” journalists’ privacy but also pursued his investigation of a real crime against national security:

By the summer of last year, the indictment makes clear, Fitzgerald already had Libby on the hook. He had testified twice before the grand jury, claiming that his knowledge of Valerie Plame Wilson’s classified CIA position and status as former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife had come from reporters. Fitzgerald had already taken a statement from NBC’s Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, flatly contradicting Libby’s entire story. Russert had made his statement under ground rules that kept Fitzgerald from asking for anything beyond Russert’s end of a phone conversation with Libby, thus protecting what Libby said to him.

That largely unnoticed fact shows Fitzgerald being sensitive to a journalist’s desire to shield a source from disclosure while pressing for the information (what Russert said to Libby) that was most material. Deals between the prosecutor and reporters for The Washington Post show similar sensitivity.

Time magazine and its correspondent Matt Cooper, and The New York Times and its correspondent Judy Miller contested their subpoenas, which postponed the final stages of the investigation until this summer. Fitzgerald prevailed in each case — no surprise, since the governing constitutional law is clear. Even in victory, Fitzgerald was careful to limit his questioning of reporters and examination of their notes; this was no fishing expedition but a diligent search for evidence from what amounted to witnesses to an alleged crime. …

This segment from last Sunday’s MEET THE PRESS transcript is worth a fast scan. The collusion among insider members of the press is clear in this exchange: