Steve Clemons of The Washington Note uses his government sources tonite to weave together the details revealed in the latest NYT article (via Truthout) about what Cheney knew and when he knew it.
Clemons warns that it is speculation, but it ties together angles and players in a way that we’ve all suspected.
This is where things get interesting. Although Fitzgerald may not need to establish this connection, it seems increasingly plausible to TWN that Tenet and Cheney had some kind of exchange regarding Joe and Valerie Wilson. Cheney then passed off the information to Libby along with a few expletives about Wilson, implying that the @#$%@%er should be done in.
The question is how did Libby then churn up more info on Wilson without other parts of the “untrusted” bureaucracy spitting in his face or reporting his sins?
My hunch is that he went to trusted spear-carriers for Vice President Cheney — the office and staff of Under Secretary of State John Bolton. Fred Fleitz, Bolton’s chief of staff, maintained his CIA WINPAC portfolio and access as an active duty CIA staff member while he operated as Bolton’s “acting” chief of staff. We know that Fleitz was a key part of the intelligence cherry-picking/stove-piping operation when it came to both the intel and policy response to various global WMD concerns — in North Korea, Libya, Iran, and Iraq.
We also know that David Wurmser and John Hannah, who have both apparently cooperated after threats of legal action (i.e., time behind bars) with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald worked both for John Bolton’s operation and the Vice President’s office.
I recently consulted with a number of senior State Department officials about the level of interaction between Vice President Cheney’s office and John Bolton’s office — and was informed that there was “intense” exchange between them, constant. One said that “Bolton and his team were operatives of Vice President Cheney inside the State Department establishment — there to subvert Armitage and Powell wherever they could, and if not subvert, then there to spy on the them and report back.
TWN knows nothing more than what it speculates to be a plausible scenario. Tonight, I consulted with three senior State Department officials, one currently at the State Department and two who are now outside the Department. All three of them agreed that the scenario I have described about Fleitz being the source of information about Plame’s covert WINPAC role — and this information then passing from Fleitz and/or Bolton to Scooter Libby “is not unbelievable.”
Read Clemons’ entire account at his site…
Just a reminder: you can find prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s official investigation web site here. When the indictments come down, that’s where they’ll be posted. I hope they have good servers there at the DOJ.
