Intrepid reporter Murray Waas has new disclosures in the Valerie Plame investigation. Not only did Cheney authorize Libby to leak the information in the NIE report, he also authorized him to leak information in the still classified March, 2002 CIA debriefing of Joseph Wilson conducted after his trip to Niger.

Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report.

The March 2002 intelligence report was a debriefing of Wilson by the CIA's Directorate of Operations after Wilson returned from a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims, later proved to be unfounded, that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation, according to government records.

Murray also picks up on this nugget in Fitzgerald's April 5 filing (pdf):

Jason Leopold has a new Valerie Plame article today with allegations that directly conflict with what an Administration official told the New York Times yesterday. Jason writes:

In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media.

Other White House officials who also attended the meeting with Cheney and President Bush included former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

An Administration official has been dispatched by Bush (or was it Karl Rove?) to distance Bush from Libby's leak to select reporters of portions of the NIE report about whether Saddam was in the process of acquiring uranium to build WMD's. The New York Times reports:

A senior administration official confirmed for the first time on Sunday that President Bush had ordered the declassification of parts of a prewar intelligence report on Iraq in an effort to rebut critics who said the administration had exaggerated the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein. But the official said that Mr. Bush did not designate Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., or anyone else, to release the information to reporters

.....The official responded briefly via e-mail on Sunday to questions from The New York Times.....the [official's] disclosure seemed intended to suggest that Mr. Bush might have played only a peripheral role in the release of the classified material and was uninformed about the specifics -- like the effort to dispatch Mr. Libby to discuss the estimate with reporters.

For the Plameaholics out there, the mainstream media is staying on the story and connecting the dots in Fitzgerald's latest filing(pdf). In addition to the three I talk about below, Christy at Firedoglake has several more while Jane provides snappy analysis and Digby says it smells of Karl Rove.

New York Times: shorter version: Cheney told Libby to leak details of the NIE report to Judith Miller, knowing that it had been debunked.

...the new revelations suggest that long after [Colin Powell] had concluded the intelligence was faulty, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were still promoting it.

The Washington Post interviewed William Jeffress, one of Lewis Libby's lawyers on the latest Fitz filing (pdf) that opposed Libby's request for additional documents and disclosed Libby's statements to the grand jury about Bush and Cheney's role in the declassification of the NIE document.

Jeffress argued that the information in Fitzgerald's filing is irrelevant to Libby's defense: that he forgot about those conversations as he dealt with crucial national security issues.

Jeffress said Fitzgerald's revelation about Libby's disclosure of information from a CIA National Intelligence Estimate "is a complete sidelight" to his accusation that Libby deliberately lied. "It's got nothing to do with Wilson's wife," Jeffress said in a brief interview, adding that Libby continues to expect to be exonerated at trial.

Fitz' filing certainly shifted national attention from Libby's alleged perjury and obstruction of justice to Bush and Cheney's role in declassifying documents about the NIE report and whether they authorized their disclosure to reporters. But let's take a step back and look at why Fitz filed this document in the first place.

Knights Ridder reporters say that Bush/Cheney's authorization to Scooter Libby to declassify and divulge classified information about Iraq "fits a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration's political agenda."

Scott McClellan today tried to justify the Adminstration's actions:

Without specifically acknowledging Bush's actions in the Libby case, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters: "There were irresponsible and unfounded accusations being made against the administration suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence. We felt it was very much in the public interest that what information could be declassified be declassified."

McClellan didn't address why administration officials often declassified information that supported their allegations about Iraq but not intelligence that undercut their claims.

Here's a question I'm not seeing answered. If Libby was authorized to disclose newly declassified information to Judith Miller, and if it was all on the up and up, why did Libby, Cheney and Bush let her do 85 days in jail for refusing to say she got the information from Libby?

And, as Digby says, if they wanted to declassify and disclose information favorable to their case for war in Iraq, why didn't they call a press conference? Why did they give it to selected reporters? That's not disclosure to the public, that's a selective leak for partisan purposes.

Do the missing e-mails from the Office of the Vice President implicate Bush and Cheney in Plamegate? Jason Leopold writes:

The officials, some of whom are attorneys close to the case, added that more than two dozen emails that the vice president's office said it recently discovered and handed over to leak investigators in February show that President Bush was kept up to date about the circumstances surrounding the effort to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

The sources indicated that the leak probe is now winding down, and that soon, new information will emerge from the special counsel's office that will prove President Bush had prior knowledge of the White House campaign to discredit Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of "twisting" intelligence on the Iraqi threat in order to win public support for the war.

If you are wondering what President Bush told Fitzgerald during his 2004 interview, Jason reports,

On the heels of Murray Waas' great article last week revealing that Stephen Hadley had uncovered a classified document, the contents of were shared with Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and perhaps others in the inner circle, and of which Bush was aware, that cast doubt on the allegation that Saddam had aluminum tubes which were intended to be used to build weapons of mass destruction, American Prospect's Greg Sargent takes the story a few steps further. When it's all played out, it turns out to be a very big deal -- one which points to a gigantic coverup geared to preventing the truth from coming out, because had it come out, it may well have cost Bush the election.

It's only hard to figure out at first. Sargent breaks it down like child's play. He begins by recapping Murray's article and asking, why would Scooter Libby and Rove and perhaps Stephen Hadley lie to the grand jury? The answer: to prevent it from being known that Bush was aware in October, 2002 that experts doubted the aluminum tube story and yet he kept the claim in his State of the Union address.

TalkLeft hit a record today: I just posted the 400th post on the Valerie Plame investigation, which is the most I've written on any single topic.

The first was on July 29, 2003, Valerie Plame: Some Call it Treason. The 400th was today, Leopold: Fitz Close to Indicting Rove; Hannah Flipped Early

All of them are available here.

As you can imagine, this consumed huge amounts of time. I intend to go forward, and sincerely appreciate all financial contributions to TalkLeft as they help make it possible. If you're a regular follower of TalkLeft's Plame coverage, and would like to express your appreciation, this would be an excellent time.

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Jason Leopold breaks more news in the Valerie Plame investigation, confirming John Hannah cooperated early with Fitz and rolled on Libby and Rove. He also writes that Fitz is close to presenting an Indictment to the grand jury for Karl Rove.

As I've written many times, all roads lead back to the White House Iraq Group. Hannah was a member, as was Stephen Hadley and Libby. Rove attended most meetings. Props to Richard Sale of UPI who on February 5, 2004, identified Hannah as being in serious trouble and pressured to cooperate (Details here).

Jason writes Hannah was given a choice early on:

There's a new filing in the Lewis "Scooter" Libby case. Tom Maguire has posted it here (pdf). It's a reply to Fitz's response to Libby's Motion to Dismiss the case on the grounds that (shorter version) Fitz' appointment as special counsel violated the federal appointment statute and the Constitution because he was not being supervised by the Attorney General. Pete Yost of the AP has more on the filing here.

The most interesting statement in the filing is the one that states Fitzgerald only recently disclosed that two months after his appointment, around February, 2004, he learned the identity of Robert Novak's source for his July, 2003 column outing Valerie Plame. However, the citation provided by Libby's lawyers is page 17 of Libby's Memorandum brief (pdf) in support of his original Motion to Dismiss.

I have searched through Fitzgerald's pleadings and affidavits and cannot find anything disclosing that Fitz knew Novak's source that early. I'm hoping some other Plame-a-holics will have better luck. One other reference may be contained in Exhibit E, a heavily redacted affidavit of Patrick Fitzgerald (although not explicitly.)

If it's true, which I assume it is, because Libby has quality, ethical lawyers, is it something that was disclosed to them in discovery that hasn't been made public? Why are they disclosing it? What does it mean in terms of the overall investigation?

Investigative journalist Jason Leopold writes that sources at the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council, as well as lawyers close to the Valerie Plame investigation have told him that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is getting ready to indict Karl Rove or Stephen Hadley, or both, perhaps in about a month.

Neither Hadley nor Rove disclosed the existence of the email when they were questioned by FBI investigators or when they testified before a grand jury, the sources said, adding that Rove testified he found out about Plame Wilson from reporters and Hadley testified that he recalled learning about Plame Wilson when her name was published in a newspaper column.

Leopold writes that Fitz wasn't persuaded by Rove lawyer Luskin's most recent entreaties to avoid indictment, particularly Rove's explanation about his e-mail with Hadley.