Et Tu, Ari?
Et Tu, Ari?
Another White House official possibly facing perjury charges?
Last Monday, Bloomberg News reported that former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer had seen the classified memo thought to be the original source of Valerie Plame’s identity. “On the flight to Africa, Fleischer was seen perusing the State Department memo on Wilson and his wife, according to a former administration official who was also on the trip.”
But today’s New York Times reports (all the way down in paragraph 20) that “Mr. Fleischer told the grand jury that he never saw the document, a person familiar with the testimony said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the prosecutor’s admonitions about not disclosing what is said to the grand jury.” As the Times reminds us, Ari’s “telephone log showed a call on the day after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared from Mr. Novak, the columnist who, on July 14, 2003, was the first to report Ms. Wilson’s identity.”
Coming soon: Fleischer’s lawyer explains how one can peruse a document without actually seeing it.
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Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
By the way, here’s a pretty thorough collection of documents and materials related to the Rove scandal.
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:38 amGlad you also saw that because I was thinking I must have misread something somewhere!! Good headline!!
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:43 amMight Have Been Wrong on Filibuster
Think about it. If Dems make the filibuster showdown and lose, Bush can nominate Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanon to the Supreme Court and thumb his nose at the powerless Dems squawking in the corner. The sheep Senate Republicans go along, the American …
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:02 pmMaybe Ari is secretly blind, and the documents he was perusing were written in braille. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:41 pmAnd this for the latest from the right….. Read down into the comments section.
http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/7/22/12943/0159
It was C Powell that leaked Plame’s name not Karl. Next thing you know they will be blaming the leak on the terrorist. It seams to work every other time they get backed into a corner.
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:42 pmBeing relatively new to the art of “Blogging” I have had a foreboding sense of Deja VU. It finally occurred to me yesterday while suffering through the mindless blather of FAKE BUT ACCURATE, MIKE, NORTHEAST ENEMA, and the rest of the Right-Wingnut choir that I remembered my last encounters with these gentlemen. These guys are the same semi-literate Redneck fools that polluted CB Radio in the 80’s. Obviously retrained, probably through DUHbya’s No Child Left (or is that Right) Behind Program to use a keyboard.
Ten-Four, Good Buddies!
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:44 pmI’ve always found the “(she’ll) be declassified soon” remark by Rove to Cooper. It is almost as if they were going to punish not by giving her up, but by ending her career. But the timing was off.
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:53 pmMaybe they ALL are blind. That sure would explain alot, wouldn’t it??
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July 22nd, 2005 at 1:55 pmThere are none so blind, as those who will not see.
July 22nd, 2005 at 1:55 pmAri is more likely a co-conpirator than blind… calling him blind is an insult to the disabled.
But I’ll tell who’s just plain braindead – mainstream media – case in point, here’s Newsweek managing editor Jon Meacham on Imus:
MEACHAM: And then here comes Joe Wilson, who sort of wanders onto the stage. It turns out he had, as he put it, undertaken a mission at the behest of Cheney and the CIA to go to Niger and discover whether, in fact, these 16 words were true: Had Saddam attempted to get any uranium?
DON IMUS (host): OK, well, let me jump in here. So Joe Wilson says that Vice President Cheney and the CIA asked him to go to Niger and check this out?
MEACHAM: That was the implication. One of the key –
IMUS: What do you mean, the implication? What did he say?
MEACHAM: Yes. Yes. In the New York Times piece, and I think in the subsequent media things, he was saying, look, they wanted me to go see what was happening here.
IMUS: Who was “they”? Who do you mean by “they”?
MEACHAM: The Office of the Vice President. Which would be Cheney, might have been [I. Lewis] “Scooter” Libby –
IMUS: Cheney’s chief of staff.
MEACHAM: Basically that pro-war group around Cheney, who were very tough and very smart and very important. And one of the things, and one of the reasons, you see in the emails that [Newsweek investigative correspondent] Mike Isikoff got a couple of weeks ago from Matt Cooper to his bureau chief, is that after his conversation — after Cooper’s conversation with Rove — it explicitly says Rove says Wilson did not go — Cheney had nothing to do with authorizing the mission. His wife, who apparently works at the CIA on WMD issues, had something to do with it –
AAAARRRGH !!
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:19 pmI think it’s Bolton who wrote the State Dept. memo.
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:21 pmCome on people! Ari was NOT reading the memo. He was simply using it to cover his “Hustlers’s Lesbians of the Midwest Edition”, so as not to create an “akward” feeling should Dick look his way.
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:27 pmYou have it all wrong!
It is all about who you HEARD it from not where you READ it from.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road says the Deep Throat of the 21st century!
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:50 pmThat RNC Talking Point about Wilson “saying” or “implying” that Cheney sent him has certainly sunk into some dense MSM heads. Al Franken has a couple of times pinpointed its fallacy. It apparently depends on an misleadingly edited transcript of a Wolf Blitzer interview with Wilson. (Or should I say “heavily redacted” interview.) Wilson, of course, has always maintained that the CIA sent him after Cheney’s Office pressed them for more intelligence on this issue.
Of course, as my husband always says, “What difference does it make WHO sent him?” What matters IS what he found, and what he told his CIA debriefers. Of course, what Rove, Libby, Hughes et al. were concerned about was not what Wilson found out in the spring of 2002, but what Cheney can be shown to have known when he made his famous “reconstituted programs” (Just Add Water!) statements, over and over, in the fall of 2002. They of course were most concerned about the 2004 elections and keeping the public in the dark about the situation leading up to the Iraq war: “that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
Good for Imus for saying, “what did he say” but a few minus points for not following up in detail and pointing out (like Franken does) the disassembling of the RNC Talking Points.
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:51 pm“What difference does it make WHO sent him?�
That’s what I say. Or more to the point, if the administration didn’t send him or someone else – WHY DIDN’T THEY?
Did they not want to know if the story was true or did they ALREADY know?
We know the answer to that, don’t we?
July 22nd, 2005 at 3:15 pmIt would seem plausible deniability would allow Ari to deny reading one particular document. They’re all 8-1/2 x 11 pieces of paper after all. Unless there is some sort of chain of possession sign-off log how can anyone swear beyond all doubt the doc they saw someone reading was precisely the object of contention? Wouldn’t it boil down to a “he said-she said” scenario?
July 22nd, 2005 at 3:22 pmI hate to say it of all of you are really wrong in who truly is to blame in the Republican’s eye’s, they just are not saying it yet openly where it could be examined. It’s our former President Clinton.
July 22nd, 2005 at 3:24 pmDidn’t Ari Fleischer quit rather abruptly right after the Plame/Rove scheme began to be exposed. Maybe he was involved at some level and wanted to distance himself from the nest of vipers so that at least when the indictments came down, he wouldn’t still be working with them and lying up on the podium.
July 22nd, 2005 at 3:30 pmIf you go to the whitehouse’s press briefing archives, I believe Puffy McMoonface starts around July 14 or 15, 2003.
TGIF at the 5:30 Report
It’s time to wrap it up for another week! Quotes, links and comments from The 5:30 Report with Doug Krile on KWBF, WB42, in Little Rock, AR.
July 22nd, 2005 at 3:32 pm[...] As Think Progress points out, Ari Fleischer may be facing additional scrutiny (via Eschaton). [...]
July 22nd, 2005 at 3:57 pmI love how “peruse” actually means “read carefully” but most people think it means “glance over.”
July 22nd, 2005 at 5:49 pmOh, Magoo…you’ve done it again…
July 22nd, 2005 at 6:27 pmJustice is blind.
July 22nd, 2005 at 6:34 pmMaybe Ari quit because he got tired of Dubya’s rubbing his (Ari’s) bald head.
July 22nd, 2005 at 8:00 pmno wonder he resigned when he did, right after NoFact’s column came out.
July 22nd, 2005 at 8:54 pmRemember, it was Ari who held up a sign telling our disaster-in-chief, “Don’t say anything yet,” as dumya was reading a pet goat story to a classroom full of children…and, as people were jumping from the WTC.
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:21 pmWho told Ari to write that message? It wasn’t his boss, unless Rove (who was there, too) is, in fact, the real boss.
We’re discussing a cadre of traitors here, if there ever was one. You can believe it is Rove who is telling the “president” how to handle this Plame affair, and it does not include any discussions about Rove resigning or being fired.
This is a fat chance for the Democrats to take out these un-Americans, but I’m afraid the dems won’t know what to do, unless of course, they ask Howard Dean. He seems to be the only one who has the balls to take it to the traitors’ court.
BB
Criminal in the White House?
What a bold comment by Bush… If anyone commits a crime, they can’t work in the White House.
Gee, if they commit a crime, aren’t they supposed to go to the “Big House”? It’d be hard to be Deputy Chief of Staff to the President from a Federal Penitentiary…
Unless George is saying that Rove would be pardoned…
After all, his exact quote is that they “would be taken care of”…that’s got a peculiar double meaning. I haven’t heard anyone else parse that phrase.
In fact, that might be an argument for the White House to have Rove convicted sooner than later, so he can be pardoned in time to run Jeb’s 2008 Presidential campaign. If he’s convicted too late, a Democrat could be President and goodbye Get Out Of Jail Free card…
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:02 amI just luv u guys….i can say that, I’m old enough..lots of info, so little time. Ya’ll gotta find out soon tho how to set fires under Dems butts. What’s wrong with them? Just can’t figure it out. I hope it’s all the Repugs – you know Rove, Cheney, Bush, Condi. What would JFK, Martin Luther King, all the seemingly caring ones say about all this crap? We can talk til the cows come home, but there’s gotta be something lucrative lurking around the corners that has answers to the nightmare… “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find”… in PEACE, Senior Dem
July 23rd, 2005 at 6:34 pmSeems like a whole lot of Important People including Senators are frightened out of their wits over something surrounding this Wilson Plame situation.
July 24th, 2005 at 8:39 pmDoes not matter though. The exact specifics about how this country is; and has been run by a select group of people to powerful that even Presidents and Top elected officials will die for them cna never be allowed exposure to the light of day. Mark my word, people are going to begin dying from this episode.
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April 3rd, 2006 at 5:22 am