1 Boring Old Man

from t r u t h o u t

The current State Department official said the INR memo was discussed at length during the meeting Grossman attended at the White House. That meeting may have been the first time other White House officials, including Karl Rove, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and other unknown administration officials learned that Valerie Plame was Wilson’s wife and that she worked at the CIA in a covert capacity.

All of the sources interviewed separately for this story said they were told that Karl Rove was the person who first suggested using the media to "turn the tables on Wilson." The officials wouldn’t identify the person who told them this. The decision, however, was made during a meeting that took place between the White House Iraq Group.

"There was a discussion about what to do about Mr. Wilson," the current State Department official said. "There was a decision to leak a story to the press – I think a few journalists – about the Wilson trip, that it was a non-issue because his wife set it up for him. They were going to show that Wilson and his wife were Democrats. Can you imagine? They were going to say ‘don’t listen to them, they’re partisan.’ It was a coordinated effort to turn him into the story. Much to my surprise, it worked."

One of the officials interviewed for this story was also cited in a September 28, 2003, Washington Post story about the motivation to leak Wilson’s wife’s identity to the media. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the State Department official told the Post. The Post did not name the official.;

This is a magnificent piece. From my perspective, it’s the first real timeline from inside the White House about what happened to get the Niger Forgeries into the President’s State of the Union speech, about how the Plame/Wilson attack was planned, and about how it was carried out. Rove is the centerpiece of the story as we know from his M.O. being all over it. Kudus to Jason Leopold. And Kudus to Patrick Fitzgerald.

But waiting is killing us…

Here’s the Talking Points Memo timeline from a couple of months ago of the Niger Forgery Documents to compare with t r u t h o u t‘s internal timeline. And here’s Eriposte’s theleftcoaster summary and analysis of the Niger Forgeries. And here’s my attempt to summarize the la repubblica expose of the italian side of the story.

I’m buying popcorn for the Fitzgerald Press Conference [O.K., I’m a dreamer…].