Our Gal Val, Back In The News

Valerie Plame is back in the news and drawing a downbeat Fact Check from Glenn Kessler of the WaPo.

Old times! In fact, I feel like a recovering alcoholic holding a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. But let me see if I can stop at two:

First, as CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo eventually claimed in his 2014 book, and as Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell and Dana Priest had reported years earlier, Plame's "outing" was just not that big a deal in terms of national security or personal danger. A Rizzo excerpt:

Secondly, what drove this investigation? Why did Special Counsel Fitzgerald look so hard at the White House yet ignore the obvious, easily detected, unconfessed leaking from Armitage (and probably Powell, and others) from State?

I say it was a mini-Deep State Coup. Democrats allied with moderate Republicans such as Comey in a DoJ revolt intended to pare back or eliminate Dick Cheney. Fitzgerald's team took it in when Richard Armitage of State admitted he leaked to Novak. It took the sleuths at the AP to obtain Armitage's appointment calendar for June 2003 and see a meeting with Woodward. Pretty heavy investigative work!

As a recap, Cheney's man at Doj, John Yoo, left the Office of Legal Counsel in June 2003 and was replaced by Jack Goldsmith. Goldsmith withdrew the OLC opinion backing enhanced interrogation and put the warrantless surveillance program under a microscope. By December the DoJ was in something like a revolt over Cheny's handling of that, which culminated in the famous Comey/Ashcroft/Card hospital room showdown in March 2004.

And during all this, the DoJ decides (Oct 2003) to take the Plame referral seriously and actually investigate the leak Rizzo laughed off. By December, Comey was appointing Fitzgerald as a Special Counsel. The target was Cheney, not Bush, not Rove and most assuredly not "the truth" about who leaked what.

BONUS (But I can quit anytime): Why did Armitage leak at all? Surely it wasn't to punish Wilson? No, it wasn't, and stop calling me Shirley. In the summer of 2003 a dispute raged about who had said what and when about Saddam's WMDs and nuclear aspirations. The gist of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate had been made public. The CIA (with other intel groups) came down on the side of "Definitely maybe" as to whether Iraq was a nuclear threat. The State Department's INR had dissented, but that was lost in a footnote. Prophets without honor!

So when the dispute raged in June 2003 Armitage discussed with his old pals Novak and Woodward that tidbit about the CIA research effort - the CIA had cobbled together a trip to Niger that was never to going to be conclusive, sent off some retired ambassador (sponsored by his wife!) and come back with an inconclusive report. Did Armitage describe the CIA effort with the phrase "clown show"? We can only hope. But the mention of the wife's role was not meant as punishment; it was meant as a punchline.

Comments

[henry]

new2

[hrtshpdbox]

It's new2 me.

The sky is blue (putting that out there for you, Iggy).

[MissMarple2]

Today and every day, we pledge to honor our history, to treasure our liberty, to uplift our communities, to live up to our values, to prove worthy of our heroes, and above all, to NEVER FORGET. #Honor911 pic.twitter.com/3xbEvl92py

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 11, 2019

Video at link.

[Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki]

hrt,
I think you're saying my point about AI was overly obvious but I'm not sure because you're being underly obvious. :)

[jimmyk]

I posted this at the end of the dead thread (2 threads back I guess), about negative interest rates.

But if foreigners start stashing stacks of $1,000 bills in safe-deposit boxes that would be really really bad for us. And if the negative interest rate is more than the rental fee of the safe-deposit box that's what they'll do.

Melinda would probably know better than I, but my sense is that it's institutional money that's supporting the negative interest rates. It's easy for me to hold cash, so why would I ever accept a negative interest rate. But for entities that have $millions in cash, they seem to be willing to pay a bit to "store" it in the form of government securities with slightly negative interest rates. They could buy US government securities but then they face exchange rate risk.