May 04 2006
Team Libby Know UGO
Team Libby knows who the mysterious original leaker “UGO” is in the Plame investigation. They apparenly know a lot about the person. We learn this from this interaction during the February 24, 2006 hearing in the Libby case (first post on the subject here):
First, there is the identify of a particular government official, obviously not in the White House, who told two reporters as early as mid-June of 2003 about Mrs. Wilson. I don’t feel, because a lot of these revelations are made in letters that are marked confidential and are covered in an affidavit filed under seal, I don’t feel comfortable going beyond I guess that description publicly.
THE COURT: I understand what you’re telling me.
OK, color me stupid but since everyone knows who UGO is, isn’t going to leak out sometime? But I see their UGO trap (and more on how Fitzgerald simply refuses to acknowledge counterveiling information). They do need to find out who leaked, because Libby did not testify he DIRECTLY heard the news about Plame from reporters:
MR. JEFFRESS: … Mr. Libby himself told the grand jury about another reporter who had told somebody in the White House who had told Mr. Libby. And when Mr. Libby said, we are hearing or I’ve heard that or we’ve heard that, he wasn’t necessarily limiting himself to conversation directly between himself and other reporters.
I see more cracks in Fitzgerald’s already fractured case. Fitzgerald is withholding this official’s name on the weak argument the official never contacted Libby:
THE COURT: What if there’s nothing that would indicate that this other government official that you reference had no contact whatsoever with Mr. Libby in regard to this information?
UPDATE: very strange, a little later on the defense lawyer claims they do not know UGO:
JEFFERS: ..we don’t know a single thing that he has said about that. How would we investigate? We would go talk to official one. If official one won’t talk to us, we would serve him with a trial subpoena. Right now since we don’t even know who he is, we can’t even serve him with a trial subpoena.
Counsel was making this in the form of an example in his argument. I get the feeling Team Libby has plenty of information to know who UGO is. I am still betting this portion was abstract discussion meant to argue more disclosure.
Off topic, but did you see the exchange between Donald Rumsfield and Ray McGovern today? I thought this was very strange, 2 anti-war protestors interrupt his speech, THEN in the question answer session Ray McGovern ask Rumsfield why did he lie and some other stupid stuff! Any thoughts?
from Jefress
…First, there is the identify of a particular government official, obviously not in the White House, who told two reporters as early as mid-June of 2003 about Mrs. Wilson. …
This presumably Woodward and Novak…but I was not aware that Novak spoke to UGO as far back as early as mid-June.
This interest me because of Novak’s chance meeting with Wilson’s stranger friend on the street (which occurred July 7th or 8th I think) When asked by this friend Novak immediately blabbed all the details…if Novak blabbed all these details to a perfect stranger on the street and he originally learned all this a full month before…think of all the other people Novak blabbed the details to.
So say you are another journo and you learn this from Novak, armed with all that you can easily find Plame (and her name)…
Also, Libby says he learned from reporters…well if Novak starts the rumor mill from UGO then, yeah…all the reporters knew.
(i am going to cross post at JOM)
Wouldn’t it be odd if McCarthy was the Plame leaker and not the secret prisons leaker? She (McCarthy) would have been in a position to know or run into them socially through her CIP connections.
AJ,
I have been wondering about whether Libby knows who UGO is for a while, ever since I read through this transcript a month ago. If you continue on after the part you quote first there is this interesting statement by Jeffress:
He [Libby] heard from another official at the White House[this is Rove] who reported to him that a reporter [this is Novak] told me [Rove] today that he knew that Ambassador Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. That’s one source from which he [Libby] got it. Knew that it came from a reporter [Novak]. That’s one. Mr. Libby was told it came from official one [UGO]. [my additions]
Jeffress is referring to the conversation Rove had with Novak, where Rove is the confirming second source for the info that UGO gave Novak for the article on July 14. Rove went back to the WH and told Libby about this conversation. What I’ve been wondering is did Novak tell Rove who his primary source was? Did he say it was some UGO or would he have actually told Rove the name [Armitage].
I wonder because of what Novak said recently. He said the President knows who UGO is and that the President should reveal the name!
Rove could have told not only Libby , but possibly the President too.
You do know that in her previous position, McCarthy was appointed by Berger to replace Beers..LOL
If it is Armitage, he just received a knighthood..Sir Leakandhide.
I think the Libby team knows (or has a very strong hunch) who UGO is, but they don’t “officialy know” since Fitz as he hasn’t actually disclosed the name.
It’s just that I am looking at Dana Priest’s husband running CIP which has a spinoff group (IPIP) that Joe Wilson is associated with (their featured speaker, in fact). So Mary McCarthy, being associated with CIP after she left the White House and before she returned to CIA would have all the connections needed. Priest would probably have already known of Willson’s wife’s identity once Joe became associated with IPIP. So while it is quite possible that McCarthy was confirming details of IG investigations for some of Priest’s articles, McCarthy is also accused of a pattern of unauthorized contacts with journalists and could also be ONE source, maybe not the ONLY source, of the fact that Plame was Wilson’s wife becoming an “open secret” in those circles in Washington DC.
I am an engineer. Sometimes there is no one single cause for something. Sometimes there can be multiple causes of the same thing. Sometimes you can run yourself around and around looking for “the one primary failure” when in fact there are multiple. The best thing to do in that case is when you find one problem, run it to ground and then start to work on the next one. There’s no guarantee both of them are going to end at the same source.
My gut instinct is that so many people knew this for so long and so many people told other people and it is so far in the past and much of it done over cocktail party conversation they are probably never going to be able to sort out an exact timeline of who told who. The fact that you have reporters that apparently already knew before they talked to government officials seems to be a reinforcing indicator to me.
So what we have is an implied leak, i.e., “I heard that, too. ” The implied leak exposed an implied covert operative, but there is an implied source in the government known to certain media insdiers whose knowledge predates Robert Novak’s article about Joe Wilson’s spy wife.
This source implied that former Ambassador Wilson’s explicit denial of Iraq’s attempts to procure fissile material from Niger was the result of effort’s by his wife, the implied covert agent, to send him to Niger for the purposes of investigating Iraq’s involvement in uranium procurement.
Wilson explicitly denied Iraqi involvement, but implicit in his report was the fact that an Iraqi delegation had secretly visited Niger before the U.S. led invasion, apparenlty seeking trade ties, implying an attempt to procure uranium.
Meanwhile, the press has implied that Wilson’s wife, the covert operative, was the CIA’s expert on nuclear proliferation in Iran- explicitly implicating the Bush administration in assisting the Iranian efforts to become a nuclear power, since outing Ms. Wilson implies a crippling of our nation’s ability to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.
Impicit in all this is the notion that, in addition to faking WMD data to go to war over non-existent nukes, the Bush administration is giving assistance to Iran’s nuclear program- for reasons that are not entirely clear. Perhaps Bush is a mole for the Iranians, perhaps he is an incompetent partisan interfering in the CIA’s business.
If it was that doggone simple, AJ, why didn’t you just say so???