RUSH: So I’m minding my own business last night as I usually do, bothering no one, and all of a sudden — what time was this? I think it was before the World Series games. By the way, do you know that the Houston Astros don’t have any black players? (interruption) They ought to be losing. They don’t have any black players on the team. Well, I’m not saying this. Joe Morgan is saying this and some others. It’s becoming a big issue here. Well, it is. I saw a TV show about this two weeks ago. We’ll get to that sometime today, but it had to be before the game started. All of a sudden, the Internet starts blowing up. The Internet starts blowing up. The first story was that ABC had called the White House, and they said that they had two sources confirming that indictments were coming, one to five indictments on the high end and, you know, Rove, Libby, could have been even higher — and the White House said, “We don’t know anything about it,” and then it turns ABC did not run with that story on their news last night. The White House said, “This is a bluff.” They called here bluffing us. They don’t know anything, and then there were more rumors last night, and the rumors were identical. One to five indictments in the CIA leak case, one to five indictments, and it could go really high in the White House — and then nothing. There was absolutely nothing to it. It was just more of the media out of control, and then today, the special prosecutor’s office.
I think the media got up today with the same theme going, said, “This could be the day, why, the day we’re all waiting for. This could be Christmas morning. Last night could have been our Christmas Eve,” and then the special prosecutor’s office. Oh, and Fitzgerald’s walking into the courthouse and he’s got an entourage of FBI and counterinsurgent guys around him protecting him, whoever they are, and the media they got a throng of cameras fog him in there. “This could be it! He’s going in to tell the grand jury who he wants to send up. This could be it! We can’t even keep our pants up we’re so excited,” and then the spokesman announced no indictments today, and you could just see the tears. You could see the tears forming. Some of the media looked like they’re sucking on lemons, the way Katrina vanden Heuvel looked last night on Hardball. Did you see that? She looked like she was sucking lemons the whole time she was on the program. Had no way to connect the dots about Saddam Hussein but, boy, she can connect the dots to Dick Cheney. At any rate, folks, after all of this hullabaloo last night — and, by the way, ABC later denied that they had ever said to the White House they “double-sourced anything about indictments,” so we have that disparity. Why would the White House make this up? At any rate, so Fitzgerald announces no indictments today, and it just made me wonder: So what was all this last night?
Well, what all this was last night was just more of the same, what we’ve had for the previous two weeks or three weeks. All these rumors, “Twenty-two indictments are coming next week! We know indictments are coming!” Every day the story has been, “Indictments could come tomorrow! We’re certainly hoping so! We want to see Cheney in Club G’itmo orange! We want to see Scooter Libby being perp-walked out of the White House,” all this stuff, and they keep changing the theme. They keep changing what the indictments are going to be about, and nobody knows. Yet look at the reporting that we have got. Anyway, while all this was happening last night, and I’m paying attention to what the leaks say and what the media is reporting, I decided it’s time to do some research here. So I started in with a long bit of research on just how this all got started and who it was that really first notified anybody that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA — and it turns out that Joe Wilson did, one month before Novak’s column. Novak’s column was in July of 2004, and Joe Wilson was speaking at some left-wing think tank on how Iraq was such a boondoggle and what’s next for the leftist movement, and they got a little biographical blurb next to Wilson’s picture, and it mentions that he is the wife of Valerie Plame — and then I went back and I found a Washington Times story from this past summer in which — oh wait, I forgot this. One of the elements that was being leaked last night was that the FBI was roaming through the Wilsons’ neighborhood yesterday knocking on doors — “Hello, anybody home?” — asking if they knew that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.
So I’m sitting there; I’m scratching my head. Wait a minute. That’s what this was all about two years ago and they’re just now getting around to it now? I mean, you would think they would have had this wrapped up within the first three months. You go door-to-door. You ask anybody in the neighborhood, “Hey, do you know that your neighbor over here worked for the CIA?” But they were just doing it yesterday, according to the news they were just doing it yesterday — and the FBI agent’s name was mentioned as well. It’s awfully suspicious. It’s awfully odd for that to happen — and they quote some neighbor. “I didn’t know.” Well, what would you say if the FBI comes knocking on your door and asks, “Did you know?” with all this going on in Washington? This is where this darling couple, the Wilsons, reside. What would you say if some FBI agent knocks on the door and says, “Did you know that a woman who lives down the street or across the street, whatever, next door to you, was a former secret operative of the CIA?”
“I didn’t know,” or would you say, “Hell yes, I knew, and everybody here knew.”
“How did you know? Well, we want to subpoena you. We’re going to bring you down to the grand jury.”
What are you going to say? But this Washington Times story from this past summer mentions that everybody in their neighborhood knew. So I’m going to present all this to you in a chronological order here after the break. We’re not going to spend nearly as much time on it today as we did yesterday because we’ve pretty much made our point here, but I do want to deal with the latest. This is more than a media conniption, folks. This is childish. This is amateurish. This is the way four- and five-year-olds behave on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and if they don’t get what they want, the parents are going to have hell to pay here. Santa Claus, whoever, will have hell to pay. But get this: CNN reported this CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
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RUSH: Nine in ten say they believe the Bush administration did something illegal — is that what that means? — or unethical in connection with the leaking of the CIA operative’s identity. Thirty-nine percent said some administration officials acted illegally in the matter in which the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, was revealed. The same percentage said that the administration officials acted unethically but did nothing illegal, 39%. So with all this media coverage, with all this slam-dunk assuredness that there will be indictments, and it’s Rove and Libby and it may go as high as Cheney, and it may go to Bush, and we may be able to go back and indict Nixon all over again for this because of his former ties to the CIA. I mean, who knows how far they want to go with it? You would think that far more than 39% were convinced or would be convinced of the guilt of people in the White House. This has to be just a depressing poll, given that it’s CNN/USA Today/Gallup. <a target=new href=”http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051021.html”>John Dean</a> wrote a column for Find Law. John Dean basically said, “It is difficult to envision Patrick Fitzgerald prosecuting anyone, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, who believed they were acting for reasons of national security. While hindsight may find their judgment was wrong, and there is no question their tactics were very heavy-handed and dangerous, I am not certain that they were acting from other than what they believed to be reasons of national security. They were selling a war they felt needed to be undertaken. In short, I cannot imagine any of them being indicted, unless they were acting for reasons other than national security. Because national security is such a gray area of the law, come next week, I can see this entire investigation coming to a remarkable anti-climax, as Fitzgerald closes down his Washington Office and returns to Chicago. In short, I think the frenzy is about to end — and it will not go any further.” That’s John Dean. Now, he’d have to be right for the first time in his life for this to have any weight, but we can hope. But, really, if what’s happening here, if the special prosecutor is in fact pursuing Dick Cheney and Libby because they targeted Joe Wilson, it essentially is just a policy dispute that they’re trying to criminalize. Wilson thinks one thing about Iraq and Cheney and Scooter Libby think another, and because Cheney and Scooter Libby think one thing and Wilson doesn’t, and they start trying to discredit Wilson, they’re going to turn that into a crime? That’s what Dean’s essentially saying. He cannot imagine any prosecutor doing that.
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RUSH: Here’s this Washington Times story. It’s from July 15th of this year, and I remember reporting this to you at the time it came out. “The partisan fight over Karl Rove exploded onto the Senate floor yesterday, with Democrats trying to strip him of his security clearance and Republicans retaliating by trying to strip the chamber’s two top Democrats of theirs.” Anyway you go down to the later part of the story. “A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an ‘undercover agent,’ saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency’s headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee. ‘She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat,’ Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times. ‘Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren’t minding the store here. … The agency never changed her cover status.’ Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under ‘nonofficial cover’ — also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson — also said that she worked under extremely light cover. In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn’t been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday. The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment ‘within the last five years.'”
She wasn’t. It’s moot. The original purpose for this investigation cannot be what’s still going on. If all of this is true, there really can be no crime in terms of outing this woman and her status. Mr. Rustmann said, “‘She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids. Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee.’ Asked whether his wife had been compromised before the press leak, Mr. Wilson said, ‘I have no idea,’ though he said that her work has had to change since the leaks. ‘My wife’s status is that she is back at work, obviously in a different capacity, and she no longer has the cover that she once held,’ he said,” and if you will recall, ladies and gentlemen, we also uncovered at that time, last July, that Mrs. Wilson had been active politically, making donations to Al Gore’s presidential campaign and also to America Coming Together — and she did so under the name of Valerie Plame. It says here — and I’ve got a campaign contribution search. “Valerie Plame, 42,” lists her bio, CIA operative. She gave a thousand dollars to Al Gore in April of 1999; $372 to a special interest group, Americans Coming Together on October 11th of ’04. When contributing to Gore back in 1999, her employment is listed as Brewster, Jennings & Associates. As you recall that’s a CIA front group.
So here you have this agent who is supposedly working under deep cover and to release her identity would be to threaten her life and put it at risk, and everybody who knew her. Here she is contributing as Valerie Wilson, Brewster, Jennings & Associates, publicly making these donations to the Al Gore campaign. So all this news we had for you last summer. But the reason I bring this up is because the press is still on this. We’re back to the same thing we were yesterday. The press is ignoring its own body of work. History begins today, as far as the press is concerned. New York Times, Washington Post ignoring what they wrote about this back in 1998 in terms of the weapons of mass destruction and now ignoring what has been published and known about Valerie Plame, Valerie Wilson, since at least last summer, especially with this notion that everybody in her neighborhood knew who she was and that she and her husband were not keeping quiet about it, and I mention this only because it was a big deal last night, some leak, some leak from somewhere saying the FBI is in the neighborhood interviewing people, and you gotta figure, “What’s this about?” This is something that you would do two weeks ago, or two years. You would do this in the first two weeks of your investigation. They’re just now sending an FBI agent in there? What could be going on? So FBI agents “as recently as Monday night interviewed at least two people in her neighborhood to determine whether they knew she worked for the CIA before she was unmasked with the help of senior Bush administration officials.”
This is from press accounts last night. “Two neighbors told the FBI they were shocked to learn that she was a CIA operative. The FBI interview…” Listen to this. “The FBI interview suggested the prosecutor wanted to show that Plame’s status was covert and that there was damage from the revelation that she worked for the CIA.” Now, that’s a press report, and that is total guesswork. That is nothing more than an assumption. There’s no official word from the prosecutor’s office that that’s what they’re doing. That whole sentence is nothing more than an assumption. “The FBI interview suggested that the prosecutor wanted to show that Plame’s status was covert.” Everybody in the world knows that it wasn’t. By virtue of the statute, it wasn’t. Now, how does this prove anything anyway? The statute doesn’t say anything about neighbors knowing. This is just media hopefulness. They could also be trying to determine if Plame failed to keep her supposed status secret herself. That’s what they could be trying to do. Who knows where they’re going here. But to make these assumptions based on what is desired as an outcome is precisely what’s going on. That’s why I continue to say that we are dealing specifically with a near scandalous media, ladies and gentlemen, and we’ve got this contribution to Gore in 2000, noted in the public report, mentions her under her maiden named, identified her CIA front company. We have a public website in which Wilson himself mentioned her by the name Plame in June of 2004 which is one month before the Novak piece. The idea that she or he were concerned about revealing her seems ridiculous, and keep in mind this forum that Wilson attended was substantial, had all kinds of representatives from foreign governments.
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RUSH: Here is the information that Wilson himself put out on his wife. The 2003 Iraq Forum, June 14th, 2003, Washington, DC, and it lists — there’s three pages of speakers here, and they’re from all over the world, and on the last page, you get to Joe Wilson, under the section, “Evening public lecture, a state-of-the-movement address,” and it lists the keynote speaker, Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst, and ambassador Joseph Wilson. Now, listen to the bio that accompanies Wilson’s picture on the website promoting the 2003 Iraqi forum. Again, this is one full month before Novak’s column came out identifying her. “Joseph C. Wilson IV blah,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. “Ambassador Wilson graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in ’72. He’s been decorated as a commander in the Order of the Equatorial Star by the government of Gabon and as an admiral in the El Paso Navy by the El Paso County commissioners. He is married to former Valerie Plame and has four children.” So he outs his wife’s name:
Valerie.
Plame.
Now, I’m telling you that the concern over all this is, “Well, if she’s running around using the name Valerie Plame, and is known as an agent at the CIA, anybody who knows her from her CIA work will then know that she’s Joe Wilson’s wife.” So he puts her name out there. He also allows Vanity Fair to photograph them on the cover of the magazine. So the point here is that Patrick Fitzgerald will not have an easy time if he goes for revelation of her identity. She will have to take the stand as will Wilson, and all their public appearances and various social contacts will become relevant. So if they’re sill pursuing this notion that the real crime here — and the reason he asked this, and speculated, because they’re sending FBI agents into the neighborhood and asking neighbors if they knew that she worked at the CIA. So I find this amazing. I can’t believe they’re still working on that aspect of this, and it could be for any reason whatsoever.
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