RUSH: Grab cut eight, because that goes with this story. Our buddies at NewsMax are back again. “Fitzgerald Ignored Witnesses Who Contradicted Wilson ? Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s Leakgate investigation is coming unraveled, as witness after witness steps forward to challenge a key premise of his controversial probe. Was the identity of Joseph Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame really a deep dark secret before she was ‘outed’ by columnist Robert Novak in July 2003? The number of witnesses now saying ‘No’ has climbed to four – and none of them have apparently been interviewed by Fitzgerald’s investigators. On Wednesday, Wayne Simmons, a 27-year veteran at the CIA, told Fox News Radio: ‘As most people now know, (Plame) was traipsed all over Washington many years ago by Joe Wilson and introduced at embassies and other parties as ‘my CIA wife.’ Last week, Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely told WABC Radio’s John Batchelor that during a 2002 conversation with Wilson while the two waited to appear on a TV show, Wilson casually mentioned that his wife worked at ‘the Agency.’ In Oct. 2003, NBC’s diplomatic correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, told CNBC that Plame’s occupation ‘was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger.’ Mitchell added: ‘So a number of us began to pick up on that.’ And in Sept. 2003, NationalReviewOnline’s Cliff May wrote that when Plame’s CIA connection was mentioned in Novak’s column – ‘That wasn’t news to me.’
“‘I had been told that (Plame was CIA) – but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.’ The day his report appeared, May told the Fox News Channel’s John Gibson: ‘I knew this, and a lot of other people knew it.’ In fact, rumors now swirl around Washington that Plame used to take her friends to lunch at the CIA’s cafeteria. So what has Mr.Fitzgerald – who was hailed as a ‘prosecutor’s prosecutor’ only weeks ago – done with the avalanche of testimony that contradicts his stated claim that Plame’s job ‘was not widely known’? Apparently nothing. In the six days since he’s gone public, Gen. Vallely says prosecutors have yet to contact him.” He was on Hannity & Colmes last night, and Colmes said to him, “Did Ambassador Joe Wilson expose his wife himself? That’s exactly what our next guest says. Joining us now in an exclusive interview that you’re not going to see anyplace else, Fox News military analyst and retired Major General Paul Vallely, who says that Wilson told him that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent in 2002. General, where did this happen?”
VALLELY: Joe Wilson and I met in Washington in the greenroom of the bureau there for Fox. Met several times in 2002, and as we talked about our families, he did not say that she was an agent, only that she was employed by the agency, and as we since learned, she is in fact and has been an analyst in Washington for a number of years. So that basically is how we met and how we discussed that.
RUSH: So Joe Wilson is telling people. Cliff May didn’t reveal his source, but he said, “I knew who she was. I knew she was CIA when I saw it in Novak’s column.” Andrea Mitchell said she knew who it was, and Wayne Simmons, the new guy on the scene here, 27-year veteran at the CIA said to Fox News, “As most people now know, Plame was traipsed all over Washington many years ago by her husband and introduced at embassies and other parties as, quote, unquote, ‘my CIA wife.'” I thought this was really strange. Remember the week of special counsel Fitzgerald’s press conference, which was a Friday, on I guess it was the Monday or Tuesday of that week, he was sending investigators, FBI, into the Wilson neighborhood asking neighbors, “Did you know that Valerie Wilson down the street there is CIA?” “Oh, no, we knew nothing about it,” and I remember thinking this is an odd time to be doing all this. After two years of the investigation, when this was the focus of it, original focus was, who outed this brave, courageous, covert agent whose life has been destroyed, and to be going around the neighborhood asking this at that point two years after the investigation began was somewhat curious. Then, you learn that Wilson wasn’t called to testify. None of these other people have been asked to testify before the grand jury. Now, clearly what’s going to happen here is that Scooter Libby’s defense team (ha-ha-ha) I’m sure they’ve got this dossier already loaded and you’ve got witnesses here that are going to be called and this is going to go right to the whole notion of whether she was covert or not, the whole notion of how she could have been outed when she already was. So it’s going to be fireworks time. It’s going to be fascinating to watch this.
END TRANSCRIPT
