So I’m listening to a replay on the Fox News Channel of Fox News Sunday. Brit Hume, in the roundtable with the host Chris Wallace essentially accuses Valerie Plame of lying under oath when she told this cockamamie story about how she was minding her own business at her little covert desk there at Langley headquarters, and a troubled junior officer working beneath her gets a phone call from the vice president’s office and erupts in a panic and says to Valerie Plame, ‘Vice president called, and they want to know something about the yellow cake in Niger, what’s the vice president doing calling here? Who does he think he is?’ Just at that moment somebody happened to be walking by, and heard the story, said, ‘Valerie, we need to send somebody over there. Your husband has been…’
‘I didn’t send him. I didn’t have the authority to send him,’ You didn’t have the authority to recommend him, Ms. Plame.
Anyway, the interesting thing about it. She may have lied, because she was under oath. She raised her right hand and Henry Waxman swore her to oath, she told and swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help whatever. Byron York has an interesting piece in National Review Online today about Plame’s testimony before the House committee on government oversight, and it’s true that she testified in February 2002 that — well, she testified that a 2002 young junior officer who worked for her at the CIA came to her very upset after a call from the vice president’s office asking about reports of an alleged Iraqi purchase of uranium in Niger. She said as she was telling me what happened somebody passed by, another officer heard this, Mrs. Wilson testified. ‘He knew that my husband had already gone on some CIA missions previously to deal with other nuclear matters, and he suggested, ‘well, why don’t we send Joe?” That’s what she testified under oath and that was the beginning of her husband’s mission to Africa.
But it turns out that Valerie Plame was also questioned about these events during the investigation into the Niger uranium matter by the Senate intelligence committee, and they were watching, members of the Senate intelligence committee were watching eagerly her appearance on Friday. Sunday night Senator Chris Bond from Missouri, vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement that Mrs. Wilson didn’t tell his committee about any junior officer or the call from the vice president’s office or the passing CIA official. ‘Friday was the first time we ever heard that story,’ Bond said. ‘Obviously if we had it we would have included it in the report. If Valerie Plame’s memory of events has improved, if she would now like to change her testimony, I’m sure the committee staff would be happy to reinterview her.’ Of course, Congress is very upset when it gets misled, aren’t they? Like the US attorney story, very, very upset. I don’t think they’re upset here over the false testimony of Ms. Plame before one of these two committees.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Robert Novak, a little blurb Saturday or Sunday, forget when it was published over the weekend. ‘Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton raised eyebrows among Democratic insiders when Washington Post columnist Al Kamen reported that she dined last week at the 701 restaurant in downtown Washington with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, his wife, Valerie Plame, and left-wing journalist Sidney Blumenthal. Leading Democrats have stayed away from Wilson since a Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2004 discredited him. Blumenthal was known as a vicious attack man when he worked as an aide to President Bill Clinton late in his administration.’ He actually worked for Hillary, I think, called him, ‘Grassy Knoll.’ He’s out there fabricating all these conspiracies on the right to get Hillary. Anyway, Novak writes that ‘Clinton’s choice of dining companions casts doubt on her attempted image modification into a centrist Democrat who wants to avoid the politics of personal destruction.’ It doesn’t surprise me, Valerie Wilson and Joe Wilson out there meeting with Mrs. Clinton before the hearings start. Then she goes up there, ‘We’ve got to just get politics out of intelligence business.’