Obvious Question in Plame Case Had Early Answer

Almost three years ago, as Patrick J. Fitzgerald settled in as the newly appointed special counsel in charge of the Valerie Plame leak investigation, he learned a startling secret.

Washington was ablaze with speculation about who had revealed Plame’s identity as a covert CIA officer to syndicated columnist Robert Novak; senior White House officials were considered the likely culprits. But Fitzgerald, reading FBI reports just after taking charge, learned that federal investigators already knew Novak’s primary source -- a gossipy State Department official who seemed to have strained relations with the White House.

So if the mystery was already solved, why did Fitzgerald’s investigation continue for almost 36 more months? Why does I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, still face criminal charges in connection with the Plame leak? And why were other senior officials left twisting in the wind, facing possible indictment?

Did the special counsel, operating behind the veil of secrecy of all such inquiries, abuse his authority in a witch hunt?

Such questions are at the heart of a furor that erupted late last month after the revelation that several months after Novak’s column naming Plame appeared in July 2003, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage had informed his superiors -- and then the Justice Department, which was investigating the leak -- that he had been Novak’s primary source. Armitage’s reasons for talking to Novak remain unclear. He was known for his skepticism on some aspects of President Bush’s Iraq war strategy, but also for his penchant to gossip.

This week, breaking a silence he said Fitzgerald imposed, Armitage told “CBS Evening News,” “I feel terrible, every day. I think I let down the president, I let down the secretary of State, I let down my department, my family, and I also let down Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.”

The discovery of Armitage’s role -- and the fact that it had been known to investigators so early -- is stirring administration defenders to fury.

After all, they say, the inquiry left the White House under a cloud of suspicion for months and created a costly distraction for senior officials, including political strategist Karl Rove and even Cheney.

“It’s as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country -- by the media, by partisan opponents of the Bush administration, even by several Bush subordinates who betrayed the president and their White House colleagues,” conservative commentator Fred Barnes wrote this week in a Weekly Standard Magazine column that listed Fitzgerald, the news media and others as the culprits.

Is such criticism of Fitzgerald’s inquiry appropriate?

The special counsel declined to comment. And the argument has become intensely partisan.

Yet the information on Armitage -- first revealed in a new book -- along with court filings and interviews with former White House staffers and others familiar with the inquiry, suggest Fitzgerald pressed ahead because he learned quickly that Armitage was not alone in discussing Plame with reporters. Top White House officials had talked about her as well.

Fitzgerald, who had been the U.S. attorney in Chicago, was appointed special counsel Dec. 30, 2003, taking over a probe initiated by the Justice Department three months earlier at the request of the CIA.

According to the book “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War,” by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Fitzgerald had barely arrived in Washington when he received a thick binder filled with FBI reports. They summarized interviews that agents had conducted with Armitage, Rove, Libby and others.

And the reports made clear that senior White House officials had been discussing Plame’s status not just with Novak but with other Washington journalists -- including Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine.

Early on, the prosecutor learned that Rove may have been a corroborating source for the information Armitage provided to Novak. That fact alone would have compelled the special counsel to push on with the investigation, in the view of some experts.

“We now know that almost from the beginning of the case the prosecutor was confronted with two different investigative tracks,” said Dan French, who served as a U.S. attorney during the Clinton administration. One track was Armitage, the other Rove and his top-level colleagues at the White House, he said.

“Objectively, this represents two separate lines of inquiry and a prosecutor in this situation would feel compelled to pursue both,” said French, who represented a witness in the case.

Former White House staffers have told The Times that in 2003, Rove and Libby seemed intent on undermining the credibility of Plame’s husband, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had been assigned by the CIA to look into reports that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein tried to buy enriched uranium from the African nation Niger.

Bush cited the claim -- attributed to British intelligence -- in his 2003 State of the Union address as evidence that Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons, even though Wilson’s earlier report to the CIA indicated he had found little evidence to support the likelihood that any sale to Iraq had occurred.

Wilson, who became an advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), later accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In leaking the role of Wilson’s wife at the CIA, administration officials suggested to journalists that she had promoted his mission as a boondoggle -- not a serious inquiry.

As Fitzgerald examined the evidence, he seems to have concluded that some White House officials might not have been forthcoming to investigators about their conversations with reporters. That raised the possibility of a cover-up.

Intentionally leaking classified information or the name of an undercover intelligence agent is a federal crime, though the legal definition of “intent” remains murky. Making false or misleading statements to FBI or other federal investigators, or to a grand jury, can also be a crime.

In early February 2004, barely a month into his tenure, Fitzgerald sought and received a letter from his Justice Department boss stating that -- in addition to probing the leaks -- he was authorized to pursue possible obstruction of justice and related crimes.

Still, an impression remained in the public’s mind that the key question was who provided information on Plame to Novak, the first journalist to write about her. While the public focused on Novak, investigators were asking about Matt Cooper’s sources for a story he and others at Time had published on Time’s website soon after Novak’s column.

Cooper has since acknowledged that his primary source was Rove, with Libby also talking to him. Libby, the only person charged in the case, has pleaded not guilty to perjury and obstruction of justice.

According to Cooper, neither Rove nor Libby mentioned Plame by name. Nor did they mention her covert status, though Rove indicated she worked on WMD at “the Agency” and was responsible for her husband’s trip. Spokesmen for both Libby and Rove pointed out that neither official initiated the conversations with Cooper.

Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, said his client did not initiate conversations with reporters about Plame, was unaware of her covert status, and did not encourage reporters to write about her.

Nonetheless, with the evidence he had, and with indications that these officials might have been less than candid with investigators, Fitzgerald decided to press on with his investigation even though he knew the answer to what the public considered the main question -- who leaked to Bob Novak?

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tom.hamburger@latimes.com

richard.cooper@latimes.com