White House Blasts Accuser in CIA Leak

The White House on Tuesday adopted a more combative approach to the scandal surrounding the leak of a CIA agent’s identity, challenging the credibility of the administration’s main accuser.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV -- who has said his wife was revealed as a covert intelligence officer to discredit him -- had changed his story by making and then withdrawing allegations against a top White House aide.

Wilson’s wife was named as a CIA agent by syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who attributed the information to sources inside the administration. Revealing an agent’s name can be a violation of federal law.

The Justice Department is investigating who inside the administration may have “outed” Wilson’s wife; throughout the day Tuesday, White House staff delivered documents and questionnaires related to the inquiry to the General Counsel’s office. After review by White House lawyers, the documents will be turned over to the Justice Department. That process could take up to two weeks. No documents had been delivered by the end of business Tuesday, a Justice Department official said.

“I am very troubled by the fact that the White House counsel seems to be a gatekeeper and I want to know what precautions Justice is taking to ensure that it gets all relevant information from the administration,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has sharply criticized the administration over the leak.

Earlier, President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., sent a note to the 2,000-member White House staff, underscoring that every employee was expected to comply in a “thorough, diligent and timely” manner.

“I want to know the truth,” Bush said at the end of a Cabinet meeting. “I want to see to it that the truth prevail. And I hope we can get this investigation done in a thorough way, as quickly as possible.”

Bush made clear, however, that he is not conducting his own internal inquiry. And he blamed journalists in part for the difficulty of investigating leaks. “I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is -- partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers,” the president said.

Wilson went public in July with allegations that the administration continued to repeat charges that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in the African country of Niger, even though Wilson had found no substance to the claim during a fact-finding trip last year. Bush included the claim about the attempted uranium purchase in his State of the Union address this year.

The disclosure of Valerie Plame’s identity to Novak came a few days after Wilson spoke out against the administration. It was, according to the former ambassador, an attempt to discredit him by suggesting his wife had used her influence in the CIA to get him the assignment.

McClellan said Tuesday the decision to send Wilson to Niger was made by counter-arms proliferation experts in the CIA -- the department where Plame is believed to work.

In an interview, Wilson said his wife was not among the 10 or 12 people who took part in the CIA meeting when the decision was made to send him to Niger.

“There was nobody at that meeting that I could identify on the street,” Wilson said. “Even at my advanced age, I can identify my wife.”

McClellan’s accusations about Wilson’s credibility focused on a statement Wilson made in August when he accused Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, of being the source of the leak to Novak.

“It’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs,” McClellan quoted Wilson as saying at a public event in August. He followed it up with a passage from the Wall Street Journal in which Wilson was quoted as saying he got “carried away” in blaming Rove for the leak.

“If I left the impression that Karl Rove was the leaker or the approver of the leak, I didn’t intend to,” Wilson said at the time.

Asked about those quotes, Wilson said the White House was mixing two issues: whether someone in the White House was the initial source of the leak to Novak, and whether Rove and other White House officials later contacted journalists to try to convince them to repeat it.

“Irrespective of whether Karl Rove was the person who outed my wife to Robert Novak, I have every reason to believe he pushed the story in the days afterward,” Wilson said. Given the apparently political motives for the initial leak, Rove’s office “is certainly an appropriate place to begin an investigation,” he said.

McClellan has sought to limit discussion of the leak to the initial disclosure of Plame’s identity, and avoid discussion of whether White House officials may have shopped it around to journalists afterward. He termed the second question “moving the goalposts.”

For the first time, however, McClellan acknowledged that revealing Plame’s identity to punish Wilson would have been inappropriate behavior.

“If someone sought to punish someone for speaking out against the administration, that is wrong, and we would not condone that activity.” McClellan said. “But it would be absurd to suggest that the White House would be engaged in that kind of activity. That is not the way this White House operates.”

Wilson said the White House seems to be trying to make the scandal focus on him and not on what he termed “two incontrovertible facts” -- that the president made an inaccurate claim in his State of the Union address, and that someone improperly revealed his wife’s identity.

“Those are the issues the White House has to come to grips with” Wilson said. “All the rest is dust in the eyes.”

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Times staff writer Rick Schmitt contributed to this report.