Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Leopold and the "Get Wilson" campaign

* jason leopold:
"In mid-June 2003, when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's criticism against the White House's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence started to make national headlines, Vice President Dick Cheney told his former chief of staff and close confidant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak classified intelligence data on Iraq's nuclear ambitions to a legendary Washington journalist in order to undercut the charges made against the Bush administration by the former ambassador.

On June 27, 2003, Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, became the first journalist to whom Libby leaked a portion of the classified National Intelligence Estimate that purportedly showed how Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

[snip]

In the letter, Fitzgerald said Libby testified before a grand jury that he was authorized by his "superiors" to leak portions of the NIE to journalists.

Woodward was first on deck. He met with Libby on June 27, 2003, in Libby's office next to the White House. A week or so earlier, Woodward met with two other government officials, one of whom told him in a "casual" and off-handed manner that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA."
He still seems to think that Plame was outed to GetWilson - he wrote something recently where i thought maybe he'd begun to consider that Plame was outed for other reasons.

see here for some other posts i've written about leopold's work

(btw - i finally worked out why nobody ever refers to Leopold's work.)

(updated for clarity)

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