Frederick Fleitz and Robert Joseph

Plame Whistleblowers Targeted by Administration By Jason Leopold (link)

Two top Bush administration officials who played an active role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, have been removing from their jobs, career State Deptartment weapons experts who have spoken to investigators during the past two years about the officials role in the leak, according to a half-dozen State Department officials.

The State Department officials requested anonymity for fear of further retribution. They said they believe they are being sidelined because they have been cooperating with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald [snip]

The officials who have been leading the State Department reorganization plan are Frederick Fleitz and Robert Joseph. Fleitz now works for Joseph [snip]

Both men were directly involved in the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson, and have been targeted by Fitzgerald's probe as possible sources that unmasked Plame Wilson's identity [snip]

At the time of the leak, Fleitz was a senior CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control official as well as the chief of staff to John Bolton, the former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, a position that Joseph was appointed to when Bolton was selected to be Ambassador to the United Nations by President Bush.

Beltway rumors have swirled for more than a year that Bolton, too, played a role in the leak [snip]

State Department officials and other people knowledgeable about the events leading up to the Plame Wilson leak said Fleitz is the unnamed CIA official identified in the federal indictment handed up by a grand jury in October against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby [snip]

These officials said Fleitz had told Bolton about Plame Wilson, and Bolton then shared that information with Libby and other senior aides in Vice President Cheney's office.

Moreover, State Department officials said Fleitz was one of the CIA officials who attended a meeting in February 2002, at CIA headquarters where Plame Wilson had accompanied her husband [snip]

"In essence, the undersecretary (Bolton) would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support," Hersh wrote. "Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign agent reports and electronic intercepts [snip]"(Page 222)

Robert Joseph was identified last week by CIA and State Department officials as one of a handful of administration officials who was instrumental in an effort to attack the credibility of Wilson [snip]

Sources close to the probe said witnesses involved in the case told FBI investigators that Joseph was one of the recipients of a classified State Department memo in June 2003 that not only debunked the Niger allegations but also included a top-secret reference to Valerie Plame Wilson's work for the CIA [snip]

The sources added that the witnesses testified that Joseph and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had worked directly with senior officials from Vice President Cheney's office - including Libby, Cheney's National Security Adviser John Hannah, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove - during the month of June to coordinate a response to reporters who had phoned the vice president's office and the NSC about the administration's use of the Niger documents [snip]

Now some State Department officials believe that Joseph and Fleitz are working to ensure the State Department is staffed with individuals who will support the Bush administration's foreign policies.

Fleitz and Joseph have been working in secret with other Bush appointees since last year to revamp the State Department by pushing out career weapons experts, many of whom have been interviewed by FBI investigators during the past two years probing the leak [snip]

the million dollar question is whether they are stacking State ( Nonproliferation Bureau & the new office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism et al), so that they can implement Bolton's scary designs on Nth Korea (and probably China) et al, or so that nobody discovers their nefarious smuggling activities (cf Plame)