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The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
Investigation widens in leak of CIA name
David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson NYT
Saturday, April 3, 2004
White House officials' actions probed
WASHINGTON -- Prosecutors investigating whether someone in the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of a CIA officer have expanded their inquiry to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the case, lawyers involved in the case and government officials said.
In looking at violations beyond the original focus of the inquiry, which centered on a rarely used statute that makes it a felony to disclose the identity of an undercover intelligence officer intentionally, prosecutors have widened the range of conduct under scrutiny and, for the first time, raised the possibility of bringing charges peripheral to the leak itself.
The expansion of the inquiry's scope comes at a time when prosecutors, after a hiatus of about a month, appear to be preparing to seek additional testimony before a federal grand jury, according to lawyers with clients in the case. It is not clear whether the renewed grand jury activity represents a concluding session or a prelude to an indictment.
The broadened scope of the inquiry is a potentially significant development that represents exactly what allies of the Bush White House feared when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from the case last December and turned it over to Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago.
Republican lawyers worried that the leak case, in the hands of an aggressive prosecutor, might grow into an unwieldy, time-consuming and politically charged inquiry, like the sprawling independent counsel inquiries of the 1990s which distracted and damaged the Clinton administration.
Fitzgerald is said by lawyers involved in the case and government officials to be examining possible discrepancies between documents he has gathered in the case and statements made by current or former White House officials during a three-month preliminary investigation conducted last fall by the FBI and the Justice Department. Some officials spoke to FBI agents with their lawyers present; others met informally with agents in their offices and even at bars near the White House.
The White House last year took the unusual step of specifically denying any involvement in the leak on the part of several top administration officials, including Karl Rove, senior adviser to President George W. Bush, and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, has said repeatedly that no one wants to get to the bottom of the case more than Bush.
But Bush has said he does not know if investigators will ever be able to determine who disclosed the name of the CIA officer, Valerie Plame, to Robert Novak, who wrote in his syndicated column last July that Plame, the wife of the former Ambassador Joseph Wilson 4th, was a CIA employee. Wilson was a critic of the administration's Iraq policies. Democrats have accused the White House of leaking his wife's name in retaliation because Wilson, in a July 6, 2003, Op-Ed commentary in The New York Times, disputed Bush's statement in his State of the Union address that January that Iraq was trying to develop a nuclear bomb and had sought to purchase uranium in Africa.
The suspicion that someone may have lied to investigators is based on contradictions between statements made by various witnesses in FBI interviews, the lawyers and officials said. The conflicts are said to be buttressed by documents, including memos, e-mail messages and phone records turned over by the White House.
At the same time, Fitzgerald is said to be investigating whether the disclosure
