From Holden:
I think we can all agree that Condoleezza Rice is a lemon. So what’s the upside to having her as Secretary of State?
Turn the clock back to March 5, 2004:
A federal grand jury probing the leak of a CIA officer’s identity has subpoenaed the records of phone calls from Air Force One, the president’s plane, made the week before the name of the officer was published in a July newspaper column, Newsday reported Friday.
A federal grand jury probing the leak of a CIA officer’s identity has subpoenaed the records of phone calls from Air Force One, the president’s plane, made the week before the name of the officer was published in a July newspaper column, Newsday reported Friday.
(The orignally article is no longer available for free from Newsday but here is the CBS version.)
Here’s the deal: On July 11, 2003, Condi blamed the CIA for the inclusion of those sixteen words about Saddam’s pursuit of yellow cake in Niger in the State of the Union address earlier that year. She did this during a gaggle aboard Air Force One while flying over Africa:
Q Dr. Rice, there are a lot of reports, apparently overnight, that CIA people had informed the NSC well before the State of the Union that they had trouble the reference in the speech. Can you tell us specifically what your office had heard, what you had passed along to the President on that?
DR. RICE: The CIA cleared the speech. We have a clearance process that sends speeches out to relevant agencies — in our case, the NSC, it’s usually State, Defense, the CIA, sometimes the Treasury. The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety.
That same night George Tenet released a statement accepting responsibility (after a fashion) for the “mistake” in the president’s speech.
The following day Ari Fleischer’s gaggle was consumed by questions about Tenet and the lies in the State of the Union.
The Plame grand jury subpoenaed the transcript to the Ari’s July 12 gaggle as well as phone conversations placed on Air Force One during the week leading up to Novak’s column of July 14, which revealed Ms. Plame’s identity.
So here’s my dream scenario. Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are indicted for the actual outing. They are Novak’s two “senior administration officials”. But they did not act in a vacuum. The revelation of Valerie Plame’s status as a covert CIA agent was discussed within a small group of administration officials. Condi Rice was all over this story in July, between blaming Tenet and belittling all the attention given to those sixteen words it was hard to switch on the teevee set during the first half of July 2003 without seeing her gap-toothed scowl.
And she was on Ari Force One during the period that telephone calls were being placed to reporters, the records of which were subpoenaed.
So, in addition to Rove and Scooter getting popped for the outing itself, could Condi and a couple of other officials to be named later be indicted for conspiracy to commit a felony?
That’s my dream scenario. It would be really juicy to see Bush’s sitting Secretary of State indicted.
When life gives you lemons…