Vice (30 page)

The first three months of 2003 were a race between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations—both committed to inspections and diplomacy—and an American administration that had already decided to attack Iraq. The Bush-Cheney administration was marching inexorably toward war. On January 28, Bush delivered his "sixteen words" State of the Union speech. On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the Security Council to lay out U.S. proof of Iraq's WMD programs. On March 7, IAEA director general Mohamed ElBa-radei responded, delivering Baute's report on the Niger documents to the Security Council. The U.S. representatives at the Security Council privately agreed that there was no evidence that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. Cheney personally attacked
ElBaradei
and the IAEA. On March 16, he told NBC's Tim Russert: "I think ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong. I think if you look at the record of the International Atomic Energy Agency on this issue, especially where Iraq is concerned, they have constantly underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid at this time than they've been in the past." (Cheney had a legitimate complaint about the IAEA's missing weapons locations in the past, but Iraq had since been bombed and boycotted and IAEA inspectors were on the ground filling the gaps that they and intelligence agencies had missed ten years earlier.)

Speaking to Russert, Cheney even went nuclear on Hussein: "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

That statement was, in a word, bullshit.

Yet on March 16, President Bush gave Hussein an ultimatum to leave Iraq or face attack by U.S. forces. On March 17, Bush declared war on Iraq. On March 20, U.S. airplanes began bombing Baghdad.

By May, U.S. and British forces combing
Iraq had found no
nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction. It was becoming evident that the administration had misled Congress and the American people. Joe Wilson was about to become a part of that story.

On May 5,
The New York Times's
Nicholas Kristof
wrote a column about an unnamed ambassador's trip to Niger and
Washington Post
veteran reporter
Walter Pincus
then tracked down Wilson. On June 12, Pincus wrote the first news article questioning the administration's pretext for war, citing an unnamed retired ambassador who had gone to Niger for the CIA and found that the uranium story was without merit. When Kristof's column appeared in mid-May, Cheney's office, in concert with Bush senior adviser Karl Rove, began discussing the problem the article presented. When Pincus's hard-news story ran in the
Post,
the discussions became a coordinated campaign against Joe Wilson and the truth. The vice president played a critical role in that campaign, which seemed to grow in intensity with each news report.

And the news stories continued,
The New Republic
following the
Post
with a seven-thousand-word investigative feature. It included a quote from an unnamed ambassador who said administration officials "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie."

On July 6, Joe Wilson went public with his own account of the trip to Niger, publishing his
New York Times
op-ed. Wilson immediately got one odd warning of the
smear campaign
that was about to consume him and his wife. On July 8, a friend told him he had seen right-wing columnist
Robert Novak
on Pennsylvania Avenue. "He said Novak called me an asshole," Wilson says. "He said 'Wilson is an asshole. His wife works for the CIA.' "

When Wilson called Novak—at seventy-five, the dark doyen of conservative journalism in Washington—Novak asked whether the call was confirmation that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent. In his July 14 column, Novak, whom Cheney once referred to as "No Facts," outed Valerie Plame Wilson. Because the
Intelligence Identities Protection Act
makes it illegal to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent, the agency requested an investigation. The Department of Justice started the two-year inquiry that resulted in Scooter Libby's indictment and resignation in October 2005. (Cheney took his swipe at "No Facts" Novak in a 1977
Casper Star-Tribune
article under the headline "Cheney: Altering Foreign Elections a Possible Option.")

Coincidentally, the entire process was set in motion by Cheney. "Wilson was asked to go to Niger for one specific purpose," Goodman says. "It was the CIAs idea to get Cheney off their backs. Cheney would not get off their backs about the yellow cake documents. They couldn't get Cheney to stop pressing the issue. He insisted that was the proof of reconstitution of their program."

Someone at the agency took the vice president at his word and called Joe Wilson to investigate. Wilson had been an ambassador in Africa, spoke fluent French, and knew many of the players—including the directors of the French uranium consortium. In fact, Wilson had been the last American diplomat in Iraq when the United States invaded it the first time, in 1991; the senior George Bush had commended him for his courage and service to his country. Wilson went to Niger to check out the intelligence that few but the vice president considered anything other than a fraud. In fact, it is hard to believe that Cheney himself believed the Niger documents were anything other than a fraudulent though useful tool to make the case for war. If he initially thought they were legitimate, he also knew that
New Yorker
reporter Seymour Hersh had thoroughly debunked them soon after they surfaced. Cheney then participated in a plan to discredit Wilson. All will be played out in federal court—and in the court of public opinion—in 2007, unless Bush takes the unlikely step of pardoning Scooter Libby before the trial.

The man prosecuting Scooter Libby is
Patrick Fitzgerald
.

The U.S. attorney in Chicago was a loyal lieutenant in an administration that had declared a war on terror. Fitzgerald convicted
Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman
for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. In June 1998, he handed down a sealed indictment against Osama bin Laden after investigating him and his terrorist network for two years. That same year, he was in
Nairobi
two days after the bombing of the American embassy there, directing five hundred FBI agents sifting through evidence. Three years later, in federal court in Manhattan, Fitzgerald won convictions against the Nairobi bombers, two of whom were sentenced to death. "His brain was like a computer," Manhattan U.S. attorney
Mary Jo White
told
Vanity Fair.
"You had 224 victims, you had lots of al-Qaeda names, Arabic names that sound alike. He could recite these names and knew the links, knew the history. I thought I'd seen everything. . . . But watching him in that case was just head-jerking." Adored by magazine feature writers, who described his workaholic habits, his indifference to the world around him, and his uncanny mind (he keeps his suits, underwear, and socks in his office; once left a pan of lasagna in his oven for three months; memorized entire case files), Fitzgerald was the Bush administration's fed from Central Casting.

Then he was appointed to investigate them—at which point he became the prosecutor described in an
Irish Times
headline: "Scary Irish-American." After Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, recused himself, and Assistant Attorney General
Patrick Comey
appointed Fitzgerald to investigate the criminal betrayal of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name, the scary forty-five-year-old Irish American prosecutor became the administration's worst nightmare. An attorney representing reporters whom Fitzgerald was pressuring for information about Libby said that after just one meeting with the prosecutor, he knew it would be bad for the press. Fitzgerald did put
Judith Miller
in jail for three months when she refused to reveal her sources. The lawyer said he walked away from his meeting with Fitzgerald realizing that Libby and the vice president were in far greater trouble: "1 don't think these guys had any idea what they are in for."

Fitzgerald's appointment was another unintended consequence of the excessive and endogamous partisanship of the Bush-Cheney administration. Attorney General John Ashcroft was the only incumbent U.S. senator in U.S. history to lose his seat to a dead man, coming in second after Democratic challenger
Mel Carnahan
was killed in a plane crash. Ashcroft's one term in the Senate had been fairly unremarkable. But he had been a client of Karl Rove. He was the darling of the extreme Christian right. And he was out of work. For the Bush team, he was a natural choice for AG. And Cheney had eliminated Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, who as AG could have directed the investigation with no "Rove conflict."

Because Rove had directed Ashcroft's Senate campaign and was also a possible target of the leak investigation, Ashcroft, as they say at the courthouse, was "conflicted out." He was too close to one of the subjects he would be investigating. Once Ashcroft designated his assistant AG to appoint a special investigator, the White House was saddled with Fitzgerald, a prosecutor so dedicated to the law that he's become a cult hero among his peers.

Fitzgerald deposed and jailed journalists, questioned the president, engaged in a broad and protracted discovery process, and began to follow a testimonial and documentary trail into the Vice President's Office. He became the Javert of the DOJ, following Libby from reporter to reporter and building a case based on what he extracted in what one witness described as "precise and persistent interrogation." In most instances, Fitzgerald knew the answer to the question he would ask each subject he called before the grand jury.

Fitzgerald's indictment provides a narrative that tells a story and defines a motive. He starts at Bush's sixteen words on January 28 and proceeds to Nicholas Kristof's May 5 column. By May 29, Fitzgerald has Libby on the phone with the State Department inquiring about the trip. On June 9, he has Libby receiving faxed classified documents from the CIA, with "Wilson" noted in Libby's handwriting on one page. On June 11, he finds Undersecretary of State
Marc Grossman
telling Libby that Wilson's wife works for the CIA. On June 11, the CIA advises Libby that Wilson's wife works at the agency. On June 12, the vice president appears on the crime scene, telling Libby that Wilson's wife works for the CIA in the Counterproliferation Division, information Cheney has gotten out of the CIA. On June 14, Libby is meeting with his CIA briefer, discussing Joe Wilson and his wife,
Valerie Wilson
.

Fitzgerald's detailed indictment also tracks Libby to a long meeting with
New York Times
reporter Judith Miller at the St. Regis Hotel—a Washington institution a few blocks from the White House. The St. Regis meeting occurred two days after Wilson's op-ed ran. When asked by the FBI and later under oath, Libby says he first learned about Valerie Wilson's CIA status from "reporters." He says he told each reporter he spoke to that he heard about Valerie Wilson "from reporters." Fitzgerald's investigation, however, established that Libby was working official government sources from his office in the White House. Based on Libby's response, Fitzgerald makes a prosecutorial decision that will make 2007 a difficult year for Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney. Rather than prosecute him under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Fitzgerald puts Libby in a very small box. He charges him with perjury and obstruction of justice.

Behind the narrative is a clear motive. Cheney, according to one CIA source, was furious when he learned that the CIA had revealed the Niger documents as a forgery, because they were "the very core" of his argument for war in Iraq. Further fueling the vice president's anger was the man the agency sent out to investigate the story: Joe Wilson, a flamboyant Francophile and a Democrat. And the timing, just as American troops in Iraq were finding there were no weapons of mass destruction of any kind, made a bad moment for the vice president even worse. For the White House, the story of the 2004 campaign
could not be
about missing weapons of mass destruction. Scooter Libby went after Valerie Plame Wilson.

Trying to get to the bottom of what essentially was an act of treason committed in the White House, Fitzgerald relentlessly worked the paper trail that led to the Vice President's Office. Two years and six months into the investigation, the persistent U.S. attorney from Chicago walked into the clerk's office in the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse and filed a piece of evidence that literally bore the fingerprints of the vice president—an original clipping of Joe Wilson's
New York Times
op-ed piece of July 6, 2003. Written in the margin are pointed questions about Wilson's mission to Iraq and his wife's role at the CIA. The handwriting—on the wall as well as on the op-ed page of the
Times
—is Dick Cheney's. "Have they done this sort of thing before?" Cheney wrote. "Send an Amb. to answer a question. Do we ordinarily send people out to do pro bono work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?" The annotation places Cheney at the center of the campaign to discredit Wilson, aware early on that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent.

Judge Reginald Walton is a Republican. George W. Bush appointed him to the District Court bench in Washington, D.C. He's one of the party's African American stars, first brought to Washington to work in the White House by George Bush the elder. Unfortunately for Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney, Reggie Walton is a hardass when it comes to criminals. A trim man with a sprinkling of gray in his hair, an intense and focused face, and a dry, sometimes witty demeanor, he has yielded little ground to Libby's attorneys. In a pretrial hearing in May, Libby sat taking notes as Walton refused to order the State Department and CIA to turn over documents to the defense team. He repeatedly reminded Libby's attorneys that the case is about perjury and obstruction of justice. His standard for what is relevant in the trial was clearly defined in one reply to the defense counsel:

"I just don't see how that helps the jury decide whether Mr. Libby lied. . . ."