Mike Allen, who wrote several of the best articles about the Plame case, has a new article in the Post...
The point of Allen's article is that the perps in the Plame case may not have committed a crime because they may not have known that Plame was undercover. They may only have known she was CIA.
And who's the expert who pushes this angle?
Victoria Toensing...
Allen calls Toensing a "legal expert" and "the chief counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when Congress passed the law protecting the identities of undercover agents."
But that's a rather incomplete description, now isn't it?
Toensing, of course, is not only a pricey DC defense lawyer. She's also a professional Republican, one tightly connected to the DC GOP power structure, and someone you could find at pretty much any point in the late nineties as an anti-Clinton "legal expert" on every chat show under the sun.
Using Toensing as the legal expert on this question is like bringing Bruce Lindsey in as your commentator to discuss Lewinsky.
Now for the substance of what Toensing said.
Toensing says this may not have been a crime because the perps may not have known Plame was undercover.
But this isn't really a reason why this wasn't a crime. It's more properly termed the logical defense at trial or perhaps in a plea negotiation. It may well be impossible to prove the perps' knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt. But it's very hard to believe, for a number of reasons, they didn't know exactly what she did.
Here's just one of the many reasons why.
Allen writes ...
The July column by Robert D. Novak that touched off the investigation did not specify that Valerie Plame was working undercover, but said she was "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." That raises the possibility that the senior administration officials he quoted did not know Plame's status.
This rather misses the point.
In the intelligence community, the word 'operative' is a term of art. And it means someone who is undercover. It doesn't refer to an analyst. And as I showed in this post from October 9th a review of all of Novak's columns in the Nexis database shows that he always use the term in this way...
And one other point.
Back on October 9th and 10th I told you that Scott McClellan's denials that Rove, Libby and Abrams were the perps wasn't nearly as air-tight as they seemed, that it was basically a non-denial denial. But no one seemed to catch on.
Now they're coming clean. Again, from Mike Allen's piece in the Post ...
When White House press secretary Scott McClellan was being barraged with questions about the case this fall, he said repeatedly that he knew of no Bush aides who had "leaked classified information." McClellan would not answer questions about the ethics or propriety of encouraging reporters to write about Plame."The subject of this investigation is whether someone leaked classified information," McClellan said. Another time, he said, "The issue here is whether or not someone leaked classified information." McClellan left open the possibility that White House aides had discussed Plame with the media. "You all talk about what's in the news, I talk about what's in the news, people always talk about what's in the news," he said.
A senior administration official said Bush's aides did not intend to mount a legalistic defense, but two GOP legal sources who have discussed the case with the White House said the careful, consistent wording of McClellan's statements was no accident.
"If they could have made a broader denial, they would have," said a lawyer who is close to the White House. "But they seem to be confident they didn't step over the legal line."
So let's stop the charade. They're guilty as sin. It's now crystal clear that from the very beginning the folks at the White House have known who did it. And pretty clearly the president didn't see anything wrong with it, or didn't care, because he didn't try to do anything about it.
A classic Washington power couple, diGenova, 53, and Toensing, 56, occupy a strange, symbiotic nexus between the media and the law that boosts their stock in both worlds. They are clearly players, which gives them access to juicy information, which gets them on television, which generates legal business.
"Dozens of Washington lawyers are trying to get on these shows," diGenova says. "I think it's very healthy. We can destroy myths and shoot down misunderstandings." Toensing sees televised debate as a good way of sharpening the old legal skills. "It's something that gets the body juices going," she says.
The two law partners not only talk about the Monica Lewinsky investigation -- they've been quoted or on the tube more than 300 times in the month since the story broke -- but have been drawn into the vortex. Toensing was approached by an intermediary for a Secret Service agent who had supposedly seen something untoward involving President Clinton and the former intern. DiGenova was at the heart of a quickly retracted Dallas Morning News account of that matter. What's more, diGenova took to the airwaves Sunday to charge -- based on nothing more than one reporter's inquiry -- that private investigators "with links to the White House" were digging up "dirt" on him and his wife.
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Sources, investigators, commentators: Lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing have become hot properties in the media since the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. (By Michael Williamson – The Washington Post) |
The Power Couple at Scandal's Vortex By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 27, 1998; Page D1
... DiGenova has become a white-hot media presence, politically connected lawyer and all-around agent provocateur. He and Toensing, also a battle-tested former prosecutor, keep popping up wherever there is trouble -- as commentators, as investigators, as unnamed sources for reporters.
A classic Washington power couple, diGenova, 53, and Toensing, 56, occupy a strange, symbiotic nexus between the media and the law that boosts their stock in both worlds. They are clearly players, which gives them access to juicy information, which gets them on television, which generates legal business.
"Dozens of Washington lawyers are trying to get on these shows," diGenova says. "I think it's very healthy. We can destroy myths and shoot down misunderstandings." Toensing sees televised debate as a good way of sharpening the old legal skills. "It's something that gets the body juices going," she says.
The two law partners not only talk about the Monica Lewinsky investigation -- they've been quoted or on the tube more than 300 times in the month since the story broke -- but have been drawn into the vortex. Toensing was approached by an intermediary for a Secret Service agent who had supposedly seen something untoward involving President Clinton and the former intern. DiGenova was at the heart of a quickly retracted Dallas Morning News account of that matter. What's more, diGenova took to the airwaves Sunday to charge -- based on nothing more than one reporter's inquiry -- that private investigators "with links to the White House" were digging up "dirt" on him and his wife.
A Wide Net
Name a high-profile investigation in this city and chances are the prosecutorial pair is involved.
Charges that Republican Rep. Dan Burton improperly demanded campaign contributions from a lobbyist for Pakistan? DiGenova and Toensing are the Indiana congressman's personal attorneys.
Newt Gingrich's ethics problems? Toensing represents the speaker's wife, Marianne, to ensure her compliance with House ethics rules.
Their television advocacy is hardly a state secret. As former prosecutors, both diGenova and Toensing have largely defended the aggressive tactics of independent counsel Kenneth Starr and repeatedly challenged the president's veracity.
"They've become a public spectacle, which means they can't be impartial" in the Teamsters probe, says Missouri Rep. William Clay, the committee's ranking Democrat. "It's a payoff from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to both Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. . . . They have been on television over 200 times and not once have they been talking about an issue we're paying them $25,000 a month to handle for the Congress. It's a hell of a part-time job."
DiGenova and Toensing laugh off the attacks, saying it's hardly shocking that Republican committees hire Republican lawyers.
...
The couple seem to have been at the periphery of the Monica Lewinsky case from the start. A go-between initially approached Toensing about representing Linda Tripp, the former Pentagon staffer who secretly taped Lewinsky. Toensing declined because the couple already had one high-profile case in the Teamsters probe. But the Tripp feeler, too, became a point of contention.
When Toensing appeared on Charles Grodin's CNBC talk show, Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic lawyer and former Watergate prosecutor, asked when she first learned about Tripp and her tapes. Toensing said she was not at liberty to divulge that. After the program, she told Ben-Veniste of the feeler from Tripp.
The next day, Toensing got several calls from reporters about her on-air remarks after they had been tipped to the possible controversy. She saw a Democratic plot. "I decided to go on offense, I was so mad," she says.
On NBC's "Today" the next morning, Toensing assailed what she called "the anatomy of a lie. . . . That's how it works here, folks. It ain't pretty. . . . They put out just enough of a kernel of truth and then spin it, because what they want to do is make it look like all Republicans got together to go after the president."
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atrios.blogspot.com/2005_10_30_atrios_archive.html
The highlight of Kalb's book is his careful dissection of one of the scandal's great non-stories: the allegation that a White House staffer--perhaps a Secret Service agent--had happened upon Clinton and Lewinsky in flagrante in the Oval Office. First reported by Jackie Judd on ABC News, several permutations of the story ricocheted around the media universe for days, eventually forcing embarrassing retractions from two of the nation's most prestigious papers, The Wall Street Journal and The Dallas Morning News. The false rumor captures the pitfalls journalists encounter when they ignore the by-the-book approach Kalb so sternly advocates.
The heroes in this episode are John Broder and Steve Labaton of The New York Times, who spiked their own story about the tryst's eyewitness at the last moment when they suddenly realized something their competitors did not: Their "sources" (four of them, in fact) were not really sources at all. The pressure on the pair was intense, not least because their story looked big enough to offset the Post's having scooped the Times in breaking the Lewinsky story. Yet careful last-minute spadework indicated that rather than four knowledgeable sources, what they actually had were, in Kalb's words, "four different people who seemed either to be echoing the Judd report [from ABC News] without any independent confirmation of their own or conveying and then embellishing a rumor they had heard about an agent `stumbling' upon the president with a young woman."
Like an echo chamber, the combustible scandal atmosphere had ricocheted a single rumor in so many directions that it seemed to many as though it were being confirmed from numerous sources. Only uncommon restraint and exacting self-scrutiny kept Broder and Labaton from falling into the trap that snared their peers. Later they learned that each of their four "sources" might actually have picked up the rumor from the same individual, former U.S. Attorney (and ubiquitous talking head) Joe DiGenova.
