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Nov. 3, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
November 3, 2005, Thursday, Hour #3
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All right, we're back.
We've got broadcast excellence, L. Rush ball, the fastest, fastest three hours in media, and we're already through two of them, starting the third, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have a never forget.
This is the program that meets and surpasses all audience expectations every day.
It's a thrill and a delight to have you along for the ride.
800-282-2882, if you want to be on the program.
And the email address uh rush at EIB net.com.
Move on to some other things.
I want to touch on just some other things.
A gang of 14 appears to be falling apart as well, does the Democrat opposition to uh Sam Alito, a couple of uh uh moderate Democrats up for re-election.
Well, a couple of Democrats from Red States, let's put it that way.
Ben Nelson uh from uh from uh Nebraska, Mark Pryor from Arkansas, and maybe Bill Nelson from Florida, he's up for re-election too, and this is a red state, Florida is all probably gonna vote for Sam Alito.
The the gang of 14 is fallen apart, Vice President Lindsey Graham and Mike DeWine have signaled that they see no reason that this guy should be filibustered.
Meanwhile, Dingy Harry and his loco band of thugs actually think they've changed the momentum on everything from investigating pre-war intelligence to the Alito nomination and so forth, and they continue to immerse themselves in this alternative false reality.
They're living a lie.
And I'm just I'm gonna I'm just gonna make a prediction to you.
I will predict to you that by the time all is said and done, Joe Wilson blows up in their face, and this CIA Libby thing blows up in their face, just as Cindy Sheehan has, just as Bill Burkett and Dan Rather have, uh, just as Richard Clark and the 9-11 commission did.
They just they don't learn and have as as they continue to make mistakes, they make them even bigger the next time.
And they make like they're rerunning the 2004 campaign again.
They lost in 2004.
They're rerunning it.
They ran on Bush lied to get us into the war in 2004.
That was Carrie's campaign theme, the whole Democrat thing.
They're rerunning it.
It's Groundhog Day.
Now you got Bill Clinton up there at Rosa Parks Funeral.
I was nine years old.
I wrote I wrote public public school bus every day of my life.
Well, I saw where Rosa Parks did, a couple friends of mine.
We decided, we'll move to the back of the bus.
I am just as good as Rosa Parks.
She doesn't have anything on me.
I mean, I I have this.
I did the same thing she did.
It's just nobody knew it because I was only nine years old.
Now, those are not his exact words, but it's what he said.
First black president at the Rosa Parks funeral.
Anyway, other news, and we're I'm I've no, I've not forgotten it.
We're gonna get a CIA investigation business.
I've got two pieces today I want to touch on.
One by Victoria Tenzing in the Wall Street Journal, the other Clarice Feldman in the American Thinker.com, one of our favorite uh web blogs.
And of course, your phone calls at 800-282-2882.
Here's this story out of Texas.
Opponents, it's a Washington Post story, but it's actually AP, but it's on the Washington Post site.
Opponents of a proposed constitutional amendment in Texas to ban same-sex marriages, have a message for you.
The proposition could mean trouble for marriage between a man and a woman, too.
With telephone calls, emails, and internet postings, gay rights activists and others opposed to Proposition 2, which would ban gay marriage, are spreading that idea around as part of their long-shot battle to derail the measure in Tuesday's election.
The tactic has supporters of the same-sex marriage ban crying foul.
It has opponents boasting that they may have a chance of uh defeating the measure in Texas of all places, the conservative home of uh George W. Bush.
Glenn Maxie, an openly gay former legislator directing the opposition group, No Nonsense in November, said we're making a horse race out of it for the first time in any state.
It it they argue that the ban could interfere with all marriages, and they're making phone calls.
If you ban same-sex marriage, you're running a risk of damaging the prospect of anybody getting married.
And of course, you start making these push phone calls, you never know who's gonna answer.
Could get Ronnie Earl on the other end of the run.
Call Ronnie Earl up.
And he'll believe it.
You know, because it's his buddies calling.
And then you never know who's gonna end Up believing this, so this is the latest tactic gay rights activists are using in um in Texas to defeat the attempt to ban same-sex marriage in Jefferson City, a state lawmaker and a St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan says that umpires should literally pay for what he sees as bad calls made during the playoff series in which the Cardinals lost to the Houston Astros.
And where are the Astros?
Houston Astro there in Houston.
What's in Houston?
Big oil.
And I'm saying it was clear to me that the umpires botched a whole bunch of calls against.
I'll never forget that strike call on Jim Edmonds.
It nearly decapitated him.
He got thrown out in the middle of a three-two count.
This is uh Representative Jeff Rudida.
Uh Democrat from Barnhart, Missouri wants to expand the state athletic and entertainer tax to also cover officials like umpires and referees.
The tax is charged to out-of-state residents who earn money in Missouri while performing in such events as baseball games and concerts.
Revenue's supposed to go to the arts public libraries, that's library for those of you not in real linda, and other cultural programs.
Jeff Ruerta said his idea grew out of his frustration with umpires in the National League Championship series, but he also contends, and it's logical to tax the officials affecting a game's outcome, not just the athletes who play it.
I think if they're not going to pay attention, they ought to at least pay taxes, he said.
Seriously, though, I think it's a good public policy.
Referees and umpires play a critical role.
Do you believe this?
So here's a Democrat.
Right now, and I you know, this a lot of states have this.
If you're an athlete, you go in and play a three-game series in New York and you live in California, you pay you pay New York taxes for those three days that you're there.
Don't start laughing at me, snurdly.
It ensnares a lot of people, folks.
Just as President Bush says, trust me.
It ensnares a lot of people.
But for some reason it hasn't gotten into the umpire.
So this guy, because he's mad at their calls.
Is this not a typical way the Democrats?
We're gonna punish the guy because you don't like the outcome of his work, and we're gonna subject him to a new tax, the umpires.
Speaking of obscene profits, have you seen this?
Time Warder today posted an 80% increase in profits, boosted its share buyback plan to 12.5 billion from five billion, and confirmed it was in talks over its AOL internet arm with a number of strategic partners.
It had already been a busy week for the media conglomerate, and separately the company today said its Time Inc.
unit, Time Magazine, had received a writ from a federal grand jury in connection with an investigation into magazine circulation.
On Monday, Steve Case, the former chief executive of AOL and the architect of its disastrous merger with Time Warner, stepped down from the board to avoid a conflict of interest with his latest venture.
Now, how come nobody's complaining about Time Warner's 80% increase in profits?
Have you heard any complaints about it?
I haven't.
That's my whole point.
Senator Joe Biden.
Democrat Delaware made some interesting comments during his Manchester, New Hampshire stop last night or Tuesday night.
He said too many Democrats were elitist and even unpatriotic, and he blamed them for helping Republicans paint the whole party as out of touch with America.
Biden noted that some Democrats had even questioned why he wore an American flag pin on his lapel.
The Senator has been refreshingly honest about his run for the Democratic nomination in 2008.
Further honest comments like those he made Tuesday night might hurt his chances with the party lurching increasingly to the left, but the Democrats need to hear them.
No, they don't.
I wish he'd shut up.
He's talking about the move on people.
He's talking about these these wacko computer geeks at MoveOn.org and all these uh all these blog websites.
He, I'm sure he does get grief.
What do you do when wearing that American flag?
What are you siding with the Republicans?
Is that what you're doing?
Sighting with the military?
Is that what you mean?
Is that what you mean by wearing that flag?
I'm an American.
No!
Americans don't real Americans don't wear the flag.
Like Tom Brokaw, he didn't want to wear the flag because he knew it showed bias.
What bias toward what?
America.
So?
What's wrong with bias to your own country?
Well, sometimes our country's wrong.
It's evil.
That's the American left for you.
Biden getting grief from his own side.
Dan Rather was in Maine.
Longtime CBS evening news anchorman Dan Rather Tuesday called for get now, folks.
This is I swear to you, I am reading verbatim from this news story.
This is from the Bangor Daily News.
Bangor Maine Daily News.
Dan Rather on Tuesday called for a return to independent journalism, telling viewers to be critical of the plethora of new media outlets that feign objectivity while working to advance their own or another's agenda.
Now, what is the psychological term when you accuse your opponents of doing exactly what you do?
Transference, that's what it is.
Dan Rather is typical of somebody on the left.
They have immersed themselves in this alternative reality, and they cannot bel they do not have the ability to see exactly who they are and what they're doing, and more importantly, have no idea how they appear to everybody else.
Dingy Harry thinks that he scored big time.
He doesn't realize he looked like a six-year-old bully in a sandbox back in grade school.
He has no idea how he looked to people.
Average people that don't care one way or the other about what he's doing.
He looked like an abject fool.
Rather sounds like one here.
He said you need to ask yourself, is more better?
And is uh is all it calls itself news really news.
There were fourteen hundred people who filled the main center for the arts near capacity for his morning speech on the University of Maine campus.
News is something people need to know, which someone somewhere doesn't want them to know.
All the rest is advertising.
Holy, this is a new definition of news.
Did you know that's what the news was?
Listen to his definition.
News is something people need to know, which someone somewhere doesn't want them to know.
Well, thank you.
This explains the forged documents.
This explains the whole liberal bias.
It goes on.
Uh Rather spoke as part of the William S. Cohen lecture series, which is in its fifth year.
For him Cohen, former defense secretary for Clinton, former senator from Maine, actually echoed Rather's renewed call for a free and independent press, one whose members don't have to risk access to information if they ask tough questions.
Rather also bemoaned the decrease in international news coverage, tracing its decline with the rampant closing of overseas news bureaus during the last 25 years.
See, here's Danry.
He'll go out of his way to just rip oil companies for obscene profits while demanding his own news division experience obscene losses just to keep international bureaus open, doing news that nobody cares about.
I gotta go.
A quick timeout.
We'll be back.
I'm looking for the story.
Some guy.
Oh, here it is.
Did you hear about this?
Is in Boulder, Colorado.
Home Depot has found itself in a sticky situation.
They're defending a lawsuit filed by a man who said that their Louisville Colorado store.
By the way, is it it if it's in Colorado is it pronounced Louisville or Louisville or Louisville?
I'm not regardless.
A guy said that Home Depot's Louisville, Colorado store ignored his cries for help after he fell victim to a prank and was glued to a toilet seat.
Bob Docherty, 57, maybe it's Doherty of Neederland, California, said he became stuck to a bathroom toilet seat on which somebody had smeared glue on October 30th, 2003, and he felt tremendous panic when he realized he was stuck.
They left me there, going through all that stress.
Doherty told the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper.
They just let me rot.
So his lawsuit filed Friday.
So he was recovering from heart bypass surgery at the time, thought he was having a heart attack.
A store employee who heard him calling for help informed the head clerk via radio, but the head clerk believed it to be a hoax.
The lawsuit said about after about 15 minutes, store officials called for an ambulance paramedics unbolted the toilet seat.
And while wheeling a frightened and humiliated Doherty out of the store, he passed out.
The lawsuit said the toilet seat separated from his skin leaving abrasions.
This is not Home Depot's fault, but I am I am blaming them for letting me hang in there and just ignoring me.
Well this was not a toilet seat that was on the floor to be sold.
This was in a bathroom.
I was gonna say what's somebody dropping trow and sitting on a toilet seat on the floor of the showroom doing okay, I get this now.
Sounds to me like the guy sticking to his story, despite where this lawsuit might go.
Back in a moment.
All right, as many of you know, I have been suspicious of this whole Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Niger CIA story from for a long time.
And I wouldn't be surprised, I can't make the I can't make the allegation.
I wouldn't be surprised if before this is all over we learn that the whole thing was an attempted coup, if you will, to send this guy Wilson over to Niger to purposely undermine the Bush war on terror and the Bush administration, hopefully, have an effect on the 2004 elections.
There are many reasons to suspect this, uh not the least of which is that the president has ideological enemies in the CIA and at the State Department, and he's trying to clean both these places up.
Now, Victoria Tenzing, who wrote the law that was the subject of the original investigation by the independent prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, has written a piece today in the Wall Street Journal entitled Investigate the CIA.
In a surprise closed door debate, Senate Democrats demanded an investigation of pre-Iraq war intelligence.
Well, here's an issue for them.
Why not assess the validity of the claim that Valerie Plame's status was covert or even properly classified given the wretched trade craft by the CIA throughout this whole episode?
It was, after all, the CIA that requested the leak investigation, alleging that one of its agents had been outed in Bob Novak's July 14, 2003 column.
Yet it was the CIA's bizarre conduct that led inexorably to Ms. Plame's unveiling.
When the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was being negotiated, Senate Select Committee Chairman Barry Goldwater was adamant if the CIA desired a law making it illegal to expose one of its deep cover employees, then the agency has to do a better job of protecting their cover.
That is why a criterion for any prosecution under the act is that the government was taking affirmative measures to conceal the protected person's relationship to the intelligence agency.
Two decades later, the CIA either purposely or with gross negligence made a series of decisions that led to Ms. Plame becoming a household name.
First, the CIA sent her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson to Niger on a sensitive mission regarding WMD.
He was determined whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellow cake, an essential ingredient for nonconventional weapons.
However, it was Ms. Plame, not Mr. Wilson who was the WMD expert.
Moreover, Mr. Wilson had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to this administration's Iraq policy.
The assignment was given, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Mrs. Plame's suggestion, or Ms. Wilson's suggestion.
Second, Joe Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement.
This is a mandatory act for the rest of us who either carry out any CIA assignment or who represent CIA clients.
Yeah, he didn't have to.
If he didn't have a confidentiality agreement, he was free to come back and say whatever he wanted to say about it.
Third, when he returned from Niger, Mr. Wilson was not required to write a report, but rather merely to provide an oral briefing.
That information was not sent to the White House.
Now if this mission to Niger were so important, wouldn't a competent intelligence agency want a thoughtful written assessment from the missionary If for no other reason and to establish a record to refute any subsequent misinterpretation of that assessment, because it was the vice president who initially inquired about Niger and the yellow cake, although he had nothing to do with Wilson being sent.
It is curious that neither his office nor the president's were privy to the fruits of Mr. Wilson's oral report.
So we know this is true.
Cheney did ask the CIA to find out about this, and Wilson gets the trip.
Wilson comes back without a confidentiality agreement, no written report, and Cheney and Bush are not told anything about his report.
And then he started lying about it all over the place as well.
There's a little bit more here to this piece, and I want to touch on a couple elements of a piece at the American thinker.com on the same subject today.
We'll do that after the bottom of the hour break, and we will get back to your telephone calls too.
So sit tight and be patient as the EIB network rolls.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the excellence in podcasting network.
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Your host for life having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
You know, I was just going back here to this this uh this definition of journalism uh that Dan Rather gave in Banger Main, I guess it was on Tuesday morning.
He said news is something people need to know, which someone somewhere doesn't want them to know.
All the rest is advertising.
Folks, that would make me a newsman.
We tell you what Democrats don't want you to know all the time, we tell you what the media doesn't want you to know all the time, such as how they used forged documents to concoct a phony story to try to force Bush out of office or to defeat him in the 2004 elections.
Now I'm sure Dan rather's upset, but of course, as a journalist, he would he would say that well, work of journalists is of course immune from the definition.
We by definition.
Anyway, back to this Joe Wilson thing, uh Victoria Tensing and the fourth point here that would raise eyebrows.
Although Mr. Wilson did not have to write even one word of a report for the CIA that sent him on the mission at taxpayers' expense.
Over a year later he was permitted to tell all about this in the New York Times.
For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we'd have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA's pre-publication review board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published.
Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of Wilson's article, which it has been reported did not jibe with the thrust of his oral briefing.
She's being polite.
He told two different stories.
For starters, if Wilson's piece had been properly vetted at the CIA, somebody should have known that the agency never briefed the vice president on Wilson's trip, as claimed by Wilson in his op-ed.
Fifth point, most important, or more important actually than the inaccuracies, is the fact that if the CIA really, really, really had wanted Miss Plame's identity to be secret, it would never have permitted her spouse to write the op-ed.
Did no one at Langley think that her identity could be compromised if her spouse wrote a piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her expertise, weapons of mass destruction?
The obvious question that a sophisticated journalist like Mr. Novak asked after why did the CIA send Wilson was who is Wilson?
Why did they send him and who is he?
And after being told by a still unnamed administration source that Wilson's wife suggested him for the assignment, Novak went to who's who, which reveals Valerie Plame is Mr. Wilson's spouse.
It's in Who's Who?
He was just a curious journalist.
Okay, CIA sends this guy, but who is this guy?
Well, he's uh the the Who is this guy and and why did they send him?
And then you find out in an asking those questions, oh his wife uh raises wife works CIA, wife arranged for the triple.
Who is she?
Why would she?
Oh, she works on weapons and mass destruction?
He never has?
She does.
She's not covert, hadn't been covert for six years, but she works at the WMD desk.
She gets her husband sent over to a trip for something he's not shown any expertise in at all.
Sixth point.
CIA incompetence didn't end there.
When Mr. Novak called the CIA to verify her employment, it not only verified her employment, but failed to go beyond the perfunctory request not to publish.
They didn't ask Nova, hey, don't publish this.
They told him, Yep, she works here.
Yep, Wilson's wife.
Go ahead and print it if you want.
Every experienced Washington journalist knows that when the CIA really doesn't want something public, there are serious requests from the top, usually the director.
Only the press office talked to Mr. Novak.
And if they don't want something public, the odds are it'll it won't be made public unless somebody in there leaks it or wants it leaked.
Seventh.
Although high ranking Justice Department officials are prohibited from political activity, the CIA had no problem permitting its deep cover or classified employee from making political contributions under the name Valerie Wilson.
And this information is available at the FEC, and she did so in the name of the CIA front company she worked for.
She made political contributions to Al Gore and Americans coming together.
The CIA conduct in this matter is either a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence trade craft.
It's up to Congress to decide which.
That means it's up to the Republicans, and that's why I said yesterday.
If Dingy Harry wants to act like a spoiled little kid and rehash stuff that's already been investigated and we already have the answers to, somebody at the Senate, somebody just one time stand up and say, All right, you want to play it this way, what we're gonna do, we're gonna find out who Joe Wilson is.
We're gonna find out how he went on this trip, and we're gonna explore the lies that he has told about this, and we're gonna find out what the CIA's involvement in this is and what the CIA's purpose was.
I guess Republicans just don't play that game.
I they but but it it's time, and you would think that if they're gonna get irritated and agitated, then it would be about now with all that's happened.
Now, there's another similar piece today, coincidentally, at the American thinker dot com, and it's by Clarice Feldman, who is an attorney in Washington, DC.
Senate Democrats employed a stealthy maneuver the other day to reinforce their demand into an affair they like to call Plame Gate.
They're right that an investigation's required, but they've gotten the subject matter wrong.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that the real scandal is the genesis, not the unmasking of an irregular and highly questionable mission, the Wilson Gambit.
It's time for serious examination, equipped with the tools of subpoena and testimony under oath into the genesis and conduct of this anomalous operation.
It's damn right.
It's time to we don't know that anybody has put Wilson under oath, but it's about damn time, and Congress could do it.
He's out there running his mouth off and creating all these new raw realities and telling lies and so forth.
And he's just and the Democrats have glommed on to him.
He is he is the guy they're basing their whole procedure on.
So bring him in and find out who he is and put him under oath.
The mainstream media, of course, is entirely uninterested in determining why the Wilson Gambit was undertaken.
Once upon a time, the New York Times and the rest of the American liberal establishment worried about CIA dirty tricks aimed at influencing domestic politics.
The more effervescent leftists fulminated about a secret government.
They muttered darkly about a threat to democracy itself emanating from Langley.
How Times and the New York Times have changed.
Today the darlings of the American left and its house organ are a CIA employee and her husband who set up and implemented a highly irregular operation which, if not explicitly designed to do so, has had the net effect of discrediting an elected leader and his foreign policy.
The Wilson Gambit was a stealth operation undertaken outside normal procedures and supervision, used as a political weapon.
Complete with lies spread by a cooperative media establishment interested in bringing down a leader in his policies, which they detest.
Former Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat, a man of enormous stature, has done the nation a great service in publicly raising questions about the intent behind the Wilson Gambit.
This is what Zell Miller wrote in his piece that uh that uh I saw yesterday.
He said it's like a spy thriller.
Institutional rivalries and political loyalties have fostered an intelligence officer's resentment against the government.
This would be Plame.
Suddenly an opportunity appears for the agent, Plame, to undercut the national leadership.
A vital question of intelligence forms the core justification for controversial military actions by the current leaders, Bush.
If this agent, Plame, can get in the middle of that question, distort that information, and then make it public, the agent, Plame, might foster regime change in the upcoming election.
But the rules on agents are clear.
They can't purposely distort gathered intelligence.
They cannot go public with secret information, or they cannot use their position or information to manipulate domestic elections or matters without risking their job or jail.
But their spouse can.
Joe Wilson can.
What Zell Miller is saying here is the focus needs to be on her.
She's at the weapons of mass destruction desk.
She's had her identity outed, and the CIA did very little to keep her identity secret.
She is the one who recommended her husband.
She's the one contributing to Gore and Americans coming together, as working at the weapons of mass destruction desk.
She's no fan of the president, obviously by her political affiliations.
Here comes this bit of news about yellow cake from Niger.
Bush puts it in the State of the Union speech, says that the British say that the Iraqis tried to buy, and all of a sudden we get a guy who's not got any experience whatsoever in this kind of thing being sent over there.
His wife engineers the trip.
He comes back, doesn't have to sign a confidentiality agreement, is allowed to write an op-ed by the CIA.
He doesn't have to file a written report.
The people who were interested in this whole story, the president and vice president, are never told of what he is told a CIA Wilson when he comes back.
This guy is allowed to totally distort in the New York Times and tell a different story there from what he told the CIA.
The story is that when he told the CIA his original oral report, that it pretty much confirmed what everybody thought that there had been an attempt to purchase this stuff.
Just an attempt.
Nobody ever said that they actually made the buy.
They were just looking around with the intelligence that Wilson brought back.
It looked like it might have happened.
But when he wrote the New York Times op-ed, it was a 180 from what his oral report was, but there was no way to check because he was not required to fill out or write a report.
Then it all blows up when people say, Who is this guy?
We find out who's Joe Wilson.
Oh, his wife works at the CIA in this.
And by the way, our buddies at Newsmax today have an interesting story.
They've gone back in the past and they have found uh transcript of Andrea Mitchell of NBC News.
I'll find this in the stack here during the break.
Saying in 2003 that all the reporters covering the intelligence community was widely known that Valerie Plame, Valerie Wilson worked at the CIA.
Among reporters, I'll make you another prediction.
By the time this Libby case gets to trial, if it does, you're going to see a bunch of reporters being called by his defense lawyers.
And that's going to be fun, folks, because the trial, if it happens, we may really ferret out how all this did start.
We will see.
I'm telling you that this whole sordid tale involving Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson, these two people have gotten away with being prepared as injured patriots, damaged great courageous
patriots, when they may in fact be the people who originated this scam, along with people in the CIA who are opposed to President Bush, and they had as their express purpose to undermine the war in Iraq and thus the Bush presidency.
And it's at least worthy of official investigation.
If we're going to look as we...
For two years, an independent Council investment investigation for two years.
It turns up no evidence that anybody outed a covert agent.
And now we've got an indictment of offenses that occurred during the investigation.
I think an investigation into where this all started and who it really may be at the genesis of it is clearly justified.
I think Victoria Tensing's right, and I think that uh Clarice Feldman is as well.
We'll be back after this and continue.
Stay with us.
And we're back.
El Rushball time is rapidly evaporating on us here.
Here's the uh newsmax story from um today they posted it about 10 o'clock this morning.
NBC Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert told Leakate probers he had no idea Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA employee before her name surfaced in Novak's July 14th, 03 column, and that he was stunned upon learning that Louis Libby claimed that he got that information from him, Russert.
But an account by senior NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell raises questions.
On October 3rd, 2003, Andrea Mitchell was a guest on the now defunct Capitol Report on CNBC, where she was asked by host Alan Murray, do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?
Andrea Mitchell replied, it was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger.
So a number of us began to pick up on that.
Andrea Mitchell's widely known characterization flatly contradicts assertions last Friday by the special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who repeatedly insisted that claims association with the CIA was not widely known.
So Andrea Mitchell covers the State Department.
She covers you know national security issues.
And she said, yes, it was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Nigeria'd be Joe Wilson.
Yeah, we knew she worked there.
Then when we found out Wilson, oh yeah, we knew.
This is again October of 2003.
Uh Novak's piece was July 14th of 2003.
So uh the the point here in all of this, uh, folks, to me, is that this indictment of Scooter Libby, and I'm not denying that perjury and all that, that that's that's bad stuff, and you don't want to ever do that, and it is very, very problematic.
But I'm telling you, we're not getting at the real sources.
Well, whatever, whatever we have, whatever we get here with with with uh the lies that Scooter Libby told the media, which is basically what this is about, not gonna get us anywhere near what we really need to know about this, and that's how Wilson got sent over there, who told Novak her name, and what involvement did she have in all of this?
Because there's too much of this that occurs without the usual CIA policies in effect, such as uh confidentiality agreement.
He didn't have one.
He was allowed to write an op-ed.
He didn't have to file a written report, so there was no way that anybody could go back and say he was changing his story.
You know, words vanish into the ether.
There's just everything about this is a huge, huge question mark.
And I I'll tell you, uh during this whole two years of the special counsel investigation, we weren't getting any leaks, and I kept hearing about how upstanding and brilliant Fitzgerald was.
I kept telling myself, okay, then he reads the papers too.
He's smart guy.
He's got to know there's something odd here.
He's got to know that Joe Wilson's not this man of paragon of virtue, and neither is his wife, but yet they survive in all this as the aggrieved, damaged, brave, courageous patriots who gave everything, including risking their lives for their country.
And I'm sorry, folks, but I'm not buying that.
Back in just a second.
Stay with me.
Have you said they've lost control In France, folks.
They've lost control of it.
Is anybody surprised?
They've got all these riots.
And the of all the only question here is when are the French gonna surrender to the rioters in the neighborhood?
It's just astounding.
I'm gonna tell you when it was over for France when they wouldn't fight longer than two weeks to save their own country from the Nazis back in the 40s.
When the French said saving their own country was only worth two weeks, it's been downhill ever since.
And it's no wonder why John Kerry has them as his favorite ally.
Have a wonderful day, my friends.
We'll be back for Open Line Friday tomorrow.
And I can't wait.
Looking forward to it.
We'll see you then.
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