Ladies and gentlemen, where is Patrick Fitzgerald when you need him? Valerie Plame has equivocated under oath, and I am hearing nothing about it. Documentation proves she was the one who recommended her spineless feckless husband, Joe Wilson, to go to Niger. Yet, there she was on Capitol Hill, saying otherwise. Where is the justice? Scooter Libby gets prison for not remembering, but Plame gets nothing for her lies, for helping to fuel a divide which threatens the future security of this nation? Come on now....Here are the key excerpts:If Joseph Wilson's wife hadn't worked for the CIA, he would not have been sent on the fact-finding mission to Niger that has caused so much controversy over the past few years. This fact is indisputable. Yet last week, Valerie Plame Wilson, under oath before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, did her best to dispute it, or at least to muddy the waters. The question now is whether she committed a crime in doing so.
MS. PLAME WILSON: No. I did not recommend him, I did not suggest him, there was no nepotism involved -- I didn't have the authority.
The suggestion that Plame Wilson "didn't have the authority" to make a recommendation to her boss is laughable. Perhaps she could be read as merely saying that she didn't have the authority to, as Lynch put it, "make the decision," but no one has claimed that she didHere is what Plame Wilson said when Rep. Lynch asked her to "walk us through everything you did that may have been related around the time of the decision to send Ambassador Wilson to Niger":
In February of 2002, a young junior officer who worked for me -- came to me very upset. She had just received a telephone call on her desk from someone -- I don't know who -- in the office of the vice president asking about this report of this alleged sale of yellow cake uranium from Niger to Iraq. She came to me, and as she was telling me this -- what had just happened, someone passed by -- another officer heard this. He knew that Joe had already -- my husband -- had already gone on some CIA mission previously to deal with other nuclear matters. And he suggested, "Well why don't we send Joe?"
Here, Plame Wilson is eliding the fact that, as documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Wilson had gone on a previous mission at his wife's recommendation, which would seem to be a salient fact. There is simply no way that, if not for his wife, Joe Wilson would ever have been selected for a CIA mission.
THROUGHOUT HER TESTIMONY, Plame Wilson attempted to cast doubt on the conclusions of the Senate Intelligence Committee report.The reference here is to an addendum to the report (.pdf) titled "Additional Views," in which Senators Pat Roberts, Christopher Bond, and Orrin Hatch grumble about a number of conclusions that Senate Democrats moved to exclude from the bipartisan report. The trouble with this effort at partisan point-scoring is that Roberts, Bond, and Hatch didn't simply pull that conclusion out of the air; though the Republican senators were frustrated that this finding wasn't emphasized in the "Conclusions" section, it was certainly included in the bipartisan report. (The relevant paragraphs of the bipartisan report can be found on page 39 -- page 4 of this .pdf under "B. Former Ambassador."):
Some CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name" and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife says, "my husband has good relations with the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."
Plame Wilson knows this
Why don't we hear those dems calling for a grand jury? Aren't they trying to be the reformers, not a culture of corruption and seediness?
