Enron Trial Avoids the Real Rip-Off

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

More than 400 pages of documents released by federal energy regulators suggest that former Enron chairman Ken Lay and former chief executive Jeff Skilling were aware that the company's west coast traders may have broken the law by using manipulative trading tactics in California to boost Enron's profits during the height of the state's power crisis.

Skilling and Lay are being prosecuted for securities fraud and numerous other charges in a federal courthouse in Houston. A judge has prohibited prosecutors from introducing recorded evidence related to the California energy crisis in the case against Skilling and Lay, saying it's too "prejudicial."

The transcripts are from recorded conversations between Enron traders, company attorneys and Enron's public and governmental affairs departments that took place at the height of the California electricity crisis in 2000 and 2001. The material provides the most vivid portrait to date of the company's questionable trading practices that ignited California's power crisis, and led to a financial meltdown at the company which Lay and Skilling hid from securities regulators and investors, and which both men are now being prosecuted for.

In the spring of 2001, one of Enron's most powerful Washington lobbyists met with several members of the Bush administration to talk about Enron's opposition to price controls on electricity sales in California.

The lobbyist was told by Tim Belden, the mastermind behind Enron's notorious trading scams, less than a year earlier that Belden and other Enron traders who worked in Portland, Oregon, spent the better part of 2000 and 2001 breaking the rules governing California's power market "when opportunities presented themselves to make money."

"There's really two - two things that happened - two areas ... in terms of things blowing up," Belden told Richard Shapiro, Enron's vice president of regulatory affairs and one of the company's lobbyists, in August 2000. "One is our day-ahead scheduling practices and then the other is our real-time operations. Um, we've been doing and have been doing for two years a lot of activity in, you know, there's black, there's white and there's gray. Um, we have been endeavoring into the gray area when opportunities present themselves to make money. We have now moved out of the gray area into the clearly what's legal area ... not even legal, but what's, um, there's like the letter of the law, the letter of the rules and the spirit of the rules. Um, we've been exploiting the letter of the rules - or literally interpreted - interpreting the rules, um, in California when we can make money ..."

California's electricity crisis wreaked havoc on consumers and businesses from the summer of 2000 to June of 2001, resulting in three days of rolling blackouts and hundreds of emergency power alerts and forcing the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, into bankruptcy. The crisis cost the state more than $70 billion.

In the conversation between Shapiro and Belden, Shapiro urged Belden to pull back on his trading schemes in California - such as artificially clogging transmission lines, sending power out of state and submitting false data to the state's grid operator - and to begin working more closely within the law because of the severe political risk associated with Enron and the billions of dollars the company reaped from California's electricity crisis to fill its coffers.

But despite the fact that Shapiro was in the know about Enron's questionable trading practices, he continued to lobby powerful Washington lawmakers, urging them not to fix the market problems in California, saying the crisis was the state's fault for not building enough power plants, according to public documents from the House Governmental Affairs Committee.

Belden, however, told Shapiro that he would continue to exploit the rules in California, even though he might be breaking the law, as long as it didn't cause the lights to go out in the state. He added that if Skilling were forced to testify before a commission about the inner workings of the West Coast trading desk it could hurt Belden's career.

"I know there's a lot of political risk and I know that we got a ton of money in our book and then - if Jeff Skilling ah, has to go in front of some commission and explain the activities of the West Power Group, that's probably not so great for my career," Belden told Shapiro, according to the transcripts.

This is the first revelation that an Enron lobbyist was briefed on the company's manipulative trading practices, and it appears likely that other executives were also in the know. Shapiro wielded enormous influence with members of the Bush administration. On May 23, 2001, he met with White House economic adviser Robert McNally and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham's chief of staff about Bush's National Energy Policy and Enron's opposition to price controls in California.

The meeting between Shapiro and McNally came at a crucial time for Enron. The company's most senior executives recognized that Enron stood to lose hundreds of millions in profits and its standing on Wall Street if California lawmakers were successful in getting federal energy regulators to rewrite the rules in California's power market. Judging by the events that followed, it appears that Bush and Cheney were in Enron's corner.

Six days before Shapiro met with McNally and Abraham's staff, on May 17, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by the television news program Frontline. When asked if companies like Enron were behaving like a "cartel" and manipulating the California power market, Cheney responded with a resounding "No."

"The problem you had in California was caused by a combination of things - an unwise regulatory scheme, because they didn't really deregulate. Now they're trapped from unwise regulatory schemes, plus not having addressed the supply side of the issue. They've obviously created major problems for themselves ..."

That same day, May 17, 2001, Cheney and Bush unveiled the details of the National Energy Policy, in which Cheney adopted seven of Ken Lay's suggestions, according to published reports. Had the intimate details of Enron's trading schemes been known to California officials, it most certainly would have derailed Bush's energy policy, which called for keeping many of deregulation's key components in place.

A few months earlier, Sue Mara, an Enron governmental affairs employee, phoned Bob Badeer, an Enron trader, with a question from Ken Lay. Following public comments by Governor Gray Davis about the state of California's energy crisis, Mara said Lay personally wanted to know if Davis's comments had affected the price of power in the forward market. That Lay would be interested in such minute details contradicts the former chairman's public statements that he had no idea about the shenanigans taking place inside Enron.

California signed an unprecedented $42 billion in long-term electricity contracts with more than two-dozen energy companies to put the brakes on skyrocketing wholesale power prices. The state no longer bought the bulk of its power needs in the open market, where companies like Enron earned its windfall.

In June 2001, shortly after the details of the long-term contracts were revealed, Skilling and Lay summoned Belden to Houston to discuss the company's West Coast trading division, which Belden said in one recorded conversation accounted for 80 percent of Enron's profits in 2000 and 2001, to determine if anything could be done to salvage the operation, according to one person working with the Justice Department on the investigation.

It's unclear what came out of that meeting, but two months later Jeff Skilling resigned from Enron. Just three months earlier, on March 9, 2001, he flew to Portland to take Belden and other senior traders out to dinner at Higgins restaurant to celebrate Enron's successful first quarter earnings. In the transcripts released by FERC, traders said they made upwards of $10 million a day in 2000 by utilizing many of the trading scams developed by Belden.

What's surprising about those scams Enron traders pulled in California is how well-known it was within the company's Houston headquarters, according to the transcripts. Indeed, one public affairs official at Enron instructed a trader based in the company's Portland, Oregon trading division to lie to a Wall Street Journal reporter who wanted to write a story about Enron's lucrative trading desk.

"The thing is anything they'd ask you, you'd have to lie because you wouldn't want to tell them the truth," an unidentified Enron employee in the company's governmental affairs department said to an Enron trader. The governmental affairs employee then attempts to talk the trader out of doing the interview with the Journal. "I wouldn't do it (the interview). 'Cause first of all, you'd have to tell 'em a lot of lies, cause if you told 'em the truth..."

"I'd get in trouble," the trader says, interrupting the governmental affairs employee.

"You'd get in trouble," the governmental affairs employee said.

Perhaps the most prescient part of the transcript is when John Forney, a senior Enron trader who worked closely with Belden and was indicted on conspiracy charges, fears that he may be sent to jail.

In a conversation Forney had with Belden, Forney seems to have misgivings about one scheme he just pulled that involved California and Canada.

Belden seems to brush off Forney's concerns, according to the transcripts, and Forney says he can't believe that none of his Enron colleagues seem to be concerned about the possibility of going to jail as a result of the schemes he and other traders have pulled.

"I only want to go to jail once," Forney says.

"Yeah," Belden says. "Once in this country."

Whether Skilling and Lay join their one-time trading star remains to be seen.

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Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributor to t r u t h o u t.

White House 'Discovers' 250 Pages of Emails Related to Plame Leak

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

The White House turned over last week 250 pages of emails from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. Senior aides had sent the emails in the spring of 2003 related to the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald revealed during a federal court hearing Friday.

The emails are said to be explosive, and may prove that Cheney played an active role in the effort to discredit Plame Wilson’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Bush administration’s prewar Iraq intelligence, sources close to the investigation said.

Sources close to the probe said the White House “discovered” the emails two weeks ago and turned them over to Fitzgerald last week. The sources added that the emails could prove that Cheney lied to FBI investigators when he was interviewed about the leak in early 2004. Cheney said that he was unaware of any effort to discredit Wilson or unmask his wife’s undercover status to reporters.

Cheney was not under oath when he was interviewed. He told investigators how the White House came to rely on Niger documents that purportedly showed that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country.

Cheney said he had received an intelligence briefing on the allegations in late December 2003, or early January 2004, and had asked the CIA for more information about the issue.

Cheney said he was unaware that Ambassador Wilson was chosen to travel to Niger to look into the uranium claims, and that he never saw a report Wilson had given a CIA analyst upon his return which stated that the Niger claims were untrue. He said the CIA never told him about Wilson's trip.

However, the emails say otherwise, and will show that the vice president spearheaded an effort in March 2003 to attack Wilson’s credibility and used the CIA to dig up information on the former ambassador that could be used against him, sources said.

Some of the emails that were turned over to Fitzgerald contained references to Plame Wilson's identity and CIA status, and developments related to the inability of ground forces to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the start of the war in March 2003.

According to sources, the emails also contained suggestions by senior officials in Cheney’s office, and at the National Security Council, on how the White House should respond to what it believed were increasingly destructive comments Wilson had been making about the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Last month, Fitzgerald disclosed in court documents that he discovered from witnesses in the case that some emails related to Wilson and his wife, written by senior aides in Cheney’s office and sent to other officials at the National Security Council, had not been turned over to investigators by the White House.

“In an abundance of caution,” Fitzgerald's January 23 letter to Libby's defense team states, “we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.”

Sources close to the case said that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales withheld numerous emails from Fitzgerald’s probe citing “executive privilege” and “national security” concerns. These sources said that as of Friday there are still some emails that have not been turned over to Fitzgerald because they contain classified information in addition to references about the Wilsons.

Attorneys representing Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators related to his role in the leak, were in court Friday arguing that Fitzgerald should be required to turn over classified material, including highly sensitive Presidential Daily Briefs, to Libby’s defense team.

The defense hopes that the classified materials will establish that Libby was dealing with more pressing matters facing the White House and that he simply did not intend to mislead the grand jury when he testified that he did not disclose Plame Wilson’s name to reporters.

In another development in the leak case Friday, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said another administration official, who does not work at the White House, also spoke to reporters about Plame Wilson. This individual, according to sources close to the case, works at the National Security Council.

Walton said that Libby’s defense team was not entitled to be told of the individual’s identity because the person is not charged with a crime in the leak. However, the person is said to be one of several people in the administration who is cooperating with the probe.

Plame Whistleblowers Targeted by Administration

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Two top Bush administration officials who played an active role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, have been removing from their jobs, career State Deptartment weapons experts who have spoken to investigators during the past two years about the officials role in the leak, according to a half-dozen State Department officials.

The State Department officials requested anonymity for fear of further retribution. They said they believe they are being sidelined because they have been cooperating with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and have disagreed with the Bush administration's intelligence that claimed Iraq sought 500 tons of yellowcake uranium ore from Niger - an explosive piece of intelligence that was included in President Bush's January 2003, State of the Union address that was found to be based on crude forgeries, but helped pave the way to war.

The reshuffling, which has been conducted in secret since late last year, has led to a mini-revolt inside the State Department, numerous officials who work there said.

The officials who have been leading the State Department reorganization plan are Frederick Fleitz and Robert Joseph. Fleitz now works for Joseph. Both men were appointed to their positions by President Bush. They have claimed publicly that the State Department reshuffle has nothing to do with retribution, rather it is aimed at helping that branch of the federal government to better deal with 21st century threats.

Both men were directly involved in the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson, and have been targeted by Fitzgerald's probe as possible sources that unmasked Plame Wilson's identity to reporters, according to several people knowledgeable about the Fitzgerald probe and the roles Fleitz and Joseph played in the Plame Wilson leak.

At the time of the leak, Fleitz was a senior CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control official as well as the chief of staff to John Bolton, the former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, a position that Joseph was appointed to when Bolton was selected to be Ambassador to the United Nations by President Bush.

Beltway rumors have swirled for more than a year that Bolton, too, played a role in the leak, specifically, that Bolton enlisted Fleitz to obtain information from the CIA regarding Wilson's Niger trip and asked him to find out who at the agency was responsible for sending him there, sources at the CIA and State Department said.

State Department officials and other people knowledgeable about the events leading up to the Plame Wilson leak said Fleitz is the unnamed CIA official identified in the federal indictment handed up by a grand jury in October against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was indicted on five counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to investigators relating to his role in the leak.

The indictment states: "on or about June 11, 2003, Libby spoke with a senior officer of the CIA to ask about the origin and circumstances of Wilson's trip, and was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip."

State Department officials said Fleitz was in a position to obtain Plame Wilson's status as a covert CIA operative. These officials said Fleitz had told Bolton about Plame Wilson, and Bolton then shared that information with Libby and other senior aides in Vice President Cheney's office.

Moreover, State Department officials said Fleitz was one of the CIA officials who attended a meeting in February 2002, at CIA headquarters where Plame Wilson had accompanied her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was selected to travel to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger, according to several State Department officials who also attended the meeting.

Fleitz has been a trusted source of information to Bolton for some time. In his book, Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990's: Causes, Solutions, and US Interests, Fleitz thanked Bolton for advising him on research and providing him with guidance in writing the book.

It has long been rumored that Bolton had his own connections to agents at the CIA who shared his political philosophy on Iraq. Greg Thielman, a former director at the State Department who was assigned to Bolton and entrusted with providing the former under secretary of state with intelligence information, told New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh that Bolton had become frustrated that Thielman was not providing him the smoking gun intelligence information on Iraq that he wanted to hear.

"He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get CIA information directly," Thielman said in Hersh's book, Chain of Command. (Page 223)

"In essence, the undersecretary (Bolton) would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support," Hersh wrote. "Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous administrations, such data had been made available to undersecretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specific secured offices of the INR." (Page 222)

Robert Joseph was identified last week by CIA and State Department officials as one of a handful of administration officials who was instrumental in an effort to attack the credibility of Wilson when the former ambassador started to criticize the administration's use of the Niger claims in Bush's State of the Union address.

Joseph is the former director of nonproliferation at the National Security Council who was responsible for placing the infamous "sixteen words" about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from Niger in Bush's speech.

Sources close to the probe said witnesses involved in the case told FBI investigators that Joseph was one of the recipients of a classified State Department memo in June 2003 that not only debunked the Niger allegations but also included a top-secret reference to Valerie Plame Wilson's work for the CIA, and that she may have been responsible for recommending that the CIA send her husband to Niger to investigate the uranium claims in February 2002.

The sources added that the witnesses testified that Joseph and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had worked directly with senior officials from Vice President Cheney's office - including Libby, Cheney's National Security Adviser John Hannah, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove - during the month of June to coordinate a response to reporters who had phoned the vice president's office and the NSC about the administration's use of the Niger documents.

The State Department had disagreed with the White House's intelligence on Niger, saying in a number of classified documents sent to the White House since 2002 that the intelligence was suspect and should not be cited by the Bush administration to make a case that the country was attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

Now some State Department officials believe that Joseph and Fleitz are working to ensure the State Department is staffed with individuals who will support the Bush administration's foreign policies.

Fleitz and Joseph have been working in secret with other Bush appointees since last year to revamp the State Department by pushing out career weapons experts, many of whom have been interviewed by FBI investigators during the past two years probing the leak.

"The process has been gravely flawed from the outset and smacks plainly of a political vendetta against career Foreign Service and Civil Service (personnel) by political appointees," a group of employees told Undersecretary of State for Management Henrietta Fore on December 9, according to notes prepared for the meeting, Knight Ridder reported on February 7.

In response to the unprecedented shake-up, a dozen State Department officials drafted a dissent letter to Fore and W. Robert Pearson, the director general of the Foreign Service, on October 11, and "sought, but failed to get, a stay from the Justice Department to stop the plan," Knight Ridder reported.

"An inquiry by Knight Ridder has found evidence that the reorganization was highly politicized and devastated morale: One of the government's top experts on the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, which helps stem the spread of nuclear weapons but disputed the Bush administration's claims about Iraq's weapons programs, returned from two and a half years at IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, and was blocked from assuming an office directorship that had been offered to him, the officials and a complaint document said," Knight Ridder added.

The position, which oversees US diplomacy related to international efforts to contain suspected nuclear-weapons programs in countries such as Iran and North Korea, went to a less qualified officer who officials said shared Bolton's views.

In the interest of fairness, if any individual named in this article believes the information written about them is untrue they will be afforded an opportunity to respond to this story in writing.

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Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

NSC, Cheney Aides Conspired to Out CIA Operative

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

The investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson is heating up. Evidence is mounting that senior officials in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney and the National Security Council conspired to unmask Plame Wilson's identity to reporters in an effort to stop her husband from publicly criticizing the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence, according to sources close to the two-year-old probe.

In recent weeks, investigators working for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald have narrowed their focus to a specific group of officials who played a direct role in pushing the White House to cite bogus documents claiming that Iraq attempted to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger, which Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had exposed as highly suspect.

One high level behind-the-scenes player who has been named by witnesses in the case as a possible source for reporters in the leak is Robert Joseph, formerly the director of nonproliferation at the National Security Council. Joseph is responsible for placing the infamous "sixteen words" about Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from Niger in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

It's unknown when Fitzgerald will present the grand jury with additional evidence related to this aspect of the case or if he is close to securing indictments. The sources said the Special Prosecutor is very "methodical," and they expect the investigation to continue well into the spring.

The new grand jury hearing evidence in the leak case was empanelled in November. Right now, the jurors are still absorbing two years' worth of evidence Fitzgerald presented to the jurors a couple of weeks after the previous grand jury's term expired at the end of October. Sources said the jurors have raised numerous legal questions about unnamed senior Bush administration officials against whom Fitzgerald is trying to secure indictments.

Sources close to the probe said witnesses involved in the case told FBI investigators that Joseph was one of the recipients of a classified State Department memo in June 2003 that not only debunked the Niger allegations but also included a top-secret reference to Valerie Plame Wilson's work for the CIA, and that she may have been responsible for recommending that the CIA send her husband to Niger to investigate the uranium claims in February 2002.

Joseph did not return calls for comment. A spokeswoman for the vice president's office said she would not comment on "rumors" or "speculation" as long as the investigation is ongoing. Hadley's spokeswoman also did not return calls for comment, but she has said in the past that Hadley played no role in the leak.

The sources added that the witnesses testified that Joseph and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had worked directly with senior officials from vice president Cheney's office - including Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, National Security Adviser John Hannah, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove - during the month of June to coordinate a response to reporters who had phoned the vice president's office and the NSC about the administration's use of the Niger documents.

Libby was indicted in October on five counts of lying to investigators, perjury, and obstruction of justice related to his role in the Plame Wilson leak. Legal scholars said that Fitzgerald can ask a grand jury to add conspiracy charges against Libby if he uncovers evidence that Libby and other administration officials worked together to leak Plame Wilson's identity to reporters in an effort to silence her husband. If additional charges were filed against Libby it would come in the form of a superseding indictment. Fitzgerald would have to introduce new evidence and witnesses against Libby to the grand jury, and the grand jury would decide whether there were enough evidence to support the superseding indictment.

In a court filing made public Friday in response to a defense motion in which Libby's attorneys wanted Fitzgerald to turn over highly classified documents to assist the defense's case, Fitzgerald made it clear that Libby was not charged with conspiracy.

"Libby is not charged with conspiracy or any other offense involving acting in concert with others, and the indictment lists no un-indicted co-conspirators," states Fitzgerald's motion, which asks a judge to deny the defense motion seeking evidence Fitzgerald said is unrelated to Libby's criminal indictment.

That could change, however, the sources said, if there is enough evidence to support conspiracy charges.

Although that remains to be seen, former State Department and CIA officials who have testified about their role in the leak said they believe officials at the National Security Council and in the vice president's office worked together to unmask Plame Wilson to reporters, specifically to undercut her husband's credibility. They said that Joseph was one NSC staffer who worked with Cheney officials to do so.

Joseph, who is now the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control - a position once held by John Bolton, now United States Ambassador to the United Nations - testified before the grand jury that he played no part in the leak and was not involved in attempts by the administration to discredit Wilson.

Moreover, Joseph testified that he did not recall receiving a warning in the form of a phone call from Alan Foley, director of the CIA's nonproliferation, intelligence and arms control center, saying that the "sixteen words" should not be included in Bush's speech, the sources said.

Foley had revealed this element during a closed-door hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence back in July 2003 - just two weeks after Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that proved the administration cited suspect intelligence claiming Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Niger.

The Senate committee had held hearings during this time to try to find out how the administration came to rely on the Niger intelligence at a time when numerous intelligence agencies had warned top officials in the Bush administration that it was unreliable.

Foley said he spoke to Joseph a day or two before President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address and told Joseph that detailed references to Iraq and Niger should be excluded from Bush's speech. Foley told committee members that Joseph agreed to water down the language and would instead, he told Foley, attribute the intelligence to the British, which is exactly what Bush's speech said.

However, a few weeks before Foley's meeting with the Senate committee, the Niger intelligence was beginning to unravel and threatened to expose the roles of Libby, Hadley, Joseph, Hannah, and Rove in getting the administration to rely upon it to build the case for war.

The sources said it was during this time that Libby, Hadley, Joseph, Hannah and Rove plotted to silence Wilson by leaking his wife's name to a specific group of reporters, saying that she chose him for the fact-finding mission to Niger and as a result his investigation was highly suspect. It's unclear what role, if any, Cheney played, but the sources said Fitzgerald is trying to determine if the vice president was involved.

The sources said Hannah is one of the cooperating witnesses in the probe.

The sources said this time frame was chosen because there were "rumors" that Wilson was "going to go public" and reveal that he had checked out the Niger claims on behalf of the CIA and that there was no truth to them. According to the sources close to the probe, all five of the officials have spoken with reporters about Plame Wilson.

At the same time that Plame Wilson's CIA status was leaked to reporters, Libby, Rove and Hadley had been exchanging emails that included draft statements explaining how the "sixteen words" ended up in President Bush's State of the Union address, the sources added.

"Before Mr. Wilson's article appeared in the New York Times," one source close to the case said, "the administration still insisted that Niger still had merit. It was only after the article had been published that the White House accepted responsibility."

Wilson disclosed in an op-ed he wrote in the New York Times that he had been the special envoy chosen by the CIA in February 2002 to travel to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from the African country.

Wilson's fact-finding mission had come as a result of additional questions Vice President Cheney raised with the CIA about the veracity of those allegations a month or so before Wilson was selected for the mission. Wilson wrote in the column that he had reported back to the CIA eight days after his trip that there was no truth to the charges. In his column, he accused the administration of ignoring his report. He said President Bush and Cheney continued to cite the Niger uranium intelligence, knowing it was false, in order to dupe the public and Congress into supporting the war.

In the four months prior to writing his column, Cheney and officials from the NSC insisted that the Niger intelligence had merit, and said as much publicly, despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Association found that they were crude forgeries. Moreover, there is evidence that Cheney, Hadley, Libby, and numerous other officials were warned as early as March 2002 - one year before the start of the Iraq war - that claims suggesting Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger were baseless.

Indeed, witnesses in the case have testified that President Bush's senior aides, the vice president's office, the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the National Security Council had received and read a March 9, 2002, cable sent by the CIA that debunked the Niger claims.

The cable was prepared by a CIA analyst and was based on Wilson's oral report upon his return from Niger. It did not mention Wilson by name, but quoted a "CIA source" and Niger officials Wilson had questioned during his eight-day mission, who said there was absolutely no truth to the claims that Iraq had tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.

Cheney and other officials connected to the leak have said over the years that they never saw such a report from the CIA, and had never heard of Wilson until he became the subject of news accounts in which the former ambassador called into question the veracity of the Niger documents upon which the uranium claims were based.

The sources said it was during this month, March 2003, when Wilson arrived on the administration's radar as a result of his public comments that alleged the White House had manipulated intelligence, that Cheney, Libby, and Hadley spearheaded an effort to discredit Wilson.

It was during the course of their attempts to attack Wilson's credibility and rebut his charges that officials in the State Department, the CIA, Cheney's office, and the National Security Council - many of whom were responsible for pushing the administration to cite the Niger claims - learned that Wilson's wife was a covert CIA agent and, upon learning that she may have been responsible for sending Wilson to Niger, leaked her name to a handful of reporters.

Five days after Wilson's explosive column was published, CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility for allowing the infamous "sixteen words" to be included in Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. Many people interpreted this as Tenet falling on his sword to protect the president.

Two weeks later, the CIA revealed that other administration officials were culpable as well. CIA officials sent Hadley two memos in October 2002 warning him not to continue peddling the Niger claims to the White House because the intelligence was not accurate.

Hadley, who didn't heed the CIA's warnings at the time, said during a press conference on July 23, 2003, that he had forgotten about the memos.

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Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

Gonzales Withholding Plame Emails

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Sources close to the investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson have revealed this week that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has not turned over emails to the special prosecutor's office that may incriminate Vice President Dick Cheney, his aides, and other White House officials who allegedly played an active role in unmasking Plame Wilson's identity to reporters.

Moreover, these sources said that, in early 2004, Cheney was interviewed by federal prosecutors investigating the Plame Wilson leak and testified that neither he nor any of his senior aides were involved in unmasking her undercover CIA status to reporters and that no one in the vice president's office had attempted to discredit her husband, a vocal critic of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence. Cheney did not testify under oath or under penalty of perjury when he was interviewed by federal prosecutors.

The emails Gonzales is said to be withholding contained references to Valerie Plame Wilson's identity and CIA status and developments related to the inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Moreover, according to sources, the emails contained suggestions by the officials on how the White House should respond to what it believed were increasingly destructive comments Wilson had been making about the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Gonzales, who at the time of the leak was the White House counsel, spent two weeks with other White House attorneys screening emails turned over to his office by roughly 2,000 staffers following a deadline imposed by the White House in 2003. The sources said Gonzales told Fitzgerald more than a year ago that he did not intend to turn over the emails to his office, because they contained classified intelligence information about Iraq in addition to minor references to Plame, the sources said.

He is said to have cited "executive privilege" and "national security concerns" as the reason for not turning over some of the correspondence, which allegedly proves Cheney's office played an active role in leaking Plame Wilson's undercover CIA status to reporters, the attorneys said.

Aside from the emails that have not been turned over, there are also emails that Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor investigating the case, believes were either "shredded" or deleted, the attorneys said.

In a court document dated January 23, Fitzgerald says that, during the course of his investigation, he had been told that some emails from the offices of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had not been saved. His letter does not claim that any member of the Bush administration discarded the emails, but sources close to the probe say that is what Fitzgerald has been alleging privately.

"In an abundance of caution," Fitzgerald's January 23 letter to Libby's defense team states, "we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."

Spokespeople for Gonzales and the White House would not comment citing the ongoing investigation. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Fitzgerald, also wouldn't comment. A spokesman for Cheney did not return calls for comment nor did Cheney's criminal attorney, Terrence O'Donnell.

Cheney testified for a little more than an hour about his role in the leak in early 2004. What he told prosecutors appears to be identical to testimony his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, gave before a grand jury during the same year. Libby was indicted on five-counts of obstruction of justice, perjury, and lying to investigators related to his role in the Plame Wilson leak.

Two weeks ago, additional court documents related to Libby's case were made public. In one document, Fitzgerald responded to Libby's defense team that Libby had testified before a grand jury that his "superiors" authorized him to leak elements of the highly classified National Intelligence Estimate to reporters in the summer of 2003 that showed Iraq to be a grave nuclear threat, to rebut criticism that the administration manipulated pre-war Iraq intelligence.

News reports citing people familiar with Libby's testimony said Cheney had authorized Libby to do so. Additionally, an extensive investigation during the past month has shown that Cheney, Libby and former Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley spearhead an effort beginning in March 2003 to discredit Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the administration's intelligence related to Iraq, who had publicly criticized the administration for relying on forged documents to build public support for the war.

Cheney did not disclose this information when he was questioned by investigators.

Cheney responded to questions about how the White House came to rely on Niger documents that purportedly showed that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country. Cheney said he had received an intelligence briefing on the allegations in late December 2003 or early January 2004 and had asked the CIA for more information about the issue.

Cheney said he was unaware that Wilson was chosen to travel to Niger to look into the uranium claims and that he never saw a report Wilson had given a CIA analyst upon his return, which stated that the Niger claims were untrue. He said the CIA never told him about Wilson's trip.

However, these attorneys said that witnesses in the case have testified before a grand jury that Cheney, Libby, Hadley, the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Justice Department, the FBI, and other senior aides in the Office of the Vice President, the President, and the National Security Council had received and read a March 9, 2002, cable sent to his office by the CIA that debunked the Niger claims.

The cable, which was prepared by a CIA analyst and based on Wilson's fact-finding mission, did not mention Wilson by name, but quoted a CIA source and Niger officials Wilson had questioned during his eight-day mission, who said there was no truth to the claims that Iraq had tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium ore from Niger.

Several current and former State Department and CIA officials familiar with the March 9, 2002, cable said they had testified before the grand jury investigating the Plame Wilson leak that they had spoken to Libby and Hadley about the cable, and that they were told Cheney had also read it.

Cheney told investigators that when Wilson began speaking to reporters on background about his secret mission to Niger to investigate Iraq's alleged attempts to purchase uranium, he asked Libby to contact the CIA to "get more information" about the trip and to find out if it was true, the attorneys added.

Furthermore, Cheney told prosecutors that before he learned of Wilson's trip, his office simply sought to rebut statements made by Wilson to reporters and the various newspaper reports that said the Bush administration knowingly relied on flawed intelligence to build a case for war.

Moreover, Cheney said that he and his aide were concerned that reporters had been under the impression that Cheney chose Wilson for the Niger trip, the attorneys said. Cheney testified that he instructed Libby and other aides to coordinate a response to those queries and rebut those allegations with the White House press office.

"In his testimony the vice president said that his staff referred media calls about Wilson to the White House press office," one attorney close to the case said. "He said that was the appropriate venue for responding to statements by Mr. Wilson that he believed were wrong."

Cheney told investigators that he first learned about Valerie Plame Wilson and her employment with the CIA from Libby. Cheney testified that Libby told him that several reporters had contacted him in July to say that Plame Wilson had been responsible for arranging her husband's trip to Niger to investigate the Niger uranium claims.

Cheney also testified that the next time he recalled hearing about Plame Wilson and her connection to Joseph Wilson was when he read about her in a July 14, 2003, column written by syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials.

The officials work or had worked in the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council in a senior capacity and had direct knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to discredit Wilson.

In interviews over the course of two days this week, these officials were urged to speak on the record for this story. But they resisted, saying they had already testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and added that speaking out against the administration and specifically Vice President Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and subject their families to vitriolic attacks by the White House.

The officials said they decided to speak out now because they have become disillusioned with the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq and the flawed intelligence that led to the war.

They said their roles, along with several others at the CIA and State Department, included digging up or "inventing" embarrassing information on the former Ambassador that could be used against him, preparing memos and classified material on Wilson for Cheney and the National Security Council, and attending meetings in Cheney's office to discuss with Cheney, Hadley, and others the efforts that would be taken to discredit Wilson.

A former CIA official who has worked in the counter-proliferation division, and is familiar with the undercover work Wilson's wife did for the agency, said Cheney and Hadley visited CIA headquarters a day or two after Joseph Wilson was interviewed on CNN.

These were the first public comments Wilson had made about Iraq. He said the administration was more interested in redrawing the map of the Middle East to pursue its own foreign policy objectives than in dealing with the so-called terrorist threat.

"The underlying objective, as I see it, the more I look at this, is less and less disarmament, and it really has little to do with terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation of terrorists," Wilson said in a March 2, 2003, interview with CNN.

"So you look at what's underpinning this, and you go back and you take a look at who's been influencing the process. And it's been those who really believe that our objective must be far grander, and that is to redraw the political map of the Middle East," Wilson added.

This was the first time that Wilson had spoken out publicly against the administration's policies. It was two and a half weeks before the start of the Iraq war.

But it wasn't Wilson who Cheney was so upset about when he visited the CIA in March 2003.

During the same CNN segment in which Wilson was interviewed, former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright made similar comments about the rationale for the Iraq war and added that he believed UN weapons inspectors should be given more time to search the country for weapons of mass destruction.

The National Security Council and CIA officials said Cheney had visited CIA headquarters and asked several CIA officials to dig up dirt on Albright, and to put together a dossier that would discredit his work that could be distributed to the media.

"Vice President Cheney was more concerned with Mr. Albright," the CIA official said. "The international community had been saying that inspectors should have more time, that the US should not set a deadline. The Vice President felt Mr. Albright's remarks would fuel the debate."

The officials said a "binder" was sent to the Vice President's office that contained material that could be used by the White House to discredit Albright if he continued to comment on the administration's war plans. However, it's unclear whether Cheney or other White House officials used the information against Albright.

A week later, Wilson was interviewed on CNN again. This was the first time Wilson ridiculed the Bush administration's intelligence that claimed Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger.

"Well, this particular case is outrageous. We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger, and for something like this to go unchallenged by US - the US government - is just simply stupid. It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have had an embassy there since the early '60s. All this stuff is open. It's a restricted market of buyers and sellers," Wilson said in the March 8, 2003, CNN interview. "For this to have gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more to the point, it taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build against Iraq."

What Wilson wasn't at liberty to disclose during that interview, because the information was still classified, was that he had personally traveled to Niger a year earlier on behalf of the CIA to investigate whether Iraq had in fact tried to purchase uranium from the African country. Cheney had asked the CIA in 2002 to look into the allegation, which turned out to be based on forged documents, but was included in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address nonetheless.

Wilson's comments enraged Cheney, all of the officials said, because they were seen as a personal attack against the Vice President, who was instrumental in getting the intelligence community to cite the Niger claims in government reports to build a case for war against Iraq.

The former Ambassador's stinging rebuke also caught the attention of Stephen Hadley, who played an even bigger role in the Niger controversy, having been responsible for allowing President Bush to cite the allegations in his State of the Union address.

At this time, the international community, various media outlets, and the International Atomic Energy Association had called into question the veracity of the Niger documents. Mohammed ElBaradei, head of IAEA, told the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003, that the Niger documents were forgeries and could not be used to prove Iraq was a nuclear threat.

Wilson's comments in addition to ElBaradei's UN report were seen as a threat to the administration's attack plans against Iraq, the officials said, which would take place 11 days later.

Hadley had avoided making public comments about the veracity of the Niger documents, going as far as ignoring a written request by IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei to share the intelligence with his agency so his inspectors could verify the claims. Hadley is said to have known the Niger documents were crude forgeries, but pushed the administration to cite it as evidence that Iraq was a nuclear threat, according to the State Department officials, who said they personally told Hadley in a written report that the documents were bogus.

The CIA and State Department officials said that a day after Wilson's March 8, 2003, CNN appearance, they attended a meeting at the Vice President's office chaired by Cheney, and it was there that a decision was made to discredit Wilson. Those who attended the meeting included I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in October for lying to investigators, perjury and obstruction of justice related to his role in the Plame Wilson leak, Hadley, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and John Hannah, Cheney's deputy national security adviser, the officials said.

"The way I remember it," the CIA official said about that first meeting he attended in Cheney's office, "is that the vice president was obsessed with Wilson. He called him an 'asshole,' a son-of-a-bitch. He took his comments very personally. He wanted us to do everything in our power to destroy his reputation and he wanted to be kept up to date about the progress."

A spokeswoman for Cheney would not comment for this story, saying the investigation into the leak is ongoing. The spokeswoman refused to give her name. Additional calls made to Cheney's office were not returned.

The CIA, State Department and National Security Council officials said that early on they had passed on information about Wilson to Cheney and Libby that purportedly showed Wilson as being a "womanizer" and that he had dabbled in drugs during his youth, allegations that are apparently false, they said.

The officials said that during the meeting, Hadley said he would respond to Wilson's comments by writing an editorial about the Iraqi threat, which it was hoped would be a first step in overshadowing Wilson's CNN appearance.

A column written by Hadley that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2003, was redistributed to newspaper editors by the State Department on March 10, 2003, two days after Wilson was interviewed on CNN. The column, "Two Potent Iraqi Weapons: Denial and Deception" once again raised the issue that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

Cheney appeared on Meet the Press on March 16, 2003, to respond to ElBaradei's assertion that the Niger documents were forgeries.

"I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said during the interview. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

Cheney knew the State Department had prepared a report saying the Niger claims were false, but he thought the report had no merit, the two State Department officials said. Meanwhile, the CIA was preparing information for the vice president and his senior aides on Wilson should the former ambassador decide to speak out against the administration again.

Behind the scenes, Wilson had been speaking to various members of Congress about the administration's use of the Niger documents and had said the intelligence the White House relied upon was flawed, said one of the State Department officials who had a conversation with Wilson. Wilson's criticism of the administration's intelligence eventually leaked out to reporters, but with the Iraq war just a week away, the story was never covered.

It's unclear whether anyone disseminated information on Wilson in March 2003, following the meeting in Cheney's office. Although the officials said they helped prepare negative information on Wilson about his personal and professional life and had given it to Libby and Cheney, Wilson seemed to drop off the radar once the Iraq war started on March 19, 2003.

With no sign of weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, news accounts started to call into question the credibility of the administration's pre-war intelligence. In May 2003, Wilson re-emerged at a political conference in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. There he told the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff that he had been the special envoy who traveled to Niger in February 2002 to check out allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the country. He told Kristoff he briefed a CIA analyst that the claims were untrue. Wilson said he believed the administration had ignored his report and were dishonest with Congress and the American people.

When Kristoff's column was published in the Times, the CIA official said, "a request came in from Cheney that was passed to me that said 'the vice president wants to know whether Joe Wilson went to Niger.' I'm paraphrasing. But that's more or less what I was asked to find out."

In his column, Kristoff Had accused Cheney of allowing the truth about the Niger documents the administration used to build a case for war to go "missing in action." The failure of US armed forces to find any WMDs in Iraq in two months following the start of the war had been blamed on Cheney.

What in the previous months had been a request to gather information that could be used to discredit Wilson now turned into a full-scale effort involving the Office of the Vice President, the National Security Council, and the State Department to find out how Wilson came to be chosen to investigate the Niger uranium allegations.

"Cheney and Libby made it clear that Wilson had to be shut down," the CIA official said. "This wasn't just about protecting the credibility of the White House. For the vice president, going after Wilson was purely personal, in my opinion."

Cheney was personally involved in this aspect of the information gathering process as well, visiting CIA headquarters to inquire about Wilson, the CIA official said. Hadley had also raised questions about Wilson during this month with the State Department officials and asked that information regarding Wilson's trip to Niger be sent to his attention at the National Security Council.

That's when Valerie Plame Wilson's name popped up showing that she was a covert CIA operative. The former CIA official who works in the counter-proliferation division said another meeting about Wilson took place in Cheney's office, attended by the same individuals who were there in March. But Cheney didn't take part in it, the officials said.

"Libby led the meeting," one of the State Department officials said. "But he was just as upset about Wilson as Cheney was."

The officials said that as of late May 2003 the only correspondence they had had was with Libby and Hadley. They said they were unaware who had made the decision to unmask Plame Wilson's undercover CIA status to a handful of reporters.

George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, took responsibility for allowing what is widely referred to as the infamous "sixteen words" to be included in Bush's State of the Union address. Tenet's mea culpa came one day after Wilson penned an op-ed for the New York Times in which he accused the administration of "twisting" intelligence on Iraq. In the column, Wilson revealed that he was the special envoy who traveled to Niger to investigate the uranium claims.

Tenet is working on a book titled At the Center of the Storm with former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, which it is expected will be published later this year. Tenet will reportedly come clean on how the "sixteen words made it into the President's State of the Union speech, according to publishersmarketplace.com, an industry newsletter.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Plame Wilson leak for more than two years, questioned Cheney about his role in the leak in 2004. Cheney did not testify under oath, and it's unknown what he told the special prosecutor.

On September 14, 2003, during an interview with Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney maintained that he didn't know Wilson or have any knowledge about his Niger trip or who was responsible for leaking his wife's name to the media.

"I don't know Joe Wilson," Cheney said, in response to Russert, who quoted Wilson as saying there was no truth to the Niger uranium claims. "I've never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson - I don't who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back ... I don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn't judge him. I have no idea who hired him."

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Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

Fitzgerald Focuses on Missing White House Emails

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

More than two dozen emails sent to various senior Bush administration officials between May 2003 and early July 2003 related to covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, are missing, and the special prosecutor investigating the case suspects that the communications may have been destroyed, according to high level sources close to the two-year old probe.

The sources, who are knowledgeable about Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and have read hundreds of pages of grand jury testimony, said the emails in question were sent between May and July 2003 by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, former CIA official Frederick Fleitz, former Cheney aide John Hannah, former Cheney National Security assistant David Wurmser, former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

Fitzgerald also suspects that some emails sent to Vice President Cheney by Libby and senior officials at the CIA as well as Libby and Cheney's email replies during this time were not turned over to Fitzgerald's staff.

The sources added that Fitzgerald had learned about the existence of the missing emails during grand jury testimony given by key players in the case, some of whom are now cooperating with the probe in order to avert an indictment for their own roles in the leak.

The emails contained references to Valerie Plame Wilson's identity and CIA status, but did not say that she was an undercover operative of the CIA. Moreover, according to sources, the emails contained suggestions by the officials on how the White House should respond to what it believed were increasingly destructive comments Wilson had been making about the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence.

The witnesses, who are current and former White House officials who are cooperating in the case, told the grand jury that they communicated verbally and through email with Libby and Rove and other senior officials about Wilson's comments to reporters about the administration's intelligence and how the White House should respond to the media regarding that.

Fitzgerald's staff, however, could not locate the email communication the officials disclosed during their grand jury testimony in the thousands of documents his staff had obtained during the course of his investigation.

Fitzgerald's suspicions about the possibility of evidence destruction arose just a few weeks after he took over the probe into the leak of Plame Wilson's undercover CIA status in early 2004. By then, sources close to the case said, he already believed that Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's then-chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators related to his role in the leak - were hindering his investigation.

Acting on a tip received during the early stages of the investigation that Rove may have withheld or destroyed an email that would have implicated him in the Plame Wilson leak, these sources said, Fitzgerald sent a letter in January 2004 to his boss, then-acting Attorney General James Comey, seeking confirmation that he had the authority to investigate and prosecute individuals for additional crimes, including obstruction of justice, perjury and destroying evidence. The leak investigation had been centered up to that point on an obscure law making it a felony for any government official to knowingly disclose the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

Comey responded to Fitzgerald in writing on February 6, 2004, confirming that Fitzgerald had the authority to prosecute "perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses."

Fitzgerald's suspicions may have been right: on Wednesday, he wrote a letter to Libby's attorneys in response to a defense request for prosecution documents related to the probe. The letter confirmed a new development in the case first published by this reporter in mid-December: that some electronic communication related to various officials' roles in the leak had not been turned over to his investigative staff as ordered by a federal subpoena more than two years ago.

The same day Fitzgerald received the response letter from Comey, the White House faced a deadline for turning over administration contacts with 25 journalists to the grand jury investigating the leak.

Three months earlier, in late 2003, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales enjoined all White House staff to turn over any communication about Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson. Gonzales's directive came 12 hours after senior White House officials had been told of the pending investigation.

In the recent letter sent to Libby's attorneys dated January 23, Fitzgerald says that during the course of his investigation, he had been told that some emails from the offices of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had not been saved. His letter does not claim that any member of the Bush administration discarded the emails, but sources close to the probe say that is what Fitzgerald has been alleging privately.

"In an abundance of caution," Fitzgerald's January 23 letter to Libby's defense team states, "we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."

According to sources, Libby, Rove and Card started sending emails to each other and other administration officials in mid- to late May about the explosive allegations made against the Bush administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the White House of "twisting" the intelligence so it could get the public and Congress to support a pre-emptive strike against Iraq.

One particular email that didn't turn up early on in the investigation is an email Rove sent to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley in early July 2003, which later proved Rove had spoken to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about Plame - a fact that Rove omitted when he was first interviewed by the FBI and during his first grand jury testimony in February 2004.

Hadley was also required to comply with the subpoena and the Gonzales order. But it's unknown whether he turned over the email to Fitzgerald or to Justice Department and FBI investigators some three months earlier. If he did, Fitzgerald knew of its existence all along - even while Rove, for nearly a year, was not being forthcoming with Fitzgerald or the grand jury.

If, in addition to Rove, Hadley also failed to locate and turn over the email, it raises more questions about his own role in the matter.

Hadley was interviewed by investigators to determine if he was involved in the leak, but has so far not entertained questions about his role, if any.

Rove still remains under intense scrutiny for his role in the leak while Fitzgerald responds to the numerous questions asked about the case by the new grand jury he empanelled in November. Fitzgerald has also been dealing with high-profile criminal cases in Chicago while the grand jury in the Plame Wilson case familiarizes itself with the probe.