MacRanger, I think, calls it right. The exposure of Mary O. McCarthy is just the beginning. The MSM is wasting all the ink it’s spilling this morning trying to establish a whistleblower defense. Ms. McCarthy is probably not going to jail. She has most likely already made a deal. It’s her associates in the Pouting Spooks Conspiracy who will be going up the river, with her testifyng against them.

..Mary’s discovery definitely came as a part of a tip, most likely on the promise of immunity, which I find most intriguing and amusing. Imagine a mole on the inside who is now spilling the beans on those leakers – such as Mary – who have been leaking stories over the last three years. Its going to be fun to watch the rats devour one another to save their own hides.

As we all know – or should know – since before and especially during the 2004 election cycle leaks were coming out at a fast and furious pace. It was if the State Department and the CIA had suddenly become a 24 hour news service, leaking information specifically designed to undermine the Bush administration, the war effort, and ulitmately was intended to defeat the President’s reelection effort.

We now know that McCarthy was a hire of Sandy Burglar, a Clintonista, and a heavy contributor to failed Presidential candidate John Kerry. In addition she worked out of the IG’s office of the CIA who would have directly worked on the referral to the JD of the Valerie Plame Game. As the Agency is a small sorority, I immediately wonder just how close she was and is to Valerie Plame.

As I noted from the beginning of the Plame Game, the story was never about Joe Wilson’s boondoggle to Niger per-se, but about an elaborate coup by a group of rogue ops to undermine the President of the United States in war time. This is much more than just the leak of CIA prisons – a story which in itself is false, but about the oldest type of war waged and which the CIA is expert at. That being toppling Governments by misinformation propaganda designed to sow discord among the people. Thus the Plame Game was and continues to be a ruse – a paper tiger- a fact that Fitzgerald and his bungling prosecution continually reminds us of.

Pofarmer asks over on Tom Maguire’s JOM:

The Fitzgerald investigation has been handled as an ivestigation of the administration and not like a “leak” investigation from the get go. Ergo, we know who the leaker is, but there’s no charges.

Fitz is from Chicago, which is highly Democratic.

So, what I want to know.

Who reccommended Fitz at the beginning of the chain?

Is Fitz just a useful idiot, or is something a little more/less sinister involved.

————————————————
SOME BACKGROUND

On October 3, 2003, George W. Bush nominated James Comey, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to the post of Deputy Attorney General. Comey was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on December 9, 2003.

New York Magazine profile of Comey.

George W. Bush chose one of the worst grandstanding prosecutors in the country, a Reinhold Niebuhr-quoting, statist liberal, who had recently sent Martha Stewart to prison “for lying” about a crime which was never proven to have occurred, to the Number 2 position in his Justice Department.

This unsound and unprincipled appointment would have the gravest consequences. The failure of the Bush Administration to safeguard the rights of Martha Stewart, and other victims of Comey’s over-reaching, opportunistic, and bullying prosecutions, would ultimately backfire on the administration itself.

It is known that by March 2004 Comey was quarreling with the White House over surveillance. Here is one leftwing account, describing the circumstances of one policy battle, and the application by Bush of an uncomplimentary nickname to Comey:

In March 2004, John Ashcroft was in the hospital with a serious pancreatic condition. At Justice, Comey, Ashcroft’s No. 2, was acting as attorney general…. (Jack) Goldsmith (head of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel) raised with Comey serious questions about the secret eavesdropping program, according to two sources familiar with the episode. He was joined by a former OLC lawyer, Patrick Philbin, who had become national-security aide to the deputy attorney general. Comey backed them up. The White House was told: no reauthorization.

The angry reaction bubbled up all the way to the Oval Office. President Bush, with his penchant for put-down nicknames, had begun referring to Comey as “Cuomey” or “Cuomo,” apparently after former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who was notorious for his Hamlet-like indecision over whether to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s. A high-level delegation—White House Counsel Gonzales and chief of staff Andy Card—visited Ashcroft in the hospital to appeal Comey’s refusal. In pain and on medication, Ashcroft stood by his No. 2.

But, even before he was confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Comey had taken advantage of John Ashcroft’s remarkably scrupulous personal recusal to appoint as Special Council, Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

Fitzgerald would, of course, prove to be a prosecutor strongly reminiscent of Comey himself, preening for an admiring press, while lodging perjury charges against a trophy-class target based on contradictory witness accounts, having found no evidence to support the theory that any crime was ever committed in the first place.

Relations between Comey and the White House worsened after June 2004, when Comey (with Justice department associates Goldsmith and Philbin) held a not-for-attribution background press briefing to announce that the Justice Department was disavowing the August 2002 so-called “Torture memo” written by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. Wrangling over new definitions of permissible forms of interrogation continued through December.

A leftwing view of conflicts between Justice Department liberals and the White House appeared in Newsweek.

In April 2005, James Comey announced that he would be resigning later that year. He was quickly hired as General Counsel and a Senior Vice President by Lockheed Martin.

Mary McCarthy’s ties to the Clinton Administration and Kerry campaign (and via Beers implicitly to the Pouting Spooks VIPS organization) were identified by Rick Ballard of YARGB (writing at Just One Minute):

National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger announced today the appointment of Mary O’Neil McCarthy as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs. Mrs. McCarthy succeeds Rand Beers.

Hat tip to AJStrata.

The New York Times reports:

Public records show that Ms. McCarthy contributed $2,000 in 2004 to the presidential campaign of John Kerry, the Democratic nominee.

UPDATE

Tom Maguire finds the Times’s report just a bit short of complete:

However, per public records at Open Secrets, we can easily find the $2,000 donation to Kerry, a $5,000 donation by Mary O. McCarthy to the Ohio DNC, a $2,000 donation by a Michael J McCarthy from the same address (Husband, brother, bro-in-law, dad? I’ll guess hubby), and a $500 donation to Barbara Mikulski, all in 2004.

————————————
FURTHER UPDATE

Spook86 draws upon an insider’s understanding to put McCarthy’s rank & career in perspective:

Ms. McCarthy had been an agency employee for 22 years at the time of her dismissal. She had strong ties to the Clinton Administration; disgraced former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (of “Secrets Down My Pants” fame) engineered her appointment as Special Assistant to the President for Intelligence Programs in 1998. Before that, she held a similar post at the National Intelligence Council (NIC), and previously served as National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Warning (1994-1996), and the Deputy NIO for Warning (1991-1994).

You’ll note that many media accounts describe the leaker as an “analyst,” suggesting that she was, at best, a mid-level staffer. That was hardly the case; few analysts make the jump from a regional desk at Langley to the White House. A “National Intelligence Officer” is the equivalent of a four-star general in the military, or a cardinal in the Catholic Church. There are only a handful of NIOs in the intelligence community; they are in charge of intelligence community efforts in a particular area. As a senior officer for Warning, Ms. McCarthy was tasked, essentially, with preventing future Pearl Harbors. Observers will note that McCarthy’s tenure in that role coincided with early strikes by Islamofacists against the United States, including the first World Trade Center bombing, and the Khobar Towers attack. It could be argued that Ms. McCarthy’s performance in the warning directorate was mediocre, at best–but it clearly didn’t affect her rise in a Democratic Administration.

Equally interesting is her meteoric rise within the intelligence community. According to her bio, she joined the CIA as an analyst in 1984. Within seven years, she had rise to a Deputy NIO position, and reached full NIO status by 1994. To reach that level, she literally catapulted over dozens of more senior officers–and I’m guessing that her political connections didn’t hurt. By comparison, I know a current NIO, with a resume and academic credentials more impressive than Ms. McCarthy’s, who reached the position after more than 20 years of extraordinarily distinguished service. McCarthy’s rapid advancement speaks volumes about how the Clinton Administration did business, and sheds new light on the intelligence failures that set the stage for 9-11. We can only wonder how many other political hacks climbed the intel food chain under Clinton–and remain in place to this day…

.. I also detect the whiff of sour grapes in her motivation for leaking information to the Post. At the time she talked with reporter Dana Priest, Ms. McCarthy was apparently working in the CIA Inspector General’s Office. The agency, citing the Privacy Act, hasn’t divulged her pay grade or title at the time of her firing, but it seems certain that she was not at the NIO level. After the rarefied air of the Clinton White House, McCarthy had been banished to a relative backwater at Langley, and she was likely upset by the apparent demotion.

————————————
And look who admits knowing her, but “doesn’t consider her a friend,” Pouting Spook, VIPs member, and Plame Pal Larry Johnson himself:

Let me state at the outset that the officer in question, Mary McCarthy, is an old acquaintance. I hasten to add that I do not consider her a friend. She was my immediate boss in 1988-89 and was instrumental in my decision to leave the CIA and take a job at the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. Mary, in my experience, was a terrible manager. I left the CIA in 1989 despite having received two exceptional performance awards during my last eight months on the job because I could not stand working under her.

But Johnson is ready to perform some pretty demanding intellectual acrobatics to defend her:

I am struck by the irony that Mary McCarthy may have been fired for blowing the whistle and ensuring that the truth about an abuse was told to the American people. There is something potentially honorable in that action; particularly when you consider that George Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak misleading information for the purpose of deceiving the American people about the grounds for going to war in Iraq. While I’m neither a fan nor friend of Mary’s, she may have done a service for her country.

Mary McCarthy

A variety of news sources are reporting that Mary McCarthy, a veteran CIA officer employed by the agency’s Inspector General’s Office has been identified as having illegallly given classified information to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.

McCarthy, previously an employee of the NSA and currently nearing retirement, failed a polygraph test. She then admitted to more than a dozen unauthorized meetings with Priest, at which she supplied a variety of classified information, not all the content of which has so far been identified. It is clear, however, that it was McCarthy who provided the classified information leading to the Washington Post’s published reports of secret prisons in Eastern Europe, for which Priest received a 2006 Pulitzer Prize.

The case is now under review by the Justice Department, and an indictment is expected.

NBC — AP

CSIS bio (both photo & bio have been removed):

Prior to joining CSIS in August 2001, Mary O. McCarthy was a senior policy adviser to the CIA’s deputy director for science and technology. Until July 2001, she served as special assistant to the president and senior director for intelligence programs on the National Security Council (NSC) Staff, under both Presidents Clinton and Bush. From 1991 until her appointment to the NSC, McCarthy served on the National Intelligence Council. She began her government service as an analyst, then manager, in CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, holding positions in both African and Latin American analysis. From 1979 to 1984 she was employed by BERI, S.A., conducting financial, operational, and political risk assessments for multinational companies and banks. Previously she had taught at the University of Minnesota and was director of the Social Science Data Archive at Yale University. McCarthy has a B.A. and M.A. in history from Michigan State University, an M.A. in library science from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Social Change and the Growth of British Power in the Gold Coast (University Press of America, 1983).

Holy Mackerel! The Washington Post defends George W. Bush’s declassifying information in order to defend policy, and comes pretty darn close to calling Joe Wilson a liar. I certainly wish this one was a signed editorial; I’d like to keep an eye out for the author.

Rick Moran starts by commenting on the above piece, but turns to noting the absence of coverage by the Press in connection with L’Affaire Plame of the highly newsworthy story of the Pouting Spooks war on George W. Bush. Much of the MSM has for many months studiously failed to notice:

the knife sticking out of the back of the Bush Administration; a knife planted by a group of leakers — organized or not — at the CIA who, unelected though they were, took it upon themselves to first try and prevent the execution of United States policy they were sworn to carry out, and failing that, trying to destroy in the most blatantly partisan manner an Administration with which they had a policy disagreement…

..by failing to illuminate this story by placing all the revelations in the context of the continuing war by the CIA against the Bush Administration, an enormous disservice is done to the American people. Because in the end, in order to find the truth of the matter, you have to understand the motivating factors of both sides. And the way writers are approaching the story now, that just isn’t happening.

Article II, Section 1. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
— Constitution of the United States .
——————————-

I’m not going to repeat the big news story of the day, except to note that documents released today, in a filing by the defense in the I. Lewis Libby case, indicate that Scooter Libby had the president’s permission to release to the press information contained in a certain previously classified National Intelligence Estimate.

The Left was jumping for joy today. The ebullient Andrew Sullivan ran the story under the headline, BUSH NAILED.

One so hates to spoil the little rascals’ fun, but the left’s joy, and fondly imagined hope for future legal havoc based on all of this, rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the US Constitution.

There is no such thing as classified information which the President of the United States could potentially be prosecuted for publishing on the front page of the New York Times.

The president is the chief executive, the head of the entire Executive Branch. The Executive Branch of the US Government has no power to do anything, but by the will of the president. If any document or information is classified, it is classified by presidential authority extended down a chain of command.

The only purpose for information to be classified is to assist the president in defending the United States and in implementing his own policies. In a circumstance in which it were to the advantage of the president to declassify some document, or piece of information, in order to defend his policies in domestic political debate, it is completely within the competence of the president to classify or declassify either at will. And it would not be in the least surprising, if a president delegated the same authority on some occasions, at least, to the vice president, or even to the vice president’s chief of staff.

Clarice Feldman has a new article on American Thinker, in which she demonstrates a pattern of protecting the reputation of Patrick Fitzgerald by such representatives of the establishment media as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

Ms. Feldman also reviews the arguments in Lewis Libby’s Motion to Dismiss identifying the core argument:

The decision whether to continue the Special Counsel’s investigation long after the acts regarding the disclosure of Ms. Plame’s occupation were established required a careful balancing of the interests. On the one hand, there is a law enforcement interest in investigating potential false-statement and perjury offenses. On the other hand, there is a public interest in avoiding confrontations that Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation and prosecution continue to entail. There is also a public interest in avoiding continued distraction of our nation’s highest officials well after it has become apparent that the alleged crime that was the intended focus of the investigation did not in fact occur. Those competing interests should have been weighed by properly appointed principal officers of the United States. Because the Special Counsel was given the power to operate without any supervision of direction in contravention of the Appointments Clause, that did not happen in this case.

On which basis, she concludes:

I think that Libby has made a persuasive hard-to-answer argument that the Prosecutor was improperly appointed and granted powers in a way that violates the Statute and the Constitution, and that the indictment should be dismissed.

NBC News reported this evening that Naji Sabri, Iraq’s Foreign minister under Saddam Hussein, served in the period leading up to the US invasion, as a paid informant to the CIA.

NBC News’ informants sound rather like the usual gang of leaking, pouting spooks endeavoring to inflict revenge on the Bush Administration for past policy differences. NBC’s informants are described as “Intelligence sources” speaking “on condition of anonymity.”

The goal of these revelations is apparently to make public information in the possession of US Intelligence prior to the invasion testifying to Saddam’s not possessing weapons of mass destruction.

For example, consider biological weapons, a key concern before the war. The CIA said Saddam had an “active” program for “R&D, production and weaponization” for biological agents such as anthrax. Intelligence sources say Sabri indicated Saddam had no significant, active biological weapons program. Sabri was right. After the war, it became clear that there was no program.

Another key issue was the nuclear question: How far away was Saddam from having a bomb? The CIA said if Saddam obtained enriched uranium, he could build a nuclear bomb in “several months to a year.” Sabri said Saddam desperately wanted a bomb, but would need much more time than that. Sabri was more accurate.

On the issue of chemical weapons, the CIA said Saddam had stockpiled as much as “500 metric tons of chemical warfare agents” and had “renewed” production of deadly agents. Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had “poison gas” left over from the first Gulf War.

Both Sabri and the agency were wrong. NBC tells us. But, since NBC News has neglected to look in Syria, I’m afraid I’m not willing to take their word on that one.

It’s kind of sad when your own leak, even partially, supports your opponent’s case, and damages your own: Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had “poison gas” left over from the first Gulf War.

But, at least, a poor pouting spook can count on his media allies to bang down the gavel, and declare him right in the end.

It might be the fact that NBC News was selected as the venue for the leak that is the most interesting detail here, really. It may indicate that some previously favored media allies are, at this point beginning to get the wind up, are thinking of possible legal consequences to themselves, and are currently less eager to cooperate than they have been in the past.

The Washington Post tries a little pre-emption in tomorrow’s edition:

The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws.

In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI’s Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the two cases.

Numerous employees at the CIA, FBI, Justice Department and other agencies also have received letters from Justice prohibiting them from discussing even unclassified issues related to the NSA program, according to sources familiar with the notices. Some GOP lawmakers are also considering whether to approve tougher penalties for leaking.

In a little-noticed case in California, FBI agents from Los Angeles have already contacted reporters at the Sacramento Bee about stories published in July that were based on sealed court documents related to a terrorism case in Lodi, according to the newspaper.

Some media watchers, lawyers and editors say that, taken together, the incidents represent perhaps the most extensive and overt campaign against leaks in a generation, and that they have worsened the already-tense relationship between mainstream news.

Fiat justitia, ruat coelum.[Let justice be done, though the Heavens fall.]

Special Prosecutor Patrick’s Fitzgerald’s latest filing contains a paragraph referring to a “transcript of the conversation” between the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, columnist Robert Novak (who started the whole thing), and an official whose name was redacted. Editor & Publisher infers that this may imply that Woodward taped the conversation, or (at the very least) that he made a very detailed set of notes.

Leftblogger emptywheel took that transcript, converted it to an MS WORD document, and went to work counting spaces in the redacted portion.

Using one inch margins and Times New Roman, I recreated the passages at paragraph 43 and paragraph 52 that name Woodward’s (and Rove’s) source. Richard Armitage fits at paragraph 53, and Armitage fits in both spaces at paragraph 43. Cheney, Bush, Hadley, Rice, Joseph, Bolton … none of those alternatives fit. The one other possibility I can think of (it is slightly shorter than Armitage, but with the non-justified pages, it’s hard to tell) is Fleischer. Update: I think Rumsfeld is an outside possibility, too. Note that the passage at 43:

Moreover, Libby has been given a transcript of the conversation between Woodward and [redacted] and Novak has published an account briefly describing the conversation with his first confidential source ([redacted]).

Which would still allow two different sources for Novak and Woodward.

——————————

Meanwhile Tom Maguire (who is the lead specialist in L’Affair Plame coverage) suspects that Fitzgerald’s lengthy redaction of the overview of his investigation means he’s hiding something significant.

If Fitzgerald is seriously probing some sort of cover-up, that might explain the silence of Bob Novak. And there is surely *something* going on – on p. 2 Fitzgerald promises a detailed overview of the investigation on pages 2-12, all of which are redacted. [NOTE – well, there was something going on at one time – maybe this is water under the bridge now. Fitzgerald did say in a Miller-related filing that his investigation was substantially completed, except for the testimony of Cooper and Miller.]

So, is this all about the Karl Rove angle, with Matt Cooper and the missing Hadley email? Or is there more, and might that “more” explain Novak’s continued silence?

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued on Friday that he is really trying a perjury case, and the question of Valerie Plame’s covert status does not matter, i.e., it doesn’t matter if any crime was ever committed in the first place.

All a prosecutor has to be able to do, in Fitzgerald’s proposed Amerika, is to demonstrate that he can contradict details of the sworn testimony of the minutiae of the activities and conversations two years back of a senior government official intensely occupied with the affairs of state, and he is entitled to a conviction.

Convictions for the crime of obstructing investigations have become a popular prosecutorial fallback in cases like this where it is found to be impossible to prove that anyone ever committed the initially alleged crime. Martha Stewart was successfully imprisoned in just such a fashion, essentially for the crime of protesting her innocence of insider trading. No insider trading was ever proven, but Martha went to jail anyway.

By a curious coincidence, Mr. Fitzgerald owes his appointment to Martha’s prosecutor, Mr. James Comey.

Guillermo Christenson replies with devastating results to Paul Pillar’s recent attack on the Bush Administration in Foreign Affairs:

CIA officers on the cusp of retirement often enroll in a seminar that is supposed to help them adjust to life after the agency — teaching them, for example, how to write a resumé. I’ve begun to wonder if part of that program now includes a writing seminar on how to beat up on the Bush administration. The latest such blast comes from Paul Pillar, who, over the course of his long career, was arguably a central player in the CIA’s analysis of the Middle East, in particular Iraq. But now Mr. Pillar has decided to disclose to the world, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, that he thought all along that the war was a bad idea, and that the president and his advisers ignored his intelligence.

Why Mr. Pillar would even attempt to argue that the White House ignored the CIA’s intelligence is beyond me — as innumerable investigations have demonstrated, all of the “intelligence” within his responsibility was 100% in agreement that Iraq posed a serious danger and that it had an active program for acquiring WMD. Over the course of a decade and a half, and thousands of pages of intelligence analysis, it is hard to think of anyone in the government who was more directly involved in reaching the wrong conclusions about what was going on in Iraq than Mr. Pillar himself.

But let’s put all that aside for the moment and conjecture that Mr. Pillar actually did change his mind about all that work he’d done, and that he really did think the intelligence didn’t support the case for war. If that was truly so, no one was better positioned to make the case against war within the government than Mr. Pillar himself. He could have personally drafted a National Intelligence Estimate, or any number of other types of memoranda, for senior readers in government, recording for all in black and white what was really going on in Iraq. He could, furthermore, have shared that analysis with every single member of Congress by writing less-classified summaries of the conclusions, as is often done.

So why did Mr. Pillar fail to take these steps? Again, as the person in charge of assessing Iraq, if he really believed that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S., we’re owed an explanation of why none of the consequences of going to war — economic costs, military and civilian casualties — were important enough for him to do something about it when it mattered. According to Mr. Pillar, it was only a year into the war that such an analysis was even undertaken, and then only at the request of the administration. The other major intelligence estimate performed before the war was the 2002 NIE on WMD, “infamous,” as Mr. Pillar calls it, because it was so wrong.

The fact is, no other issue in the history of the CIA is as deserving of the title “Mother of all Intelligence Failures” as the debacle over the CIA’s analysis of Iraq. Take your pick of the many studies that have tried to understand why the intelligence was so inaccurate, but the basic conclusion underlying all of them is the same: The CIA’s analysis and collection on Iraq was flat-out wrong over the course of many years — first in missing the fact that Iraq had WMD before the Gulf War, and then, well, you know the rest.

Paul Pillar was right in the thick of the process and substance that reached those conclusions. Had he actually written a warning to the administration against going to war before the war, his conclusions could not have rested on any of the CIA’s intelligence analysis, but instead on his own political views against the administration — something which he has made no bones about in discussions with think-tank audiences long before he left the agency. This, incidentally, is prohibited behavior according to the professional practices of the CIA, the equivalent of betraying attorney-client confidentiality.

Not merely content to have played a leading role in the Iraq intelligence failure, Mr. Pillar is now following in the footsteps of others like Michael Scheuer, in undermining whatever credibility and access the CIA still may have with policymakers. By violating his confidences, Mr. Pillar is ensuring that those who succeed him — those who are, I hope, trying to fix the many problems facing the CIA — will be even less likely to see any real impact from their work because the president and his advisers will be loath to trust them.

For decades, there has been a common understanding that CIA analysts play a role roughly analogous, for policymakers, to experts whose opinions are sought in confidence, such as lawyers or accountants. Presidents and their advisers have felt comfortable in relying on analysts, in theory at least, for unbiased information and conclusions — and for keeping their mouths shut about what they learn. Presidents, secretaries of state, and others have given the CIA access into the inner sanctum of policymaking in the belief that the CIA would not use the media or leaks to influence the outcome.

For a CIA officer to discard this neutral role and to inject himself in the political realm is plain wrong. It will end up making the CIA even less relevant than it is today — if that is possible.

Earlier Post