The White House knew in advance that the revelation was coming that President Bush had authorized Scooter Libby to leak government documents to a reporter, and they had a disinformation narrative in place and ready to go when the story broke earlier this week:
“The president did not do anything illegal.”
These were just about the first words out of the mouths of every reporter who broke the story on Wednesday. No one explained how this information came to be reported as fact.
Moving the narrative to the legalities sounds preventative — like the White House was getting out ahead of critics who might accuse the president of breaking the law.
In fact, the White House prefers public debate on the legalities of the leak over a discussion of an aspect that is a lot less savory: their motives.
Why were they so determined to discredit Joe Wilson, the former ambassador who in a recent New York Times op-ed piece had challenged the president’s claim in the State of the Union speech that Iraq had access to uranium?
We know that Vice President Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove were so agitated — threatened — by Wilson’s rebuke that they conspired on a campaign to defame him that was so reckless that it resulted in the unmasking of Wilson’s wife’s secret status as a CIA agent — and eventually to the conspirators’ own undoing.
But what was it that had the Bush team so worried?
Murray Waas has uncovered new information about motivations of the president’s men:
Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush’s 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address — that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon — might not be true, according to government records and interviews.
Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although “most agencies judge” that the aluminum tubes were “related to a uranium enrichment effort,” the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department’s intelligence branch “believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons.”
