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Ashcroft rove ties scrutinized Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Ashcroft, Rove ties scrutinized
Leak investigation grows to State, Defense
NBC, MSNBC and news services
NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — Democrats are stepping up calls for an independent investigation of the leak of a CIA officer’s identity, charging that political ties between Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House political adviser Karl Rove represent a clear conflict of interest. Meanwhile, a senior administration official told NBC News on Friday that the Justice Department set a deadline for the White House to turn over documents related to the investigation.
A COMPANY controlled by Rove, who stands accused by the CIA officer’s husband of at least condoning the leak, was paid more than $300,000 by Ashcroft’s 1994 Senate campaign in Missouri for direct mail work and other services, the New York Times reported Friday, citing campaign finance data.
President Bush’s top political adviser also played a role in two earlier Ashcroft gubernatorial campaigns.
Information about the ties between Rove and Ashcroft has emboldened Democrats to push harder for a special counsel to investigate the leak.
“Given allegations about the involvement of senior White House officials and the past close association between the attorney general and one of those officials, the investigation should be headed by a person independent of the administration,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement issued Thursday. “If there ever was a case for the appointment of a special counsel, this is it.”
The White House also honed its criticism of those calling for a special counsel, saying the accusation that Bush administration officials were responsible for leaking the name of the undercover CIA officer to syndicated newspaper columnist Robert Novak was based on “unsubstantiated rumors.”
‘SEEKING PARTISAN POLITICAL ADVANTAGE’
“Unfortunately, there are some that are looking through the lens of political opportunism,” said White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. “There are some that are seeking partisan political advantage.”
The agent’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, has said he believes the leak to Novak, who published the woman’s in July, came from the White House both as retribution for his public questioning of Bush’s rationale for going to war with Iraq and as a way to intimidate other administration critics into remaining silent. He originally blamed Rove, but later backtracked, saying that he believes the presidential adviser “condoned” the leak.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department was moving quickly ahead with its investigation, setting a deadline for the White House to turn over materials related to the investigation, according to an administration official who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. The official said it was not immediately clear how long the department gave the White House to produce the documents, but indicated that it was likely that the deadline was set for late next week.
The move came a day after U.S. officials told NBC News that the investigation would soon expand to include the State and Defense departments.
Officials at the two departments told NBC News on condition of anonymity that they expected to receive letters urging them not to delete e-mails and to preserve documents such as telephone logs. Similar letters have already gone to the White House and CIA.
The expansion of the leak investigation was first reported Thursday afternoon by The Associated Press.
The FBI team assigned to the case has already begun conducting interviews of CIA officers, other U.S. officials told NBC News on condition of anonymity. The officials declined to say whom the agents had interviewed.
Interviews of White House staffers could begin as early as Friday, the officials said. Two unidentified senior White House officials have been cited as the source of the leak in news reports.
ACCUSER’S CREDIBILITY CHALLENGED
McClellan reiterated Thursday that administration officials were cooperating with the investigation. “The sooner the Justice Department gets to the bottom of this, the better,” he said at his daily briefing for reporters.
But McClellan refused to disavow efforts by prominent Republicans to discredit Wilson, a strategy a Republican aide in Congress described to The New York Times as “slime and defend.”
McClellan would not answer when asked whether Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie was justified in publicly questioning Wilson’s motives and credibility. Gillespie accused Wilson of being a “partisan Democrat” and noted that Wilson had donated money to the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
McClellan was among those making such statements on Wednesday, when he accused Wilson of “backing away” from his accusations and “changing ... the issue all of a sudden.”
Thursday, he accused Democrats of “looking through the lens of political opportunism. ... I don’t need to go into names. We all know who they are.”
McClellan would not address statements by senators that Ashcroft might need to step aside from the investigation, which was first reported last week by NBC News and MSNBC.com.
The Justice Department has indicated that it has not ruled out the option of naming a special counsel to investigate the leak, but Bush and other prominent Republicans have rejected the idea.
Bush said Tuesday that he was “absolutely confident” that the investigation could be handled within his administration.
But a new Washington Post-ABC poll released Wednesday showed that 69 percent of Americans believe a special counsel should be appointed.
POOL OF POTENTIAL LEAKERS IS BIG
U.S. officials said the team that was assembled Wednesday to conduct the investigation was experienced in investigating leaks and was being led by John Dion, a 30-year career prosecutor who has headed the Justice Department’s counterespionage section since 2002. FBI agents from the counterintelligence and inspections division and from the Washington field office are doing the legwork, the officials said.
Law enforcement experts said the investigators’ first task would be to narrow the list of government officials who were aware of the agent’s identity — a number believed to be in the hundreds. That was expected to be a difficult task.
Former Attorney General Janet Reno, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2000, said the pool of potential leakers in any administration was extremely big.
“Almost inevitably, we find that the universe of individuals with authorized access to the disclosed information is so large as to render impracticable further efforts to identify the leaker,” Reno said. “Almost all leak investigations are closed without having identified a suspect.”
The investigation could also be hampered by the increasingly apparent tension between the CIA and the administration. U.S. officials told NBC News on condition of anonymity that Bush’s senior advisers were angrily accusing the CIA of leaking word of the probe last week to embarrass the White House.
Relations between the agency and the White House have been described as difficult ever since CIA Director George Tenet, under pressure from the White House, publicly accepted responsibility this summer for allowing Bush to make a since-discredited claim in his State of the Union address, even though the CIA itself had more than once warned the White House against using the material.
The claim, that Iraq was looking for enriched uranium in Africa as part of a nuclear weapons program, was discredited among others by Wilson, who looked into the matter for the CIA last year and wrote publicly in July that some intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had been “twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
NOVAK RESPONDS
Novak, meanwhile, has refused to reveal the identities of the two senior administration officials who he said gave him the identity of Wilson’s wife and her occupation with the CIA, which NBC News and MSNBC.com are not reporting.
In a column published Wednesday, Novak wrote that he discovered the woman’s identity when talking with a senior administration official about why Wilson, who had been part of President Clinton’s National Security Council, had been chosen to investigate allegations that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.
Novak also said that the officer’s identity was widely known in Washington and rebutted assertions that the administration officials called him specifically to leak the woman’s name.
“It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger,” he wrote.
Novak also said that he followed up the information with a CIA official, who he said asked him not to reveal the woman’s name but who did not indicate that doing so would cause significant harm. “If he had, I would not have used her name,” wrote Novak, who accused Wilson of being part of a “massive political assault on President Bush.”
NBC’s David Gregory, Jim Miklaszewski, Brook Hart and Norah O’Donnell; MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson and Mike Brunker; and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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