Quote of the Week: “Oh, God. I love Karl Rove. He deserves better. He's magnificent. He elected Bush. The country owes him a debt.” -- Dick Morris

Quote of the Week:

“Oh, God. I love Karl Rove. He deserves better. He's magnificent. He elected Bush. The country owes him a debt.”

-- Dick Morris

Shift in Plamegate misinformation on the horizon?

As we noted last week, increased media coverage of the investigation sparked by the unauthorized disclosure of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA operative has been accompanied by widespread repetition of long-ago debunked misinformation. Media reports are filled with claims that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation is -- or should be -- focused solely on potential violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; that disclosure of Plame's employment by the CIA wasn't a crime because it was part of an effort to correct allegedly false claims made by her husband; that Plame couldn't have been outed because everyone already knew she worked for the CIA; that the outing wasn't a crime because her name wasn't used.

None of these things are true, of course, but they are constantly repeated in the media.

Meanwhile, efforts to downplay the seriousness of the investigation continue. A Washington Post editorial went so far as to describe “the accounts given by reporters about their conversations with administration officials” this way:

What has been depicted is an administration effort to refute the allegations of a critic (some of which did in fact prove to be untrue) and to undermine his credibility, including by suggesting that nepotism rather than qualifications led to his selection. If such conversations are deemed a crime, journalism and the public will be the losers.

Of course, there's one little detail the Post left out: those efforts to “undermine his [Wilson's] credibility” included revealing that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, an apparently classified piece of information, the disclosure of which may have damaged U.S. national security efforts. After cleverly omitting mention of evidence of a potential crime, the Post concludes that there is none.

On Fox News Channel, Morton M. Kondracke made the even more baseless assertion that now-discredited reports of Iraq's alleged effort to acquire uranium from Niger were “never one of the major arguments that the Bush administration used for going to war with Iraq.” Kondracke apparently forgot that, in fact, those reports were the basis for claims President Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address and served as the basis for Bush administration efforts to win support for the Iraq war.

But amid the near-constant repetition of long-debunked spin points and increasingly strained efforts to downplay the significance of the investigation, the outlines of a new flavor of conservative misinformation have begun to emerge: The trashing of Patrick Fitzgerald has begun.

Columnist and pundit George F. Will got the ball rolling on the October 16 broadcast of ABC's This Week, when he claimed:

[T]he interesting thing is all this started from the supposed violation of a 1982 statute that has nothing to do with this case; people are now agreed on that. So the special prosecutor has changed statutes in midstream as often happens in these cases. ... So the question is partly now what [Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter”] Libby, [White House senior adviser Karl] Rove, et cetera, did and partly what kind of person is this Fitzgerald, who has spent 22 months of his life chasing a white whale. Is he Ahab?

Fitzgerald, of course, always had a broader mandate than just the 1982 law; his official delegation as special prosecutor made no mention of any specific statute, and he was granted “all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department's investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity.” But Will suggested that Fitzgerald exceeded his original mandate “in midstream,” and Will hinted darkly about “what kind of person” Fitzgerald is.

By the end of the week, Rush Limbaugh was even more explicit. During the October 20 broadcast of his radio show, Limbaugh warned:

LIMBAUGH: [W]e're going to be watching ... very carefully here to see what Fitzgerald does, the special prosecutor here. If he conducts himself in a way that we find over the top, we'll say so. You can count on it. Now, you liberals, you viciously attacked Ken Starr. You went out there and tried to portray him as a sexual pervert, a voyeur. You did everything you could to destroy Ken Starr's reputation and his life, and now you demand that we accept whatever comes down the pike that we must be consistent. Well, it depends on what it is. If it stinks, I will say so. Pure and simple.

In anticipation of some of the claims we expect you'll be hearing a lot in the coming days and weeks, it's worth keeping a few things in mind:

• Fitzgerald was appointed U.S. Attorney by President Bush after being recommended by conservative Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL; no relation) and was named special prosecutor by the Bush Department of Justice. Bush has described his investigation as “dignified.” Fitzgerald was given a broad mandate not limited to investigation of possible violations of any specific laws.

• “Leaks” may happen every day in Washington, as we're frequently told by pundits seeking to dismiss the seriousness of Plame's outing. But leaks of classified information that blow the cover of CIA agents and harm national security are far different from the run-of-the-mill leaks of a politician's position on a piece of legislation or of which consultant hates which members of Congress.

• Outing a CIA asset is serious. That's why former President (and former Director of Central Intelligence) George H.W. Bush said at the 1999 dedication of a CIA building named for him, “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.” And why then-RNC chairman Ed Gillespie conceded in a 2003 interview with MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews that the outing of Valerie Plame would be “worse than Watergate.”

Rush Limbaugh still the only political radio show broadcast on American Forces Radio

Last year, with your help, Media Matters for America drew attention to right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh's presence as the sole political commentator on American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS), a taxpayer-funded service that provides radio programming to American armed forces around the world. In the wake of Limbaugh's reckless and harmful endorsement of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, Media Matters called for AFRTS to remove Limbaugh from its broadcast schedule.

There is no way to truly provide “balance” to Limbaugh's hateful rhetoric, which ranges from calling people “feminazis” to saying “A Chavez is a Chavez. These people have always been a problem” to claiming that women “actually wish” to be sexually harassed. But AFRTS was set to take a step in the right direction by adding progressive radio host Ed Schultz to its broadcast schedule, beginning October 17.

However, AFRTS put those plans on hold at the last minute -- and now claims it never decided to add Schultz in the first place. Defense Department official Allison Barber personally announced the cancellation just three days after Schultz drew attention to Barber's role in a controversial scripted event President Bush held last week. Barber reportedly called Schultz's producer at home on the morning of the 17th with the news that Schultz would not be broadcast on AFR. The Defense Department's apparent decision to cancel Schultz means that Limbaugh will continue as the only political commentator on American Forces Radio and Television Service.

Read more about Rush Limbaugh and American Forces Radio here.

Freeh gives confusing and contradictory description of “source” for Clinton claim; new details about 60 Minutes report emerge

As Media Matters has previously noted, during former FBI director Louis Freeh's October 9 appearance on CBS' 60 Minutes, host Mike Wallace failed to question Freeh about the anonymous source on which he based his claim that, instead of pressuring Saudi Arabia to cooperate with an FBI investigation of the 1996 terrorist bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 Americans were killed, Clinton solicited contributions from the Saudis for his presidential library.

Freeh subsequently appeared on the October 16 broadcast of NBC's Meet the Press, where host Tim Russert did note that Freeh was not in the room for the meeting in question and pressed Freeh who his “usually reliable sources” were and whether they were in the meeting. In response, Freeh gave a confusing and self-contradicting response that first seemed to suggest his “sources” were in the meeting, then that they weren't, then that they were. When Russert sought clarification, Freeh ignored his question:

RUSSERT: Who are these “usually reliable sources”?

FREEH: Well, the usually reliable sources in this case, Tim, are very senior people who had firsthand knowledge of the meeting, who have identity with the principals at the meeting. They're not secondhand sources. They're not hearsay people. I did confirm it with them after the book came out because of some of the questions, and I feel very confident on their information.

RUSSERT: Were they in the meeting?

FREEH: I'm not going to identify my sources, obviously, but I think you have to look beyond that September 24 meeting and put the whole Khobar investigation into context. The New Yorker magazine article, which was in the spring of 2001, actually corroborates the one part of the story, which is that the president didn't seriously or vigorously persecute the request, the request being to get FBI agents into the prison in Saudi Arabia to talk to detainees who would ultimately tell us that the Iranian government was responsible for this attack.

Meanwhile, The American Prospect reported further information about 60 Minutes' refusal to broadcast a rebuttal to Freeh by a former Clinton administration official (CBS eventually agreed to read brief statements by Clinton national security adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger and Clinton spokesman Jay Carson denying Freeh's version of events). According to the Prospect:

[A] close look at the bitter behind-the-scenes back-and-forth between CBS and the Clinton camp in the runup to Wallace's interview reveals fresh details about the whole saga -- and raises further questions about CBS's journalistic conduct.

[...]

Carson said he'd be happy to provide a surrogate, but Wallace said, “We're only interested in the president responding to this,” Carson recalls. They had a similar conversation a week later.

Carson says he didn't hear any more about the story until October 6, three days before the report aired. What's more, he adds, he didn't hear it from 60 Minutes or Wallace but from a New York Post reporter who was calling for a comment on a CBS press release which had already been sent out touting the upcoming Wallace interview.

When the reporter told Carson what was in the press release, he adds, it was the first time the Clinton camp had been made aware of the substance of the allegations.

[...]

What's more, Carson adds, 60 Minutes never elaborated at all on another central charge: That it required George H.W. Bush's pressure on Abdullah to get the Saudis to cooperate with the FBI. “The first we learned of the details of that charge was watching the show on Sunday night,” Carson says.

[...]

[Former Clinton White House counsel Lanny] Davis also says he had conversations with another CBS producer, Robert Anderson. In one, Davis claims, Anderson confirmed that CBS hadn't tried to call anybody who'd witnessed the meeting first-hand. (Freeh's recreation of the meeting had come, as he ambiguously put it, from “usually reliable sources.”)

“He confirmed to me that up until then, he or anyone from 60 Minutes had never called or talked to anyone who was actually in the room,” Davis says. “He said, 'We relied on Louis Freeh and his source. We haven't called anybody who was at the meeting.' ”

The CBS spokesperson responded: “Davis keeps asking why 60 didn't talk to people who were at 'the' meeting. Fact is, President Clinton had more than one meeting with the crown prince, including a one-on-one meeting from which only Clinton would know first-hand what he'd said.” Actually, Wallace did interview Freeh about the specific meeting in question on the show. Referring to a specific scene from page 25 of Freeh's book, Wallace said: “You write this: `Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudis' reluctance to cooperate, and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.'” And Freeh responded: “Well, that's the fact that I'm reporting.”

O'Reilly makes talk-show rounds; announces: “I don't like being famous”

Bill O'Reilly took a few moments out of his whirlwind television talk show blitz this week -- which included appearances on CBS's Early Show, NBC's Today Show, and Comedy Central's The Daily Show, in addition to his own daily TV and radio shows -- to ask Newsday to interview him. And what did O'Reilly have to say to Newsday? That he's sick of all the attention, of course. “I'm as famous as I need to be. I don't like being famous,” O'Reilly sniffed, adding: “I can't take my family and stay in a hotel, so what good is it?”

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.