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Is there a Norquist/Rove/Gannon nexus in the Plame scandal?

Following the confirmation of Karl Rove's involvement in the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, the blogosphere is awash in speculative theories.  This is my entry.

Tex MacRae

Analysis of the relevance of the Gannon interview of Ambassador Joseph Wilson in which he refers to a now-notorious INR memo naming Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent seems to hit a brick wall as people try to imagine how a nobody like Gannon got his hands on a sensitive classified government document. I’d like to suggest that dismissing Guckert as an obscure wingnut is a mistake rooted in a misunderstanding of the way conservative/Republican activism works in Washington. Guckert actually associated regularly with some of the most powerful people in Washington.

Joshua Micah Marshall on TPM quotes an NYT article from July 16 and asks a couple of questions that have been bugging me as well. Josh: “Who requested that the memo be written? Who actually wrote it? Why does it contain the inaccuracies the CIA claims it does? Who were the administration officials who continued to circulate the classified document to conservative news outlets even after Plame's identity was initially revealed? And how did it get into the hands of Jeff Gannon?”

Well, I have a theory about the last two questions. When Karl Rove wants to distribute information to The Base, whom does he call? Here’s my nomination:

Norquist_guckert_1103ajc

Yes, that would be Grover Norquist, friend of Karl Rove and Conservative BaseMeister. Notice who’s just over Grover’s shoulder in that November 23, 2003 AJC photo. Yes, that would indeed be JD Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon.

First, let’s connect the dots between long-time buddies Norquist and Rove. Here are a few quotes from an April 26, 2001 profile of Norquist by Robert Dreyfuss, writing for The Nation:

To a significant degree, George W. Bush owes his election to Norquist, whose early support was crucial in lining up the right behind the Texas governor's campaign. And if Bush, born in the Ivy League haunts of the Eastern Establishment but raised in the conservative oilfields of West Texas, has managed to forge a governing coalition that includes both Big Business and the far right, Norquist's skillful ability to hold that coalition together is a big reason why.

In November 1998, immediately after Bush was re-elected as Texas governor and began eyeing the White House, Norquist traveled to Austin to meet Bush and Karl Rove, Bush's political guru, whom Norquist has known for two decades. Norquist came away convinced that Bush, if not an authentic conservative, was at least the right's best hope. On five issues, he says--tax cuts, school choice, tort reform, pension reform and paycheck protection--Bush said the right things, and that was enough for Norquist. At the time, for most conservatives Bush was an unknown quantity, and his closeness to his father (whom Norquist excoriated in his book for faithlessness and errors of political judgment) made the right queasy. Others in the race, like Steve Forbes, Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer, all had appeal to the far right--but Norquist, upon returning to Washington, started spreading the word that the right ought to line up behind Bush.

According to several sources, Norquist's support was decisive in swinging the bulk of the conservative movement into Bush's camp by early 1999. "It's not disputable," says Fund of the Wall Street Journal. Then, when Bush ran into trouble battling Senator John McCain of Arizona, Norquist mobilized the right against McCain in the early primaries, especially in South Carolina--and, in the process, cemented his ties to Bush and Rove.

[…]

Launched in 1993 to rally conservatives against President Clinton's healthcare plan, Norquist's invitation-only, off-the-record Wednesday meetings started small, with a dozen or so activists in attendance; a year later, it had grown to forty-five, including representatives of the National Rifle Association, on whose board Norquist serves; the Christian Coalition; the Heritage Foundation; and staffers from Gingrich's office. Since the arrival of President Bush, attendance has climbed to more than a hundred--including representatives of the White House, the Republican National Committee and the House and Senate leadership. Reporters and editors from conservative media outlets are frequent attendees, along with a smattering of corporate lobbyists. At one recent meeting, topics of discussion ranged from a report on allegedly wasteful federal spending to the campaign of a potential challenger to a Democratic Congressional incumbent. Norquist introduced the day's speakers and allotted ten or fifteen minutes to each. "The meeting functions as the weekly checklist so that everybody knows what's up, what to do," says Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, a conservative pollster who has been a regular attendee for years. Often, more informal get-togethers--along with fundraisers and dinner parties--take place at Norquist's Capitol Hill home, where, she says, the door is always open "and there is always Chinese food."

Apart from the photo, there exists plenty of evidence that JD Guckert was a regular at Norquist’s Wednesdays during the invasion of Iraq and the outing of Valerie Plame. Robert Hahn, a Freeper located in Washington, DC who heads up the Free Republic Network (FRN), had this to say about meeting “Jeff Gannon” at Norquist’s Wednesdays:

Grover Norquist is one of several people who informally advises FRN on a number of issues. By 'informally' I mean that none of these people has any authority over anything we do; they just give us ideas or advice when we ask for it.

As you may know, Norquist's office is host every Wednesday to a meeting that is attended by representives from practically every conservative organization on the planet. The White House, Senator Frist's office, and Speaker Hastert's office also send representatives, and they tell us about the legislative agenda or other policy topics. Conservative candidates from around the country come there to introduce themselves. Virtually any group that has something going on can get a minute or two on the agenda, and I have done so numerous times to promote things the FRN was doing, such as the "Rally for America" events we did back in March. This is also how I was able to arrange for Angelwood (Kathryn Wood, another Freeper) to attend a speech given by President Bush. It is how we met Jeff Gannon of Talon News, who now hosts a program on Radio FR. In short, Grover Norquist has been of enormous help to us in connecting us with other people and organizations that share our goals.

Conservative activist Chuck Muth also confirmed Guckert’s attendance at the Norquist Wednesday meetings, saying, “I don't even recall when or how I first met him. I just never got the impression he was all that big of a deal.  Just one of the hundred or so other people in the room.”

When did JD Guckert start attending the conservative pow-wows of Grover Norquist? Robert Hahn, who posted the statement quoted above on the Free Republic forum in December of 2003 told me in answer to that question, “I think he was there when I started.” Since Hahn refers to receiving help from Norquist in March of 2003, it is surely safe to assume that Guckert was in attendance at the Norquist Wednesdays at least from the beginning of 2003, which would also correspond with the first dates he showed up at the White House press conferences as well as his presence at Freeper pro-war demonstrations in January of 2003.

I think placing Norquist in the food chain through which the contents of the INR memo passed to at least some reporters and likely quite a few Republican activists clears up some of the ambiguities in the Gannon part of the Plame-outing story. Dan Froomkin, in his WaPo column for 2/14/2005 asks, “Did Guckert actually ever get access to an internal CIA memo related to the Plame case?”, concluding, “It seems unlikely.” Froomkin’s conclusion is based on statements by Guckert in an Editor & Publisher interview and the fact that the Wall Street Journal reported on the INR memo around the time Wilson was interviewed by Guckert (Guckert/Wilson interview Part I, Part II, Part III) and the question alluding to the memo was asked.

However, relying on Guckert’s statements has made plenty of people look pretty foolish. At least one statement Guckert made to E &P’s Strupp ("Guckert first attended a presidential press conference in April 2003, he said, just weeks after starting with Talon News.”) in that interview was a flat out lie. Then, Froomkin quotes blogger Tom Maguire making the argument that Guckert had seen the Oct 17 WSJ report and cribbed his questions to Wilson from that, but the Wilson interview happened too close to the publication of that article for Maguire’s theory to be persuasive.

Though the interview was posted in three parts, the first on October 28 and the last on November 3, it can be somewhat dated by a reference to a speech Wilson gave to the DC Rotary club on Saturday, October 11. Wilson says in the Guckert interview that the Rotary club speech was “last week.” Going by that reference we could safely assume (or we could ask Joe!) that the interview occurred sometime in the next seven days or so after October 11, plausibly up to about October 18 or thereabout. Clearly, the interview was all about the memo, so it makes no sense to assume that Guckert read the WSJ and rushed to the phone to call Ambassador Wilson and interview him on the spot. One would think the interview had at least some lead-time. This is why I think that, though the WSJ article has been mentioned repeatedly as a possible source of Guckert’s knowledge of the INR memo, he never availed himself of this excuse, although he has made allusions to the article. I think a quick check of Wilson’s calendar would reveal the truth.

If I’m right about this, Guckert made the first mention of the INR memo in the press. Guckert certainly thinks he “broke” this story, writing on his blog, “It was my reporting the first exposed Ambassador Joe Wilson's deception about how his was chosen for the mission to Niger.”

Guckert says in answer to a question from CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “Well, this memo was referred to in a Wall Street Journal article a week earlier.” But, even if we take this dodgy statement at face value, the WSJ article couldn’t have been a week earlier than the Wilson interview, unless one assumes JD Guckert is more accurate than Joe Wilson. That is really unlikely. It’s far more likely that Guckert or whoever promoted the idea of the interview would have had to contact Wilson to set up the interview, maybe even agreeing in advance to the questions and format. Guckert has said that the posted interview is a transcript – possibly Wilson insisted that it be a straight transcript sans editorial comment.

Ron Brynaert takes the similarity between the Oct 17 WSJ article and Guckert’s question and makes a case for plagiarism. I have a different theory. I think both writers’ description of the memo is the same because they both heard it described that same way, possibly from the same source. This is also consistent with other Guckert statements about “the document.” This is Guckert on July 15, 2004, writing on his jeffgannon.com website:

Valerie Plame brought attention to herself when she went outside the agency to bring in her husband for the Niger mission.  One has to wonder how the United States commits billions of tax dollars to the CIA yet not a single person within the agency was qualified to sail off to Africa to “sip sweet mint tea” with the locals.  Still more puzzling is how a retired second-tier diplomat is supposed to convince anyone to admit to providing uranium to one of the most dangerous men in the world.

A memo written by an INR (Intelligence and Research) analyst who made notes of the meeting at which Wilson was asked to go to Niger sensed that something fishy was going on.  That report made it to the outside world courtesy of some patriotic whistleblower that realized that a bag job was underway.  Novak’s column 15 months later only confirmed what some already knew:  Valerie Plame, a CIA employee had actively promoted him for the task.

I believe Plame was exposed at this point – far sooner than the timeline Wilson suggests.  The classified document that slipped out sometime after the meeting put her name before the public, albeit a small group of inside-the-beltway types, but effectively ended the notion that she was still covert.

[…]

Despite his deception, I was pleased with the interview until I read a front page article in the Washington Post on December 26, 2003 that said the CIA was angry that an INR report was circulating, mentioning Talon News as having written about it.  The source said that the document was false and that whoever wrote it could not have possibly been at any such meeting.  The Senate Intelligence Committee also blew that nugget of disinformation out of the water.  The INR report was right on target.

What is difficult to understand is the reason that the CIA would want to discredit this report.  The first clue came when the agents from the FBI came to my home in March 2003 to question me in connection to the leak probe.  I was flattered to think that I was important enough to be included among the luminaries like Andrea Mitchell, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews who were also named in a Justice Department subpoena of records from the White House.  But most of the questions were about the INR report.  They wanted to know where I got it and what I knew about it.  Of course, as a journalist there wasn’t much I could say without revealing my sources.  I’m sure they were not satisfied, but it made me wonder why they were so interested in a document the CIA said was false.

Now we know. It was true – very true – and it blew a huge hole in the Niger story and the Plame story.  She played a critical role in the Niger trip.  Rush Limbaugh suggested that Plame pushing her husband for the job was the only way it would happen since someone in the administration would have never chosen him.  I have been saying that very same thing for quite some time. If we are to believe that Vice President Cheney was over at Langley breathing down the necks of analysts in order to shape intelligence, how did he not know that Wilson would be sent on a mission he himself requested?

JD is nothing if not faithful to the party line, but in his focus on gloating over what he interpreted as his vindication, he certainly seems to make the case for the INR memo without mentioning the Wall Street Journal.

Apparently chafing at his loss of the spotlight, Guckert is now posting comments on his blog in response to questions about the date of the Wilson interview implying that his contact with Wilson was more extensive than he’s admitted before. In this thread, Guckert posts, “Actually, I first began speaking with Ambassador Wison in September 2003. A formal interview was conducted in October 2003.” While it’s entirely possible that Guckert is exaggerating, surely he’d keep it to a minimum knowing that Fitzgerald could easily haul him in for questioning, especially if any of Guckert’s current statements conflict with the story he told the FBI in March of 2004 (the March 2003 date for the FBI interview in the excerpt above is a typo on Guckert’s part.).

So, here’s how I propose that the INR memo became the subject of the Gannon/Wilson interview.

Karl Rove lateraled the memo to his buddy Grover Norquist, suggesting that he “shop it around” along with the Republican talking points assembled to smear Wilson and figure out how to confront Wilson with all of it, the first objective being to shut him up.

Norquist fills in some of his regulars, including Guckert, on the contents of the memo (which would square with Guckert’s sometimes position that he had never personally possessed the memo.) We can even theorize that the “two people familiar with the memo” cited in McCloud’s Oct 17 WSJ piece come from this same venue.

·Norquist has Guckert call Wilson about an interview. Guckert does so, implying that he has new information about his wife “promoting” him for the Niger trip.

·Wilson refuses to be intimidated into silence, so the interview is set up in the hopes that Wilson might be provoked to say something they can use to smear him or impeach his honesty. Wilson agrees to the interview on the condition that it is printed verbatim, and his comments completely unedited (this is speculation on my part, of course.).

It is true that Guckert is a peripheral character in this story, but in his Kool-Aid induced, bumbling incompetence, he may well be a key to unravelling part of the tapestry of lies and deceit woven by inhabitants of the highest “conservative” and Republican DC elites.

Asked how Guckert was introduced to Norquist’s circle, Chuck Muth said, “Maybe you should ask Bobby Eberle at GOPUSA.com.  He would know when/how Jeff got involved in the movement and gained access to the Wednesday meeting.” Bobby Eberle, one of the few people to have ever been granted the privilege of interviewing the elusive Rove, is also part of the Norquist circle, to the point that Norquist delivered the closing speech at the first GOPUSA Washington conference in late October of 2003, just as his GOPUSA website was publishing the Wilson interview. Maybe Fitzgerald should ask Bobby Eberle about how they scored an interview with Wilson, featuring questions inspired by a leaked classified document. Bob Hahn said about the Wednesday Norquist meetings, “Alas, what happens at Grover's stays at Grover's.” I doubt Fitzgerald would agree.

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