Josh Marshall reminds us that Patrick Fitzgerald has a history of run-ins with Judy Miller:
Don't forget: This isn't the first time Plame prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald has tangled with Judy Miller while investigating a leak out
of the Bush White House.
A little more than a year ago, I reported on TPM how Fitzgerald had quite aggressively investigated another
Bush White House leak in late 2001 and early 2002. Fitzgerald had been
investigating three Islamic charities accused of supporting terrorism
-- the Holy Land Foundation, the Global Relief Foundation, and the
Benevolence International Foundation. But just before his
investigators could swoop in with warrants, two of the charities in
question got wind of what was coming and, apparently, were able to
destroy a good deal of evidence.
What tipped them off were calls from two reporters at the New York Times who'd been leaked information about the investigation by folks at the White House.
One of those two reporters was Judy Miller.
Downthread, a TPM poster asks this reasonable question:
What reason would Miller have to protect these charities? HLF was a
palestinian-run org. I think Benevolence and Global Relief
Foundation were saudi.
Well, what if Judy was helping Karl Rove and Grover Norquist out?
This goes back to a long-running feud in Republican and neocon circles that intensified after 9/11. Originally, the conflict was between establishment Republicans and Israel's American Amen Corner, which contained a likudnik faction which devoted a fair amount of hasbara time to demonizing Muslims and Arab Muslims in particular. Grover Norquist, being the conservative BaseMeister I keep harping about, was trying to bring muslims into the conservative fold, arguing (correctly) that they held shared views on many issues dear to social conservatives. Read this article by Norquist in which he explains, in part:
George W. Bush was elected President
of the United States of America because of the Muslim vote.
The what?
That's right, the Muslim vote. There
are roughly six million muslim-Americans. Hard data on their voting habits is surprisingly hard to come by, because national polling groups do not yet include "Muslim" as a full-fledged religious category (Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and "other'). But according to surveys by national Muslim groups, Bush won more than 70 percent of Muslims who voted. In Florida, that totaled 55,000 people, who, according to an exit poll by the Tampa Bay Islamic Center, favored Bush over Gore by 20 to 1. According to this exit poll, Bush got 88 percent of the vote to Gore's four percent, with eight percent voting for Nadar. The margin of victory for Bush over Gore in the Muslim vote was 46,200, many times greater than his statewide margin of victory. The Muslim vote won Florida for Bush.
Of course, the anti-muslim faction hated this. Then came the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This issue of the Republican party embracing Muslims is what Frank Gaffney, various Freepers, neocons and Israel-boosting anti-muslim factions and Norquist parted ways over, in a vicious public brawl. (here, here, here, here, here ) It was in this atmosphere of barely controlled hysteria in Republican ranks over whether Muslims were voters or terrorists who should be rounded up into internment camps or deported (this argument still rages today) that the Fitzgerald Islamic charity probe began.
In the TPM post, Josh writes, "But just before his investigators could swoop in with warrants, two of
the charities in question got wind of what was coming and, apparently,
were able to destroy a good deal of evidence." What evidence would they be destroying? Maybe evidence that would embarrass the White House even more that smiling photos with Sami al-Arian? Who is the White House's go-to guy for the Muslim organizations.....the role that earned Grover Norquist the hatred of the Horowitzians, the Amen-Corner neocons, and the xenophobic right-wing closed-border rabble of the malkin ilk?
Fitzgerald was investigating Muslim charities - the Holy Land Foundation, the Global Relief Foundation, and the Benevolence International Foundation - all associated with the Bush White House and Rove through Grover Norquist. You can be sure that Norquist, directly involved in wooing these very organizations for the Bush campaign through his own Islamic Institute, was under Fitzgerald's scrutiny, which would prevent him from doing the tip-off directly. What a grand scheme to have the Whitehouse's favorite press water-carrier to do it for them.
As Arianna notes in the above-linked post,
The more I'm reading about Judy Miller and her actions leading up to
and during the early days of the war, and then through the unfolding
Plame-Rove-Libby-Gonzalez-Card scandal, the more I’m struck by the
special access and relationships she enjoyed with many of the key
players in the Iraq debacle (which, at the end of the day, is really what Plamegate is all about).
For starters, of course, we have her still unfolding involvement in the Plame leak. Earlier this month, Howard Kurtz
reported that Miller and Libby spoke a few days before Novak outed
Plame -- and I’m hearing that the Libby/Miller conversation occurred
over breakfast in Washington. Did Valerie Plame come up -- and, if so,
who brought her up? There is no question that Miller was angry at Joe
Wilson… and continues to be. A social acquaintance of Miller told me
that, once, when she spoke of Wilson, it was with “a passionate and
heated disgust that went beyond the political and included an
irrelevant bit of deeply personal innuendo about him, her mouth
twisting in hatred.”
Miller’s special relationships go much further than Scooter Libby,
Richard Perle and the rest of the neocon establishment. Take her
involvement as an embedded reporter during the war with the Pentagon’s
Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha -- the unit charged with hunting
down Saddam’s WMD. As extensively reported by both Kurtz and New York Magazine’s Franklin Foer, Miller’s time with the unit was highly unusual.
First, there was the fact that she landed the plum assignment in the
first place. It would give her first dibs on the biggest story of the
war… the hoped-for reveal of Saddam’s much-touted WMD (with much of the
touting done by Miller herself and her special sources). Was this the
reward for her pro-administration prewar reporting?
[...]
Foer cites military and New York Times sources as saying
that Miller’s assignment was so sensitive that Don Rumsfeld himself
signed off on it. Once embedded, Miller acted as much more than a
reporter. Kurtz quotes one military officer as saying that the MET
Alpha unit became a “Judith Miller team.” Another officer said that
Miller “came in with a plan. She was leading them… She ended up almost
hijacking the mission.” A third officer, a senior staffer of the 75th
Exploitation Task Force, of which MET Alpha was a part, put it this
way: “It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission
of this unit, and not for the better.”
What did Miller do to create such an impression? According to Kurtz,
she wasn’t afraid to throw her weight around, threatening to write
critical stories and complain to her friends in very high places if
things didn’t go her way. “Judith,” said an Army officer, “was always
issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat.”
In one specific instance, she used her friendship with Major General
David Petraeus to force a lower ranking officer to reverse an order she
was unhappy about. (Can we stop for a moment and take the full measure
of how unbelievable this whole thing is?)
Unbelievable, yes, but only if Judith Miller was a normal reporter rather than the White House operative she has been revealed as. Maybe Fitzgerald, realizing that the Plame investigation features the same cast of characters as the botched Muslim charity investigation, has decided that this time, they aren't getting away with it.
