Waxman: Rice hindering Niger forgeries probe

State Department blocked investigators' access to analyst who had raised alarms about the yellowcake forgeries before the State of the Union in 2003.
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Friday, May 04, 2007

Iraq Intelligence and Nuclear Evidence, Correspondence Regarding the Testimony of Secretary Rice

Committee Seeks Niger Documents and Testimony and Instructs State Department Not to Impede Probe

Today Chairman Waxman sent a letter to Secretary of State Rice (1) informing the Secretary that the legislative affairs officials in the Department should not hinder the Committee’s inquiry into why Secretary Rice and President Bush cited forged evidence to build a case for war against Iraq; (2) advising the Secretary that the Committee will depose a nuclear weapons analyst at the State Department; and (3) requesting relevant documents.

Documents and Links

• Letter to Secretary Rice- PDF
  

House Panel Votes to Subpoena Condoleezza Rice

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 1:21 p.m. EDT

In rapid succession, congressional committees Wednesday ramped up their investigations of the Bush administration by approving a subpoena for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and granting immunity to a key aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

By 21-10, the House oversight committee voted to issue a subpoena to Rice to compel her story on the Bush administration's claim, now discredited, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.

Moments earlier in the committee chamber next door, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-6 to grant immunity to Monica Goodling, Gonzales' White House liaison, for her testimony on why the administration fired eight federal prosecutors. The panel also unanimously approved - but did not issue - a subpoena to compel her to appear.

Simultaneously across Capitol Hill, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved - but did not issue - a subpoena on the prosecutors' matter to Sara Taylor, deputy to presidential adviser Karl Rove.

And in case Gonzales thought the worst had passed with his punishing testimony last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the chairman and top Republican issued a new demand: Refresh the memory that Gonzales claimed had failed him 71 times during the seven-hour session.

"Provide the answers to the questions you could not recall last Thursday," Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, wrote to Gonzales on Wednesday.

© 2007 Associated Press.

House panel approves subpoena for Rice

House panel gives Gonzales aide immunity

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee voted Wednesday to grant immunity to Monica Goodling, a key aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. She had refused to testify, invoking her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

The 32-6 vote by the House Judiciary Committee surpassed the 2/3 majority required to grant a witness immunity from prosecution. A separate vote to authorize a subpoena for Goodling passed by voice vote.

Democrats said the votes were necessary tools to force into the open the story of why the prosecutors were fired and whether they were singled out to influence corruption cases.

The votes instruct a House lawyer to seek an immunity grant from a federal court. The grant would not take effect unless Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., chooses to issue Goodling a subpoena compelling her to testify, Conyers said.

Goodling and her lawyer have invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, saying they believe Democrats have set a perjury trap for her. Conyers said Wednesday he hopes Goodling changes her mind and voluntarily tells the committee her story.

"I do not propose this step lightly," Conyers told the panel. "If we learn something new in the course of our investigation ... we can always stop the process s before the court issues an order."

Congressional Democrats investigating the Bush administration set rapid-fire votes in three committees Wednesday on subpoenas.

"If we are stonewalled then we can't hesitate to call on the powers available to us," said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Those powers include the threat of subpoenas to prod the administration into answering questions on a raft of issues, including the firings of eight U.S. attorneys and President Bush's suggestion, now discredited, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.

Chief among the targets is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose aides have insisted she has answered questions repeatedly before Congress and in the media about Bush's statement on uranium.

"We have hit a brick wall with the secretary of state," Waxman announced Wednesday. Rice, he said, "is giving us no choice but to proceed with a subpoena."

He postponed a vote on issuing a subpoena to former White House chief of staff Andrew Card on the same issue, saying White House Counsel Fred Fielding had make a compromise proposal worth pursuing.

Still, Republicans dismissed the subpoenas as political fishing expeditions by zealous majority Democrats eager to assert their newly won oversight power.

Rep. Tom Davis of Virgina, top Republican on Waxman's committee, called the Rice subpoena duplicative and evidence of a witchhunt. Though the uranium claim was false, Rice already has explained that she believed it to be true at the time.

Waxman's questions to her "have been asked and answered," Davis said.

"Subpoenaing Secretary Rice has more to do with political theater than legitimate oversight goals," said House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

The barrage of subpoenas is an example of the Democrats' newfound power and the plethora of White House business from which they have to choose after six years of a Republican majority that did virtually no executive branch oversight.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

New Evidence of Security Problems at the White House

Monday, April 23, 2007
Disclosure of CIA Agent Identity

Current and former employees of the White House Security Office have reported to Chairman Waxman that there was a systemic failure at the White House to follow procedures for protecting classified information. According to the security officers, the White House regularly ignored security breaches, prevented security inspections of the West Wing, and condoned mismanagement of the White House Security Office.

Documents and Links

• Letter to Former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card Regarding New Evidence of Security Problems at the White House

New Phil Giraldi article about Sibel Edmonds, Waxman

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Former CIA officer Phil Giraldi has a new piece out in the April 23, 2007 print edition of the American Conservative about Sibel Edmonds and our call to have Henry Waxman hold hearings into her case.

Giraldi is an expert in Sibel's case and features prominently in the new film about Sibel, Kill The Messenger.

I've electronically liberated the article in full, all errors are mine etc.

California Congressman Henry Waxman's Oversight & Government Reform Committee has been investigating allegations that the Bush administration might be concealing something about the Niger document forgeries, that it maliciously outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, and that it has looked the other way over massive fraudulent contracting in Iraq. These investigations are admirable and very much in the public interest. He has been less interested in pursuing another matter, however. FBI whistle blower Sibel Edmonds and her numerous supporters both inside and outside of government have been urging Waxman to hold open hearings on her claims regarding malfeasance and corruption among high-level government officials.

Edmonds is subject to a State Secrets Privilege gag order initiated at the request of the Pentagon and State Department, but she has recently elaborated on her allegations, stating that investigations already carried out by the FBI would demonstrate that three former senior officials were involved in illegal weapons sales and other activities that would justify charges of espionage and possibly even treason against them. The three are leading Pentagon neoconservatives Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, as well as former State Department number three Marc Grossman. Edmonds is no crackpot and is considered to be a credible witness, most of whose charges were substantiated both by former FBI officials in 2002 and by the Department of Justice in 2005. Waxman appears to be uninterested in pursuing the matter, however, possibly because Israeli officials and the country's defense industry are believed to have been involved in the weapons diversion activity.

Congressman Waxman is regarded as close to Israel's principal lobby, AIPAC, and even promised Jewish voters back in November 2006 that there would be no Democratic congressional committee chairmen involved with Middle Eastern policy who were not completely supportive of Israel.

As Giraldi says in Kill The Messenger:

All of these people (Perle, Feith) have been investigated by the FBI at one point or another for passing secret information to Israel.

In no cases were any of them convicted. The prosecutions were dropped… in my opinion because of political pressure not to get into this kind of case that involves
'Israel' and 'Espionage'.

I'm not yet ready to write-off the possibility that Waxman will hold hearings into Sibel's case. He has previously promised to do so, and we haven't yet heard from his office that he won't hold hearings. Congress has been in recess for the past two weeks and we'll be attempting to get him on the record one way or other this week. I've been told that a number of prominent-ish people tried to get Waxman to go on the record on Monday (yesterday) in response to Giraldi's new article to no avail - but surely he can't maintain that position, so in the meantime, no news is good news.

Oh - and for those of you who are saying 'Huh? AIPAC? Israel? I thought Sibel's case was about Turkey and the American Turkish Council (ATC)!' Sibel says that both AIPAC and the ATC both essentially operate as fronts for the same criminal organization. Or as Giraldi put it in his earlier article about Sibel's case:

On one level, (Sibel's) story appears straightforward: several Turkish lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies favourable to Ankara. But beyond that, the Edmonds revelations become more serpentine and appear to involve AIPAC, Israel and a number of leading neoconservatives who have profited from the Turkish connection.

I'll keep you updated, of course. Stay tuned, and thanks for your help & support, again.

Chairman Waxman Reiterates Request for Testimony from Secretary Rice

Monday, April 09, 2007
Administration Oversight, Iraq Intelligence and Nuclear Evidence

After receiving an insufficient response from the State Department's Legislative Affairs office, Chairman Waxman reiterates his request for Secretary Rice to testify on April 18 regarding President Bush's claims that Iraq attempted to procure uranium from Niger and other subjects.

Documents and Links

• Letter to Secretary Rice
• Response from State Department

Bush MisAdministration's Out of Control Corruption: The GSA

The GSA chief convened a national teleconference of GSA managers for a briefing from White House political staffers on how they could best use federal government resources to help "our candidates" in 2008.

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Oversight Hearing on GSA

March 28th, 2007 by Jesse Lee

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is currently holding a hearing: “Allegations of Misconduct at the General Services Administration.” The hearing will inquire about allegations that GSA Administrator Lurita Doan failed to follow proper procedures for awarding federal contracts, attempted to intervene in contract negotiations, and engaged in partisan political activities on federal property. We have covered the issues at hand in depth in this post.

Watch the hearing live >>

View the presentation given by Karl Rove aide Scott Jennings at GSA (pdf) >>

--MORE--

Waxman requests information on White House contract with MZM: Look no further, the answer is HERE!

Related
Background
A private firm, MZM, commits a major crime bribing a Congressman and had major access to top secret government computers. Said Congressman is in jail.
Update: Cunningham Scandal; A White House Link?
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Monday, March 26, 2007

Chairman Waxman Requests Information on White House Contract with MZM

As part of the Committee’s ongoing investigation into waste, fraud, and abuse in federal contracting, the Committee has requested information on a $140,000 contract awarded by the Executive Office of the President to MZM, Inc. in July 2002.

The contract with the White House appears to have been MZM’s first prime contract with the federal government. Subsequent investigations of other MZM contracts had uncovered serious irregularities. To date, there has been no examination of the circumstances surrounding the company’s initial contract and the role that White House officials played in the award and execution.

Documents and Links

• Letter to Josh Bolten

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This book answers the question:


The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught.


It reveals the contract was for was for screening the president's mail.

Imagine that. Criminals reading Bush's mail. The information could be valuable to certain foreign agents, like the Larry Franklins of this world.


Editorial Reviews

Book Description

The Pulitzer Prize-winning team that uncovered the biggest bribery scandal in congressional history tells the colorfully sordid story of a scandal reaching into the highest levels of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Congress.

Duke Cunningham was an All-American success story. The Midwestern boy who went off to war, became a hero and rode his fame into Congress, he even bragged that Tom Cruise played him in a popular movie. But the fall of this "Top Gun" was almost as epic and just as cinematic. Today he sits in prison, branded as the most corrupt member of Congress in U.S. history.


To the public, Cunningham was a heroic family man. In reality, he was a hard-drinking, partisan bully with a lavish sense of entitlement and feckless moral compass. In the end, he fed rogues like Brent Wilkes and Mitch Wade millions of dollars in vital post-9/11 contracts in exchange for millions in bribes.

Now, the journalists who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for sending Cunningham to prison uncover new details in a story still unfolding in Washington. The Wrong Stuff chronicles Cunningham's rise and his ignominious fall. It is the saga of a man strong enough to brave enemy fire but too weak to resist the corrupt contractors and lobbyists in the nation's capitol. It is also the story of the dark side of Washington today.

About the Author

The authors were on the team that won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Jerry Kammer has been a correspondent for Copley News Service since 2002. Marcus Stern has been in Copley's Washington Bureau for twenty-two years. Dean Calbreath has been a reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune for more than eight years. George E. Condon Jr. has been Washington bureau chief for Copley since 1984. Stern, Calbreath, and Kammer all received the George Polk award. Stern and Kammer also share the Edgar Poe award.

Waxman Committee Directs RNC to Preserve White House Emails

Most of Rove's emails are from RNC servers.
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Monday, March 26, 2007

Committee Directs RNC to Preserve White House Emails

Citing evidence that senior White House officials are using RNC and other political email accounts to avoid leaving a record of official communications, Chairman Waxman directs the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney ’04 Campaign to preserve the emails of White House officials and to meet with Committee staff to explain how the accounts are managed and what steps are being taken to protect the emails from destruction and tampering.

Documents and Links

• Letter to Marc Racicot
• Letter to Mike Duncan
• E-mails Showing Use of Non-Governmental Accounts for Official Business

Administration Oversight

Keep Off The Hippies

Friday, March 16, 2007

by digby

Ron Brownstein and Matt Cooper were on Hardball today (a refreshingly excellent show when it's hosted by David Gregory instead of you-know-who) discussing the Plame hearing. Brownstein is a good reporter who usually gets it right, but today he betrayed a little bit of that beltway reflexive dismissiveness of anything "the left" finds important. He said that Waxman needed to pick his battles better because playing to the liberal blogosphere with hearings like this will create the same problems for Democrats that Republicans found themselves in when they went after Clinton. Setting aside the fact that the Republicans' "problems" resulted in them holding all three branches of government for six years, this sounds to me like one of those tired GOP talking points that reporters love to parrot because it distances them from the hippies.

It's especially ironic since we've just seen the mainstream press sporting dripping oozing egg yolk all over their faces over the US Attorney scandal, which they also dismissed as a figment of hippy conspiracy mongerer's imaginations. This knee jerk loathing of the left tends to lead them astray and they should check themselves before they do it.

Matt Cooper and David Gregory ably argued that the Democrats can hardly be called overly zealous since this is only the second hearing the congress ever held on the issue and Cooper pointed out that this is hardly a settled issue what with the possible pardon and all. Furthermore, the underlying "crime" that Waxman is getting at isn't the covert agent act which the lying Gorgon Toensing insists on arguing every five minutes. The crime was lying and misleading the United States of America into war, something that the congress damned well should be investigating. Valerie Plame's outing is a window into that crime and the Democrats are wise to explore her story to show just how far the administration was willing to go to cover their tracks. What a prosecutor cannot do --- prosecute a political crime --- the congress surely can.

There is a huge need for the Democrats to develop the record on this administration's many crimes. It's important for our future and it's important for history. What they have done should never, ever be repeated. You had the highest reaches of the white house casually revealing what was clearly "need to know" classified information (which they had no "need to know" in the first place) to reporters, for purely political purposes. The same people who did this later turned around and said that reporters for the Washington Post and NY Times should be investigated by the Justice Department for revealing classified information that was not released purely to punish a political enemy, but rather in true whistleblower fashion, to tell the nation what its government was illegally doing.

We now know that in the case of the NSA spying stories, the Attorney General personally intervened to stop an internal investigation of the program when it came too close to him, but allowed those who were investigating that alleged treason of the NY Times to carry on.

This is all part of a very large mosaic of government secrecy, political backstabbing and abuse of power. Those of us who were screaming about this until we are hoarse were dismissed out of hand when we argued that no administration should be allowed to seize such unchecked power and the assumption among the establishment was that it was just more of our "unhinged" hysteria.

It wasn't. This stuff happened and it's likely only the tip of the iceberg. If the press can get past their loathing of the dirty hippies for five minutes they will see that not only have we been right, we have been flogging some amazingly good stories for the past six years that had they bothered to report them would have been journalistic coups. We really aren't that nuts --- and the Bush administration really is that bad.

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digby 3/16/2007 06:20:00 PM Comments (101) | Trackback (0)

The Ides of March 2003: FRANK RICH - The March to War

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Ides of March 2003

By FRANK RICH

Published: March 18, 2007

A chronology of some of the high and low points in the days leading up to the national train wreck whose anniversary we mourn this week.

TOMORROW night is the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s prime-time address declaring the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the broad sweep of history, four years is a nanosecond, but in America, where memories are congenitally short, it’s an eternity. That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now ...” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

By the time the ides of March arrived in March 2003, these warning signs were visible on a nearly daily basis. So were the signs that Americans were completely ill prepared for the costs ahead. Iraq was largely anticipated as a distant, mildly disruptive geopolitical video game that would be over in a flash.

Now many of the same leaders who sold the war argue that escalation should be given a chance. This time they’re peddling the new doomsday scenario that any withdrawal timetable will lead to the next 9/11. The question we must ask is: Has history taught us anything in four years?

--MORE--

Waxman letter to White House post Plame hearing

http://oversight.house.gov/Documents/20070316154127-11403.pdf

Eye on Corporate Espionage

Waxman Letter Seeks More Info on Case Involving Barbour Griffith Firm
By Kate Ackley

Roll Call Staff
March 14, 2007

A bizarre web of legal cases involving corporate spying and one of Washington, D.C.'s top lobbying firms has piqued the curiosity of a Congressional committee that has broad oversight powers.

A current inquiry could result in "possibly exposing more details about a matter already filled with plenty of intrigue and putting a lobbying firm in the unenviable situation of going under the Congressional microscope.

Valerie Plame to Testify at Waxman Libby Outing Hearing

Valerie Plame to Testify

March 08, 2007

ABC News' Tom Shine Reports: Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has announced that Valerie Plame Wilson will testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Friday, March 16th.

Other witnesses are also expected to appear but their names have not yet been released.

March 8, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (0)

Valor and Squalor: PAUL KRUGMAN - Walter Reed

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Valor and Squalor

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 5, 2007

The horrors of Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s outpatient unit are no aberration.

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time, with President Bush’s approval at 29 percent, Democrats in control of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld no longer defense secretary — Robert Gates, his successor, appears genuinely distressed at the situation — the whitewash didn’t stick.

Yet even now it’s not clear whether the public will be told the full story, which is that the horrors of Walter Reed’s outpatient unit are no aberration. For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

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The redoubtable Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that IAP Worldwide Services, a company run by two former Halliburton executives, received a large contract to run Walter Reed under suspicious circumstances: the Army reversed the results of an audit concluding that government employees could do the job more cheaply.

And Mr. Waxman, who will be holding a hearing on the issue today, appears to have solid evidence, including an internal Walter Reed memo from last year, that the prospect of privatization led to a FEMA-type exodus of skilled personnel.

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