Adapted from The Next Hurrah
I read Fitzgerald's latest response while jetlagged, so had totally forgotten the big mystery from it, the document mentioned in this passage, until pollyusa reminded me of in the comments:
Defendant testified in the grand jury that he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials - including Cabinet level officials - were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson's trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003.
I've got a really good idea about what that document is. I'm betting it's a draft of Bush's State of the Union address, dated after the time when Bush's speechwriter took out damaging references to Niger and amounts of yellowcake.
Bush delivered the SOTU on January 28 in 2003, just four days after the date of the mystery document. And at the core of the hullabaloo the week of July 7 were the "16 words" Bush mentioned during the SOTU. So it is very plausible they intended to declassify an early draft of the SOTU, to prove that the document did not necessarily refer to the Niger allegations.
The early drafts of the SOTU came up twice during the weeks immediately following Wilson's op-ed. First, in a botched comment in a press gaggle on July 11 in Africa, Condi admitted the following:
Q If I could just follow up. On that sentence, you said that
the CIA changed the -- that things were done to accommodate the CIA.
What was done?
DR. RICE: Some specifics about amount and place were taken out.
Q -- taken out then?
DR. RICE: Some specifics about amount and place were taken out.
Q Was "place" Niger?
Q You won't say what place --
DR. RICE: No, there are several -- there are several African
countries noted. And if you say -- if you notice, it says "Africa," it
doesn't say "Niger."
MR. FLEISCHER: Yes. To be clear, the sentence in the State of the
Union, just off the top of my head, stated, according to British
reports, Iraq is seeking to acquire uranium from African nations or
Africa. That's the sentence that was stated. [my emphasis]
Condi effectively admits that an early draft of the SOTU mentions Niger by name, as well as the amount alleged in the sale, 500 tons. But then she tries to backtrack to the position the White House had settled on, that the reference always referred to multiple African countries. As this post and this post explain the press corps was still trying to clarify what Condi had said the following week, on July 14.
And then, during on July 16, then-WINPAC Director Alan Foley testified to the SSCI about the content and vetting of the SOTU. The SSCI records this about Foley's testimony:
(U) On January 27, 2003, the DCI was provided with a hardcopy
draft of the State of the Union address at an NSC meeting. When he
returned to the CIA, he passed the draft to an executive assistant to
deliver to the office of the DDI. No one in the office of the DDI
recalls who the point of contact for the speech was, or if a point of
contact was ever named. No one recalled receiving parts of the speech
for coordination and because the speech was hand carried, no electronic
versions of the speech exist at the CIA. The DCI testified at a July
16, 2003 hearing that he never read the State of the Union speech.
(U) In late January, the Director of WINPAC discussed, over
the phone, the portion of the State of the Union draft pertaining to
uranium with his NSC counterpart, the Special Assistant to the
President for Nonproliferation. Neither individual can recall who
initiated the phone call. Both the WINPAC Director and NSC Special
Assistant told Committee staff that the WINPAC Director's concerns
about using the uranium information pertained only to revealing sources
and methods and not to any concerns about the credibility of the
uranium reporting. The WINPAC Director said because the Niger
information was specifically and directly tied to a foreign government
service, his concern was about releasing classified information in an
unclassified speech. He told Committee staff that this had been the
CIA's longstanding position and was the reason the CIA wanted the
reference removed from the British white paper. Both the WINPAC
Director and NSC Special Assistant agreed that the discussion was
brief, cordial, and that they mutually agreed that citing the British
information, which was already unclassified, was preferable to citing
U.S. classified intelligence.
(U) The WINPAC Director and the NSC Special Assistant
disagreed, however, about the content of their conversation in some
important respects. First, when the WINPAC Director first spoke to
Committee staff and testified at a Committee hearing, he said that he
had told the NSC Special Assistant to remove the words "Niger" and "500
tons" from the speech because of concerns about sources and methods.
The NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that there never was a
discussion about removing "Niger" and "500 tons" from the State of the
Union and said that the drafts of the speech show that neither "Niger"
nor "500 tons" were ever in any of the drafts at all. He believed that
the WINPAC Director had confused the State of the Union conversation
with a conversation they had previously had in preparation for the
Negroponte speech in which they did discuss removing "Niger" from the
speech because of the WINPAC Director's concerns about revealing
sources and methods.
(U) A few days after his testimony before the Committee,
the WINPAC Director found the draft text of the State of the Union in
WINPAC's files and noticed that it did not say "500 tons of uranium
from Niger." In a follow up interview with Committee staff, he said
that he still recalls the conversation the way he described it to the
Committee originally, however, he believes that he may have confused
the two conversations because the documentation he found does not
support his version of events. The draft text of the State of the Union
he found said, "we know that he [Saddam Hussein] has recently sought to
buy uranium in Africa." The White House also told the Committee that
the text they sent to the CIA in January said, "we also know that he
has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa." [my emphasis]
The chronology is not entirely clear here. Tenet got his vetting copy of the complete speech on January 27, the day before the speech. But that copy seems to have disappeared into the great bowels of plausible deniability at the CIA. The SSCI gets sketchier about the timing of the Robert Joseph-Alan Foley vetting conversation (I've found that, with the SSCI, when they keep something sketchy like this, it's to intentionally conceal an important fact). But it seems to be an entirely different process than Tenet's non-vetting. And it seems that, by this mysterious date in late January, Alan Foley had already received enough information on the content of the SSCI to have a phone conversation with Joseph. Fred Fleitz' testimony for Bolton's UN nomination reveals the WINPAC vetting process often focused on discrete pieces of intelligence, so it is likely that Foley was getting the drafts of individual claims as the White House made them up drafted them. The reference to the "draft text" rather than the "draft" seems to reinforce this possibility, that Foley and Joseph were discussing the Niger uranium claim as an individual piece of intelligence. In any case, a few days after his testimony (I'm guessing the following week, July 21, because NYT reporting from that weekend actually supports a much stronger claim, that Foley warned Joseph about the credibility of the Niger claim), Foley comes back to the SSCI with a document that seems to support the White House version of the story. Is this draft language from the SOTU dated January 24?
In any case, if I'm right that the third document BushCo was trying to declassify (in addition to the NIE and the CIA report from Joe Wilson's trip) to push back against Wilson, then it supports another speculation I'm developing: that Libby was misrepresenting the NIE when he was leaking it to Judy on July 8. Aha! I see eRiposte, in an update to his post on this, tells us exactly what Libby was doing:
So, when Libby was trying to mislead Judith Miller into believing that the classified document strongly supported the uranium claim unlike the unclassified white paper, he was misleading her by referring to the BODY of the NIE without mentioning the INR dissent in the ANNEX of the NIE. What we've learnt today is that Libby, Cheney and Bush appear to have been trying to mislead reporters by claiming that what was really in the BODY of the NIE (and which was rebutted in the ANNEX and which was NOT part of the NIE's key judgments), was somehow part of the key judgments. [emphasis eRiposte's]
So, Libby was presenting the body of the NIE as if it were key judgments. Libby was presenting the CIA report, written by one or two Reports Officers, as if Wilson wrote it himself. And, I'm arguing, Libby and his friends were presenting a January 24 draft (after the "Niger" and "500 tons" claims had been removed, but still early enough to appear to be a draft) as if it were the only draft.
Update: eRiposte has a different, very credible theory on the January 24 date that deserves attention. From a comment he left:
The Jan 24, 2003 document is almost certainly a DIA report issued on that day that focused on the uranium claim (see SSCI page 64).
We need to keep in mind that Libby was leaking the junk to Woodward and Miller even after he was told by the CIA that the CIA no longer believed the uranium claim to be credible since the forgeries had gotten exposed (this was the June 17, 2003 CIA report). This makes it more likely that he was deliberately lying about the validity of the uranium claim and was selectively picking stuff out of whatever he could get his hands on (the report on Wilson's trip and the body of the NIE) and then portraying, falsely, some of it as having come from the key judgements of the NIE.
To support eR's theory, we know the date of the DIA report matches the date of the document referenced by Fitz, perfectly, whereas I'm just in the neighborhood of the correct date. Also,
Steve M questions below whether a speech draft would be classified (though, as I point out, it would have been stuff that was deleted from the speech because it involved sources and methods).
Though to support my point, we know BushCo was dealing with the SOTU, and was being asked about just these drafts.