Steve Clemons reported yesterday at The Washington Note that former Deputy Secrectary of State Richard Armitage was a target of the Fitzgerald Grand Jury.
Today he has new sources who say that Armitage not only will not be indicted but that he has tesified three times and that information from Armitage is what has put Karl Rove at major risk of indictment".
Two sources have reported that Richard Armitage has testified three times before the grand jury and has completely cooperated and has been, as one source reported, "a complete straight-shooter" and "honest about his role and mistakes".
continued
Another person with deep knowledge about this investigation called to say that Fitzgerald seems to have abandoned any interest in securing indictments regarding the "outing" of Plame and has invested his efforts in challenging the "white collar cover-ups" involved. According to this source, the information provided by Richard Armitage is -- more than any other information -- what has put Karl Rove at major risk of indictment.
TWN 5/19/06
Background
Clemons reported yesterday in The Washington Note that he had heard from former National Security Agency Director Bobby Ray Inman.
What Inman shared with some of us -- and this was a repeated assertion from comments that I have confirmed that he made in Austin -- is that the person in Patrick Fitzgerald's bull's eye is Richard Armitage.
TWN 5/18/06
There was another blog post about Inman's claims at Daniel Drezner's blog confirming Clemons report. Drezner was also attending a Princeton conference on The Future of Liberal Internationalism with Clemons and Inman.
In response to Clemons and Maguire, here's what I can say:
1) I can confirm Inman's statements as Clemons reports them. I can confirm them because Inman made these assertions (and others that, like Steve, I will treat as off the record) to me and the others at my lunch table on the second day of the conference.
2) I would describe Inman's knowledge of this as coming from sources who would be/would have been in a position to know the fact chain on these events. It's not simply that a former NSA head still has automatic inside info privileges.
3) There was more that Inman said, and I'm tempted to spill all the beans -- but I'm not going to do it. It would be unfair to Inman, who has probably never heard of danieldrezner.com and would not necessarily have known he was talking to a blogger with any kind of audience. I know this stinks to the reader, but that's what my ethics tell me to do here. UPDATE: There is one other reason -- because this was a group lunch, and not me on a phone talking to a source, I didn't and couldn't press Inman on the complete provenance of his knowledge, Armitage's possible motivations, the relationship between what Armitage did and what Rove/Libby/Cheney did, etc.
4) Related to (3), it is my understanding that what has been blogged here is pretty much common knowledge inside the Beltway. I am genuinely surprised that it hasn't appeared anywhere else in the blogoshere.
danieldrezner.com 5/18/06
If Armitage is Woodward's source, here is what Woodward had to say about his source on Larry King Live on November 21, 2005. Woodward was deposed on November 14, 2005. His account of his involvement is
here.
WOODWARD: An excellent question. The week of the indictment I was working on something and learned another piece of this puzzle and I told Len Downie about it and I told him about the source and what had been disclosed to me and there was a sense before the indictment, well, this is kind of interesting but it's not clear what it means.
Then, the day of the indictment I read the charges against Libby and looked at the press conference by the special counsel and he said the first disclosure of all of this was on June 23rd, 2003 by Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff to "New York Times" reporter Judy Miller.
I went, whoa, because I knew I had learned about this in mid- June, a week, ten days before, so then I say something is up. There's a piece that the special counsel does not have in all of this.
I then went into incredibly aggressive reporting mode and called the source the beginning of the next week and said "Do you realize when we talked about this and exactly what was said?"
And the source in this case at this moment, it's a very interesting moment in all of this, said "I have to go to the prosecutor. I have to go to the prosecutor. I have to tell the truth."
And so, I realized I was going to be dragged into this that I was the catalyst and then I asked the source "If you go to the prosecutor am I released to testify" and the source told me yes. So it is the reporting process that set all this in motion.
CNN 11/21/05