Waxman to Atty Gen: Stop ignoring my requests for Plame info Nick Juliano

Published: Tuesday December 18, 2007



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Print This Email This Recently appointed Attorney General Michael Mukasey seems not to be living up to his pledge to remain independent from White House meddling, and he apparently is ignoring a long-standing request for Justice Department documents regarding former CIA operative Valerie Plame's outing by former Bush administration figures, according to a top congressional Democrat. House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman on Tuesday reiterated his previous appeal to Mukasey for documents from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame leak. Waxman said that the attorney general has no reason to obstruct his committee's investigation, as Mukasey did last week with a congressional inquiry into the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes. Waxman noted that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- the former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted after Fitzgerald's investigation -- has dropped his appeal, and the Justice Department is not conducting any further investigations. Therefore, the California Democrat says, Mukasey has no excuse to continue withholding the documents. "Thus," he wrote in a letter to Mukasey, "I request that you provide the Committee by January 3, 2008, with the documents requested in the Committees July 16 letter to Mr. Fitzgerald, including the reports of interviews with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other White House officials." Responding to congressional requests for information on the CIA's destruction of videotapes showing harsh methods being used on waterboarding, Mukasey told lawmakers, essentially: Back off, we've got this one. The AG argued that attempts at congressional oversight could inhibit investigations being carried out within the CIA and Department of Justice. "In the Plame matter, there is no pending Justice Department investigation and no pending Justice Department litigation," Waxman reminded him. "Whatever the merits of the position you are taking in the CIA tapes inquiry, those considerations do not apply here." Libby was convicted of four felonies -- including obstruction of justice and perjury -- for his role in outing Plame then lying to investigators about how her name came to be funneled to several Washington journalists from within the Bush administration. President Bush commuted Libby's 30-month sentence before the former high-profile White House aide was shipped off to prison, and Libby has decided to stop appealing the conviction. Waxman's committee wants to know whether Libby was acting at the president's or vice president's behest when he outed Plame, whose name first appeared in a July 2003 Robert Novak column. The conservative columnist said he received the information from former undersecretary of state Richard Armitage and former White House political adviser Karl Rove. Several other journalists also said they learned the identity of Plame, whose husband Joseph Wilson was then criticizing the administration's false pre-war contention that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Libby was the only official convicted of criminal charges, and none were fired from their administration posts as a result of the leak.



