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U.S. Justice Department Opens Investigation Into Leak of CIA Official’s Identity By Mike Nartker Justice’s decision to begin an investigation into the leak was reported in a memo sent to all White House employees from the White House Counsel’s Office. Justice is expected to send the White House today a letter instructing White House staff to preserve all materials that may be relevant to the investigation, according to the memo, signed by Alberto Gonzales, counsel to President George W. Bush. “In the meantime, you must preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the department’s investigation,” the memo says. The Washington Post reported Sunday that CIA Director George Tenet had requested that Justice investigate the leak allegations. Tenet’s request was prompted by a July 14 column in the Chicago Sun-Times, in which Robert Novak identified Wilson’s wife by name and said she was a CIA “operative on weapons of mass destruction,” citing “two senior administration officials” as his sources. Prior to Novak’s column, Wilson had published a column in the New York Times that described his trip to Niger, during which he determined it was unlikely that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium there. Wilson’s column helped discredit a key piece of evidence offered by the Bush administration that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Novak denied yesterday on CNN’s Crossfire program that he had been contacted by the Bush administration about Wilson’s wife. “Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this,” CNN.com quoted Novak as saying. “There is no great crime here,” he said. Top Democrats in the U.S. Senate yesterday wrote to both Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft calling for Justice to appoint a special counsel to oversee an investigation into the leak allegations to avoid “serious conflicts of interest.” Under Justice regulations, a special counsel would be able to operate independently, would only be able to be removed for cause and the attorney general would have to report such an action to Congress if it were to occur. The letters were signed by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.); Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “We believe it is imperative that this matter be investigated as quickly and thoroughly as possible,” the senators said in their letters. “If, as has been reported, senior administration officials deliberately disclosed this confidential information, they should be prosecuted and, if found guilty, dismissed from their positions of public trust,” they said. During a press conference yesterday, Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who first called for an FBI investigation into the leak allegations in July, put forward several possible names for a special counsel, including former Senators John Danforth (R-Mo.) and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.). “It would seem to me that if we had a special counsel … the public could have confidence that this dastardly crime would be completely and thoroughly investigated,” Schumer said. In addition, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, announced yesterday the he planned to reintroduce the Independent Counsel Reform Act “to reassure a skeptical public that criminal investigations of those at the highest levels of power will be insulated from the political influence of the very people under suspicion.” White House spokesman Scott McClellan yesterday, however, rejected calls for the appointment of a special counsel, saying Justice was the appropriate agency to conduct an investigation into the leak allegations. “There are a lot of career professionals at the Department of Justice that address matters like this. I have made it clear that they’re the ones, that if something like this happened, should look into it,” McClellan said during a White House press briefing. In the House of Representatives, Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) yesterday called on House Government Reform Committee Chairman Representative Tom Davis (R-Va.) to conduct hearings on the leak allegations. “Congressional oversight of the Wilson case is imperative,” Waxman, the senior committee Democrat, wrote in his letter. “As the primary investigative committee in the House of Representatives, it is the committee’s responsibility to ensure that the public receives a full accounting of what happened in the Wilson matter,” he wrote. Davis’ office did not return calls by Global Security Newswire for comment on whether the committee would approve Waxman’s request. Schumer yesterday aggressively criticized the White House over its handling of the leak allegations, calling the release of Wilson’s wife’s identity “one of the worst things that has been done in Washington in a very, very long time.” While saying that he believed Bush was not involved in the leak, Schumer criticized the president for so far failing to order an internal White House investigation into the matter. McClellan indicated yesterday that the White House has not yet considered such action, reiterating the administration’s position that Justice was the appropriate agency to investigate the leak. “This sort of ‘noblesse oblige’ attitude, ‘business-as-usual,’ ‘we don’t really think this is a big deal’ is almost as infuriating as what happened, because it means it can happen again and again and again,” Schumer told reporters yesterday. “And, in fact, the fact that the White House seems to put such little importance in this can only lead to one conclusion, and that is that they’re worried that there may have been high-up people in the White House involved,” he said. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Sam Nunn is co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by National Journal Group.]
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