RUSH: Let’s go back in time, shall we? Let’s turn back the clock. October 27th, 2003. I’m hold here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers the printed copy of an article in TIME Magazine Michael Duffy and Timothy Berger wrote, and again it’s October 27th, 2003. See, I think this investigation is looking in all the wrong places. This is a public investigation. I don’t know what the prosecutor is doing, but the public investigation is looking in all the wrong places. Rove is not the place to look. Rove hasn’t done anything wrong and he hasn’t lied to anybody. It is Joe Wilson and his wife who need to be looked at here, folks. If you go back to this TIME Magazine story, it’s amazing what the media forgets that they themselves publish. October 27, 2003. The title of this piece, “The Unmasking of Valerie Plame Sheds Light on the Shadowy World of NOCs,” a Spy with Nonofficial Cover is an NOC. I’m just going to read to you two paragraphs from this opus: “Plame worked as a spy internationally in more than one role. Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who put in 24 years as a spymaster and was Plame’s boss for a few years, says Plame worked under official cover in Europe in the early 1990s ? say, as a U.S. embassy attach? ? before switching to nonofficial cover a few years later. Mostly Plame posed as a business analyst or a student in what Rustmann describes as a ‘nice European city.’ Plame was never a so-called deep-cover NOC, he said, meaning the agency did not create a complex cover story about her education, background, job, personal life and even hobbies and habits that would stand up to intense scrutiny by foreign governments.
“‘[NOCs] are on corporate rolls, and if anybody calls the corporation, the secretary says, “Yeah, he works for us,”‘ says Rustmann. ‘The degree of backstopping to a NOC’s cover is a very good indication of how deep that cover really is.'” But Plame was never a so-called deep cover NOC. “Though Plame’s cover is now blown…” Remember we’re reading from October 27th of 2003 TIME Magazine. “Though Plame’s cover is now blown, it probably began to unravel years ago when Joe Wilson first asked her out. Rustmann [her boss] describes Plame as an ‘exceptional officer’ but says her ability to remain under cover was jeopardized by her marriage in 1998 to the higher-profile American diplomat,” Joe Wilson, Democrat Party hack, well known.
“The alleged crime at the heart of a controversy that has consumed official Washington ? the ‘outing’ of a CIA officer ? may not have been a crime at all under federal law, little-noticed details in a book by the agent’s husband suggest.” In other words, here’s the lead: The “outing” of Valerie Plame may not have been a crime at all under federal law according to little noticed details in her husband’s book. “In The Politics of Truth, former ambassador Joseph Wilson writes that he and his future wife both returned from overseas assignments in June 1997. Neither spouse, a reading of the book indicates, was again stationed overseas. They appear to have remained in Washington, D.C., where they married and became parents of twins. Six years later, in July 2003, the name of the CIA officer ? Valerie Plame ? was revealed by columnist Robert Novak. The column’s date is important because the law against unmasking the identities of U.S. spies says a ‘covert agent’ must have been on an overseas assignment ‘within the last five years.’ The assignment also must be long-term, not a short trip or temporary post, two experts on the law say. Wilson’s book makes numerous references to the couple’s life in Washington over the six years up to July 2003. ‘Unless she was really stationed abroad sometime after their marriage,’ she wasn’t a covert agent protected by the law,’ says Bruce Sanford, an attorney who helped write the 1982 act that protects covert agents’ identities.”
Peter King, congressman from Long Island, was on Scarborough Country on Tuesday night, and I have a little transcript of it here. Scarborough says, “The last thing you want to do in a time of war is reveal the identity of undercover CIA agents,” and King said, “No, Joe Wilson, she recommended, his wife recommended him for this job in Niger. He said the vice president recommended him. To me, she took it off the table. Once she allowed him to go ahead and say that and write his op-ed in the New York Times to have Tim Russert give him a full hour on Meet the Press saying he was sent there as a representative of the vice president, when she knew — she knew herself — that she was the one that recommended him for this job, she allowed that lie to go forward, involving the vice president of the United States, and the president. Then to me she should be the last one in the world who has any right to complain about anything, and Joe Wilson has no right to complain, and I think people like Tim Russert and the others who gave this guy such a free ride in all the media, they’re the ones that ought to be shot, not Karl Rove. Look, maybe Rove wasn’t perfect. We live in an imperfect world. I give him credit for having the guts, though, and I really tell you, Republicans are running for cover, they ought to be out there attacking Joe Wilson. We should throw this back at them with all the nonsense that’s been said about George Bush and all the lies that have come out. Let’s at least stand by the guy. He was trying to set the record straight for historical purposes, Rove was, to save American lives — and if Joe Wilson’s wife was that upset, she should have come out and said that her husband was a liar when he was.”
That’s Peter King, who’s right on the money. You want a list of some of Joe Wilson’s lies, ladies and gentlemen? He insists that the vice president’s office sent him to Niger. Vice President Cheney: “I don’t know Joe Wilson. I never met him. I don’t know who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Tupelo, Mississippi. Scott, welcome to the program. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, great to be on with you. Just to get ahead of you a minute, I’m sure I’ll be pigeon-holed as a liberal so I’d like to say I’m a pro-life, pro-gun, pro-military evangelical liberal as it were. Congratulations. You’ve done a really, really fine job of sticking with the RNC’s talking points on the whole Rove issue. I’d like to ask you a question, though. If there’s no indiscretions or illegalities there with him, why was a grand jury convened and who was it that convened it, for one, and if I could ask a second question of you, if you want to cut me off after that, I understand, but you got to bear in mind–
RUSH: Wait, wait a second.
CALLER: Okay, sure.
RUSH: Why would I want to cut off a pro-life, pro-gun, pro-military evangelical liberal? I’ve never talked to one before. After almost 17 years, this is one of the most exciting days of my career, I’ve never talked to anyone like you before.
CALLER: (Laughing) I’m flattered. I’m flattered.
RUSH: So yeah, I’ll answer any question you’ve got. Why, if no crime was committed, why was a grand jury convened?
CALLER: Yeah, that’s my first question, yes.
RUSH: Well, do you think that grand juries are only convened when there are crimes alleged? There are many crimes. There’s a grand jury sitting somewhere all the time. There’s a grand jury sitting there somewhere all the time, that is waiting —
CALLER: (Laughing.) Classic, Rush, classic.
RUSH: Scott, I’m trying to explain the legal system to you. If you don’t want to listen to the answer —
CALLER: I was also a law major at one point in my life, too, so you don’t need to —
RUSH: There are grand juries that sit for six months that sometimes never hear a case. In this case, the grand jury is the result of the special prosecutor who was asked for by the Democrats and the media in light of all this.
CALLER: Right, who control absolutely nothing in Washington, right?
RUSH: You’re not interested. You’re not interested in a discussion.
CALLER: — the White House or Congress or the Supreme Court or —
RUSH: Are you telling me — wait a second, Scott. Are you trying to tell me that the political process corrupts the legal system in America?
CALLER: Of course it does to some degree.
RUSH: Oh it does?
CALLER: That’s why you’ve got judges that are appointed by —
RUSH: No, I mean —
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: — because what happened was the liberals demanded the independent counsel on this, the administration said, “Fine, here you go. You want an independent counsel.” The administration asked for it, because it was — or gave it, granted it — because it was asked for by the media and asked for by the Democrats and therefore you’ve got a grand jury. We don’t know that there’s been a crime committed. You are violating one of the central tenets here. You’ve already assumed that a crime has been committed because there’s an investigation. You think just because an investigation is going — This is one of the big problems we have in the country. Everybody thinks that when law enforcement starts an investigation, there’s automatically guilty involved, or a crime involved, and that’s not always the case. As to the second thing you’re going to say, which I know what you’re going to say, you’re going to say that Niger didn’t sell Iraq yellowcake. Nobody said they did. What the allegation was to go see if Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger, and the British to this day stand by their report that the Iraqis did try, and Wilson’s report sheds absolutely no light on it. In fact, Wilson lies about this in his report. So I know you think you’re a smart guy, Scott, but you’re a little too smart by half. You’re a rank amateur here playing with the professionals, and we’ve dealt with people like you over the years. You think you can trick the host, but you can’t. Try again on some other show that fewer people listen to, you might have better luck. Mike in Libertyville, Illinois. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: Hey, I wanted to talk about, I believe that you’re misrepresenting the facts regarding Joe Wilson’s mission to Niger and the findings of the Senate select committee.
RUSH: Really? How so?
CALLER: Well, you keep saying that he’s making the claim that the vice president personally sent him on this mission, and there’s nowhere in the Senate select committee that states that he made this claim or —
RUSH: No, I didn’t say that came from the Senate —
CALLER: — New York Times —
This is what Joe Wilson said on CNN’s Late Edition on August 3rd, ’03. He’s out there saying that the vice president sent him. He wrote in the New York Times in his op-ed something totally different. He’s lying through his teeth every time he opens his mouth about this. “Scooter” Libby has no clue about this mission of Joe Wilson’s, nor does the vice president — and furthermore, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in their report, conclusion 13, the report on the former ambassador’s trip to Niger disseminated in March 2002 “did not change any analyst’s assessment of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts the information in the report, Wilson’s report, lent more credibility to the original CIA report on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research analysts believe that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium.” So you have here a conflict. The CIA said: His report didn’t change anything we have here. The state department said: Ah, we might have buttressed what we thought all along. The bottom line is the British stand by it. They say that there was an attempt; they stand by their report. Now, we know that we have in the CIA and we know that we have in the state department rogue elements, liberals, career people who have been trying to undermine the Bush presidency since 2001 when he was inaugurated, and that’s my point. I think Wilson’s part of it. I think Valerie Plame is part of it. The fact that he’s showing up at a joint press conference at the suspicious time of three o’clock this afternoon with Democrat senator Chuck Schumer while all along he claims he’s “nonpartisan.” Joe Wilson claims he’s nonpartisan. He doesn’t care about politics, but he’s a Kerry donor. He was a Kerry advisor. He’s contributed thousands of dollars to Democratic Party causes and candidates. He is a political hack. I think he was in on this project from the get-go. I think the whole point was to go over there and come back with a report saying that there’s nothing to this, Bush is a liar.
They wanted to start that whole refrain: Bush lied, Bush lied, Bush lied. You got a bunch of Democrats operating in cohort and concert here, and now you’ve got this press conference. I’m telling you what I think. This is my speculation based on all of this. One thing I do know is, you can’t expect to get the truth from Joe Wilson. You cannot expect it, when you hear what he says, that he’s telling you the truth, nor his wife. He has lied through his teeth a number of times about his political nonpartisanship, about his report, and about who sent him to Niger. It has been confirmed that it was his wife who recommended him. That it wasn’t the vice president’s office. That stuff is not even arguable. That’s not even a matter of debate. What we have here is a clear effort by the Democratic Party and one of its hacks, Joe Wilson, to try to take out a president. It’s a typical Democrat strategy, and it’s something they’ve been working on since the earliest days of the Bush administration. Primarily when the war with Iraq began, that’s when they started gelling and coming together and formulating all these plans. “Bush lied.” I don’t care what it is. They’ve tried to get DeLay; they’ve tried to down-wrap the economy. They’ve been trying to say this and that’s going to hell and they’re wrong about it all, and they’re wrong about this — and the thing that everybody ought to note here is that while the economy is doing well and the war on terror and the war on Iraq is doing well — and, by the way, there was no torture at G’itmo. We now know that there were some abuses like forcing a prisoner to wear a bra.
Oh, wow, is this really horrible! That’s just full of stench. I mean, how can we as Americans dare do that? You ever been to a drag club in this country in New York City? For crying out loud, folks, this is just absurd. But now this report came out. There wasn’t any torture. There wasn’t any torture at G’itmo and the New York Times has to report that story today, but guess what? In reporting the story, the New York Times conveniently forgets to mention that it was a faulty FBI report that cannot be confirmed cited by Dick Durbin to make his famous Pol Pot, Soviet gulag, and Nazi Germany analogy to our interrogators. I’ll have more on that coming up as the program unfolds. But it’s clear what’s going on here. It’s clear who Joe Wilson is. As I say, this is not an accident he’s showing up with Chuck Schumer at three o’clock this afternoon. There’s any number of people he could show up with but he’s out there claiming to be nonpartisan and all of a sudden he’s going to be joined at the hip with Chuck Schumer? What interests me in this whole case is Joe Wilson and who he is and how deep are his contacts and his behavior and his plan and his strategy with the Democratic Party. That’s what I want to know — and I join Peter King, congressman from Long Island, in urging a bunch of Republicans to sit there and start throwing some of this mud back rather than just sit there and act frightened because of where some of it might land. We know where it’s coming from.
END TRANSCRIPT