an hour yesterday as part of an investigation into who illegally leaked the
identity of an undercover CIA officer.
The rare interview by a prosecutor with a sitting president is among a
series of recent developments that indicate the politically sensitive
investigation is intensifying and could be drawing near an end, opening the
possibility that the results will be announced during the run-up to the
election.
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The grand jury investigation covers news leaks attributed to senior Bush
administration officials that exposed the identity of CIA officer Valerie
Plame soon after her husband, a former U.S. ambassador, authored a newspaper
article asserting that the president had misled the public about evidence that
Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.
Critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies have singled out the
case as a sign of deception and efforts to stifle dissent on Bush’s
justification for the war. Any indictment of a White House or senior official
in connection with the case would bring additional attention to those charges.
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago, the special prosecutor who is
leading the grand jury investigation, and his team of attorneys interviewed
Bush for 70 minutes in the Oval Office, said White House Press Secretary Scott
McClellan.
The only other person in the room was Jim Sharp, a private criminal
attorney whom Bush recently hired to represent him in the investigation.
“I met with [Bush] right after the interview, and he said he was glad to do
his part,” McClellan said. “The president of the United States wants to get to
the bottom of this.”
Bush was not required to give his answers under oath, McClellan said.
McClellan and a spokesman for Fitzgerald would not discuss the prosecutor’s
questions or give any further details on the interview. Sharp did not return a
phone call.
But lawyers not directly involved in the case said the interview was not
necessarily an indication that Bush was a target of the investigation.
“You ascertain the scope of people who have access to the information that
was leaked and then you talk to them all if you’re doing a thorough
investigation,” said Robert Litt, a former senior official in the Justice
Department’s Criminal Division.
Fitzgerald also probably would have questioned Bush about discussions
within the administration that took place after the leak was published and
might provide clues pointing toward the identity of the leakers, Litt said.
It is extremely rare for a prosecutor to question a sitting president, and
Fitzgerald would most likely make great efforts to avoid any need for a second
interview.
Fitzgerald has questioned other top administration officials, including
Vice President Dick Cheney and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.
And he recently issued subpoenas to at least two news organizations, NBC
News and Time magazine, both of which have said they will fight efforts to
compel disclosure of confidential sources.
Syndicated columnist Robert Novak printed Plame’s name July 14 of last
year, eight days after her husband published an article casting doubt on the
credibility of the Bush administration.
In an op-ed article for The New York Times, Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson
IV, disputed Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam
Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore from an African nation later identified
as Niger. Bush cited that as key evidence that Iraq was seeking a nuclear
arsenal.
Wilson, a former ambassador who served in several African nations, traveled
to Niger in February 2002 at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency to
investigate the claim and reported back that it was untrue.
After Wilson’s article was published, the White House admitted that the
evidence for Bush’s claim was weak and that the CIA had successfully warned
Bush against making the allegation when vetting a speech he gave months before
the State of the Union address.
The Washington Post later reported that an administration official had told
one of its reporters that the White House dismissed Wilson’s report because it
was “a boondoggle set up by his wife,” who was then an analyst for the CIA
specializing in weapons of mass destruction.
Wilson has argued that blowing his wife’s cover was an effort to sabotage
her career to seek revenge for his criticism of the Bush administration.