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Robert Novak Was a Liar (cont’d)

Work at headquarters

In the March 22 column, Novak also resurrected other silly arguments that had circulated widely on the Right, such as the assumption that if CIA employees work at headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they must be public, not covert.

As Post editors and Novak certainly knew, many CIA employees who work at Langley and at other CIA facilities around Washington are still covert. It was ludicrous – if not highly offensive – for the Post to run Novak’s rhetorical question: “How could she be covert if, in public view, she drove to work each day at Langley?”

Novak added other questions that he felt should have been addressed at Waxman’s hearing, such as “What about testimony to the FBI that her CIA employment was common knowledge in Washington?”

But Novak didn’t bother to identify who gave that testimony or whether it was part of the self-interested defense from Bush administration officials like Cheney’s aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice regarding the Plame leak.

Libby, for instance, claimed that he had learned of Plame’s CIA identity from NBC bureau chief Tim Russert, an assertion that Russert testified was false.

Novak revived other canards about Wilson that had long since been debunked. Novak wrote that “claims of a White House plot [to punish Wilson by exposing his wife] became so discredited that Wilson was cut out of Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign by the summer of 2004.”

What Novak was doing there was recycling a baseless report from Talon News’ former White House correspondent Jeff Gannon, whose real name was James Guckert. On July 27, 2004, Gannon/Guckert reported that Wilson “has apparently been jettisoned from the Kerry campaign.”

The article based its assumption on the fact that “all traces” of Wilson “had disappeared from the Kerry Web site.” The article reported that “Wilson had appeared on a website www.restorehonesty.com where he restated his criticism of the Bush administration. The link now goes directly to the main page of www.johnkerry.com and no reference to Wilson can be found on the entire site.”

That was the extent of Gannon/Guckert’s “proof.”

But Peter Daou, who headed the Kerry campaign’s online rapid response, told me that the disappearance of Wilson’s link – along with many other Web pages – resulted from a redesign of Kerry’s Web site at the start of the general election campaign, not a repudiation of Wilson.

“I wasn’t aware of any directive from senior Kerry staff to ‘discard’ Joe Wilson or do anything to Joe Wilson for that matter,” said Daou. “It just got lost in the redesign of the Web site, as did dozens and dozens of other pages.”

A GOP plant

Gannon/Guckert, who wrote frequently about the Wilson-Plame case in 2003-2004, came under suspicion as a covert Republican operative in January 2005 when he put a question to Bush at a presidential news conference that contained a false assertion about Democrats. That prompted concerns that Gannon/Guckert was a plant.

Later, liberal Web sites discovered that Gannon was a pseudonym for Guckert, who had posted nude photos of himself on gay-male escort sites. It also turned out that Talon News was owned by GOPUSA, whose president, Robert Eberle, was a prominent Texas Republican activist.

As a controversy built over the Bush administration paying for favorable news stories, Gannon/Guckert resigned from Talon News and its website effectively shut down. But his spurious claim about Wilson getting booted by Kerry’s campaign was reprised in 2007 by Robert Novak.

Novak finished that column by spinning new conspiracy theories implicating Democrats and suggesting that CIA Director Hayden deserved White House retaliation.

Hayden’s approval of Waxman’s statement about Plame’s covert status “confirmed Republican suspicions that Hayden is too close to Democrats,” Novak wrote. “When Hayden’s role was pointed out to one of the President’s most important aides, there was no response.”

Novak had moved from acting as a Bush propagandist attacking an Iraq War critic to serving as an instigator for reprisals against a public official who wasn’t sufficiently loyal to Bush.

So, as the Washington pundit class goes into mourning this week over the death of a beloved colleague, it might be worth remembering who Robert Novak really was–and what the weepy eulogies say about the Washington media’s disdain for real truth-telling.

This article originally published at Consortium News.