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If Alan Colmes turns up at your Thanksgiving get-together sporting a couple shiners and a re-arranged smile, don't press the poor guy if he claims to have walked into a door. The FNC host just got clobbered by a certified DC heavyweight -- Bob Novak. Novak was a guest on this evening's Hannity & Colmes. Colmes first questioned the venerable reporter about the item he published this week regarding the Clinton campaign's claim to have a scandalous story about Barack Obama. For the record, Novak stated this evening that since first reporting the story, "I've had substantiation from another source,...

Apparently one of the movie roles that Alec Baldwin won't be playing in the future is that of Sherlock Holmes. Baldwin writes an entire Huffington Post blog, Prosecuting Those Responsible For Outing Valerie Plame, without once mentioning the name of the leaker---Richard Armitage. Baldwin starts out with a fantasy about the things he would do if he were play-acting as president: The fifth thing that I would do is to prosecute whoever is responsible for outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. At this point you would think that Baldwin would lash out at the leaker, Richard Armitage, or at...

When I went to my office Monday, July 7, 2003, Joe Wilson was not in the forefront of my mind. Frances Fragos Townsend was. She had just been named deputy national security adviser at the White House though her background was in liberal Democratic politics, including Attorney General Janet Reno's inner circle during the Clinton administration. Her appointment was a political mystery of the kind I had been exploring for forty years in my column. I wrote the Townsend column Tuesday morning because I had a busy schedule the rest of the day, including a 3 p.m. appointment with Richard...

Lawmakers in Canada appear to be paving the way for "deep integration" with the U.S. and Mexico with a proposed measure that advances the controversial Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America promoted by the Bush administration, notes WND columnist Jerome Corsi. It's an issue Corsi has fully investigated for his newest book, "The Late Great USA." The conservative minority government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is pressing for "The Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement", which would enable a Canadian company to challenge laws in provinces that block the North American Free Trade Agreement. Murray Dobbin, a Vancouver author...

Three months after his felony conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice charges, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, 56, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has been sentenced to 2.5 years in prison and fined $250,000. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton to impose a sentence of 30 to 37 months, on the grounds that Libby had lied about his role in leaking the identity of former CIA staffer Valerie Plame and impeded a serious investigation, and has not expressed remorse. Libby's lawyers argued for leniency, considering that no one was ever charged...

If some people imagined a verdict in the criminal trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. would calm the political passions surrounding his fate, they may have forgotten two words with a combustible history: presidential pardon. The 11 jurors had barely pronounced Mr. Libby guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury on Tuesday when a new donnybrook broke out. “Now President Bush must pledge not to pardon Libby for his criminal conduct,” declared Senator Harry Reid, the Senate majority Leader, a stance echoed by other Congressional Democrats, editorial writers and bloggers on the left. On the right, The Wall Street Journal...

In his prosecution of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald contended that Vice President Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff was actively involved in a smear campaign against anti-war diplomat Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame and that he lied about what he said to whom during the early summer of 2003, thus obstructing the investigation to determine who “outed” Plame as a CIA agent by leaking her identity to the media. Libby’s lawyers countered that he was too busy with pressing national security matters to be involved up to his eyeballs in a conspiracy to...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer leaked the identity of a CIA operative to Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus during a 2003 phone call, Pincus testified Monday as the first defense witness in the CIA leak trial. Pincus was one of the first reporters to learn the identity of Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and prominent Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson. Pincus said he learned her identity July 12, 2003 but did not immediately write about it. Plame was outed by syndicated columnist Robert Novak two days later. Pincus testified on behalf of Vice...

WASHINGTON — The jury in the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who served as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, has heard powerful evidence that two other officials were responsible for disclosing the identity of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame. Over a prosecution objection, the defense played an audio recording yesterday of a profanity-laden rant in which a former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, told a prominent journalist, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, about Ms. Plame's ties to Langley a month before she was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert Novak. Mr. Novak also testified yesterday,...

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage originally leaked Plame's identity. Armitage says the leak was inadvertent, and he is not being prosecuted.......Federal prosecutors are trying to show that Libby lied to investigators about conversations he had with reporters regarding Plame. Libby has denied lying and says he has a faulty memory........ Former Cheney Chief of Staff on Trial for Allegedly Lying to a Grand Jury, Not Outing CIA Agent: .Jan. 16, 2007 — Jury selection begins today in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby is charged with...

AN immediate withdrawal by Australia from Iraq would not hurt the country's alliance with America, former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage said. And Peter Khalil, a Melbourne-born Pentagon adviser and former head of security for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, agreed. Mr Khalil said Diggers had done their job and could withdraw knowing they had stabilised a large section of southern Iraq. The Australian force's size limited what it could achieve, Mr Khalil, an analyst with Eurasia Group in Washington, said. And moving it to Baghdad to fight insurgents was not likely because of the political risk...

The former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage says no one would fault Australia if it decided to withdraw its troops from Iraq. But the Federal Government has warned Labor that pulling out would damage the alliance with the US. Protesters greeted several senior US officials at a dinner at Old Parliament House in Canberra last night. Inside, the Defence Minister Brendan Nelson's target was the Labor Party. "Friendships count for something," he said. "Anyone who thinks that prematurely leaving Iraq, the United States and the United Kingdom would not do damage to our relationship with those countries is...

/begin my excerpt Armitage, "N. Korea to Push Ahead with Nuclear Test This Year" (Washington = Yonhap News) Cho Bok-rae = Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, commented on Sept. 21, "N. Korea will push ahead with nuclear test this year. If it happens, everything including the issue of wartime command control would be brought back to square one, and reevaluated," according to a lawmaker of Hannara Party(conservative opposition) visiting U.S. Mr. Armitage gave his view, saying that it is his personal opinion, while meeting some lawmakers from Hannara delegation made up of Lee Sang-deuk, Vice Chairman of...

Musharraf reveals post-9/11 threat in book serialised by The TimesPERVEZ MUSHARRAF, the President of Pakistan, claimed last night that the Bush Administration threatened to bomb his country “into the Stone Age” if it did not co-operate with the US after 9/11, sharply increasing tensions between the US and one of its closest allies in the war on terrorism. The President, who will meet Mr Bush in the White House today, said the threat was made by Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, in the days after the terror attacks, and was issued to the Pakistani intelligence director. “The...

Christine M. Flowers | A SCANDAL GOES DOWN IN PLAMES SCANDALS, like wool sweaters, tend to shrink when mishandled. An item that looked so sharp at first glance can lose its zing when thrown into the wrong spin cycle. And it's only when we pull it out, misshapen and ruined, that we realize last season's trendy purchase is this year's damaged goods.Take Plamegate, where the beautiful blond wife of an ambitious diplomat was unmasked as a CIA operative. Never mind the fact that Valerie Plame, Mrs. Ambassador Joe Wilson, wasn't exactly the spy who came in from the cold since...

CIA agent's naming led to giant hoax by Bush foes Fred Barnes September 15, 2006 THE rogues' gallery of those who acted badly in the CIA "leak" case turns out to be different from what the media led us to expect. Note that we put the word "leak" in quotation marks, because it's clear now that there was no leak at all, just idle talk, and certainly there was no smear campaign against former US ambassador Joseph Wilson for criticising President George W.Bush's Iraq policy. It's as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country - by the media,...

Since the revelation that Richard Armitage, a former high-ranking official in the State Department, was the source of the much-ballyhooed Valerie Plame "leak," many in the media have refused to touch the story with a ten-foot pole. This was quite a turnaround since before the Armitage involvement was known, many journalists believed the CIA leak story was one worth pursuing on a daily basis. Some even believed it could bring down the Bush White House, or at least end the careers of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. One of the biggest media figures boycotting the Plame story has been MSNBC...

This does get a little complicated. First, a holdover, liberal CIA employee, Valerie Plame, decided to undermine President Bush’s policies by pulling strings to get her like-minded husband, Joseph Wilson, sent to Niger to discredit the report from British intelligence that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake for nuclear weapons development. (This British report was mentioned by Pres. Bush as one piece of intelligence we relied on in concluding that there was a significant risk of WMD in Iraq. The report turned out to be factual.)

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has resigned as expected a day after his boss and close friend, Colin Powell, announced he was stepping down, a State Department official said on Tuesday. Armitage, a barrel-chested former Navy officer who closely managed the day-to-day operations of the State Department's worldwide bureaucracy, tendered his resignation to Powell on Monday, the official said. "He came in with the secretary and is leaving with him," said the official, who asked not to be identified. Armitage was respected among diplomats and lawmakers for his candor. He was always expected to leave at the same...

Plamegate: Patrick Fitzgerald's three-year manhunt to track down who blew Valerie Plame's CIA "cover" has been exposed as a costly sham. He apparently knew all along that his man was not Scooter Libby. ...But it's hard to see anything but politics as the motivation for Fitzgerald's handling of the Plame affair. The facts indicate that Fitzgerald knew early on that the original leaker was State Department official Richard Armitage. So why did Fitzgerald let a cloud hang over White House adviser Karl Rove's head for so long? And why is Fitzgerald continuing to hound Libby, the former vice presidential chief...