From the road, it is barely possible to see the home where Ari Fleischer lives. Tucked away behind a secured fence and a thicket of shrubbery, Mr. Fleischer, the former White House press secretary, is right where he wants to be these days: nearly invisible, the (registration-restricted) New York Times' Anne Kornblut begins in Wednesday's editions... Full article to run shortly...Excerpts...
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For the two years since he left the White House - on the very day in July 2003 that Robert D. Novak printed the name of a Central Intelligence Agency operative in his syndicated newspaper column - Mr. Fleischer has been caught up in the investigation of who supplied that information to the columnist and whether it was a crime. The prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, called Mr. Fleischer to appear before the grand jury that is investigating the leak.
One person familiar with Mr. Fleischer's testimony said he told the grand jury that he was not Mr. Novak's source. And Mr. Fleischer, a longtime Washington operative who was never shy about championing his Republican bosses, seems not to fit Mr. Novak's description, in a subsequent column, of his primary source for the information as "no partisan gunslinger."
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But Mr. Fleischer was in the middle of the rapid-fire developments that surrounded the White House's response to the criticism leveled at it by Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat, who on July 6, 2003, publicly said the administration had "twisted" intelligence about the nuclear ambitions of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
In the week that followed Mr. Wilson's assertions in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, Mr. Fleischer played a central role as the White House acknowledged that six months earlier, President Bush should not have cited intelligence about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa in his State of the Union address.
A White House telephone log shows that Mr. Fleischer received a call from Mr. Novak on July 7, 2003, but a person familiar with Mr. Fleischer's testimony said he told prosecutors he never returned the call. Mr. Fleischer was aboard Air Force One with Mr. Bush and several other senior administration officials as they traveled across Africa that week.
["I'm cooperating with the investigators, and refer all questions to them," Mr. Fleischer said on Tuesday, after turning away a reporter at his house on Monday.]
From the road, it is barely possible to see the home where Ari Fleischer lives. Tucked away behind a secured fence and a thicket of shrubbery, Mr. Fleischer, the former White House press secretary, is right where he wants to be these days: nearly invisible, the (registration-restricted) New York Times' Anne Kornblut begins in Wednesday's editions... Full article to run shortly...Excerpts...