Libby Trial: FCC Chairman's Spouse A Key Witness

Why isn't the press connecting the dots?  Cathie Martin, formerly Dick Cheney's key flack, has been giving testimony that the leak to the press of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent was an integral part of the administration's pushback to Joe Wilson's exposure of the Big Lie that got us into Iraq, and that Cheney and Scooter Libby were central to that process. Martin's notes and testimony contradict Libby's story that he found out about Plame via the press.

While much is being made in the media of Martin's notes of who to leak to and how to spin the story (Meet The Press was a favored venue), the fact that Martin's spouse, Kevin Martin, is Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, with direct authority over the public airwaves that the television networks and radio talkers depend upon for their business' lifeblood, is getting buried. Often this key fact is not mentioned at all, Cathie Martin often being identified as "Cheney's former public relations assistant" or by her current position, " deputy director of communications for policy and planning" at the White House, or that she was a loyal Republican recruited by Cheney factotum Mary Matalin.  The New York Times story today had the FCC connection in the 19th paragraph, one from the bottom.  In Dana Milbank's Washington Post column it was the 11th paragraph, but just as a mention.

Cathie Martin has been a key player in the administration's giant media fog machine, helping to feed misinformation to the public in support of crimes against the our electoral system, the Constitution, and the Geneva Convention.  Her husband is chief of the "independent" regulatory agency that tells broadcasters what they must do to keep their licenses to print money.

These people are not little functionaries caught up in their bosses' schemes.  They are major players in the criminal enterprise that is the Bush administration.

- Barry Orton

Comments

[jody]

Dana Milbank irks me. In so many ways and on so many levels.
I wrote a piece for a campus publication on Dana Milbank after a "special" speaking engagment he had here last year. Believing that such an IrkFest should not go unrecorded for posterity, and also in hopes that others would begin to share my Irk.

I had a hard time staying in the word limit. The man is a fountain, a vast wellspring. One ounce more of the obscure stuff he is made of and he'd be an actual parody of his own self, but no, he sits there right on the line, causing a wobble in the very track of the universe. Stop contemplating the ripple effect of butterfly wings and move on to the Milbank Effect, if you think you can bear it.

There are worthy journalists out there, hopeful youth eager for a job. People with experience and a family who had to relocate - so many scenarios offering up infinitely more worthy individuals for gainful employment. And yet, Milbank has a job....