Richard Wolffe, a former Newsweek reporter working on a second book about President Obama, discussed the Flight 253 investigation last night on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”
In the interview, Wolffe speculates about possible infighting between intelligence agencies, and Olbermann later reported Wolffe’s theory as coming from White House sources.
Wolffe, an MSNBC analyst who has met one-on-one with the president many times for his book, said the White House sees the situation “more as an intelligence lapse more than a situation of airport security faults.”
Wolffe said he was speaking to White House aides earlier in the day and that Obama remains “angry” about the incident.
“The question here is why didn’t the centralized system of intelligence that was set up after 9/11, why didn’t it work? Is this conspiracy or cockup?” Wolffe asked.
“Is it a case of the agencies having so much rivalry between them that they were more determined to stymie each other or the centralized system rather than dealing with the terrorist threat or was it just that there were so many dots no one could connect them because it was all too random to figure out,” Wolffe said.
“Seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals, who maybe had an alternative agenda.”
“The question is was this information that was shared, remember there was some sharing of information … that information why wasn’t it shared fully. The question there is again, cockup or conspiracy? Was there a reason these agencies were at war with each other that prevented that intelligence from being shared?”
Olbermann asks, “Is the implication there that there is at least a possibility that somebody understood how serious this could be and yet withheld information to make some other part of the counterterrorism system look bad?”
“That has got to be an area that the White House is looking into. Motives can be hard to assess,” Wolffe said. “That’s where this internal inquiry for the moment has to go.”
Olbermann tells Wolffe, “What you’re describing is a far bigger threat” than a man on a plane with explosives.
Later Olbermann stretches what Wolffe speculated about into “breaking news.”
He says Wolffe was “quoting” sources “at the White House” who say “The administration is investigating whether or not those intel failures that led Abdulmutalib onto that flight might have been intentional and not accidental.”
Olbermann then goes much farther to summarize his interview with Wolffe, even though that’s not what the former reporter had said.
“Wolffe’s sources are offering two possibilities, two hypotheticals, and they are only hypotheticals at this point, one, that this might have been a turf war between intel agencies assigned this nation’s counterterrorism responsibilities or two, and obviously much more ominously, that the information was in some way deliberately withheld from some higher or broader authority to make someone look bad, as implausible and as disturbing as either of those prospects are, that’s what Richard Wolffe’s sources are telling him that the White House is investigating tonight.”
Later on MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called the information Wolffe had discussed with Olbermann “very worrying.”
She asked Wolffe via phone about “the prospect that intelligence [was] deliberately withheld by one part of the American intelligence community from another” and if the White House inquiry was going down that path.
“That is 10 steps ahead of where the White House is right now,” Wolffe said.
“There’s lots of finger pointing in the intelligence community,” he said. “The information was there … it wasn’t shared adequately. So there is a line of inquiry that goes to the heart of why wasn’t this stuff shared adequately.”
Wolffe added: “I think the early suspicions inside the White House is that this comes down to human error more than this is some willful withholding, but the questions are being asked, and they are being asked because some people are saying this stuff wasn’t shared adequately and they say it could have been.”
Wolffe says the White House investigation is “still very much of a fact-finding stage” and says he’d “checked in” again to administration sources in between the Olbermann and Maddow shows.
“It’s very preliminary,” he said. adding he has been told the focus will be on “things like the screening processes.”
“The question about how intelligence was shared is uppermost in the president’s mind,” Wolffe said.
Watch the clip:
