Telling The Right Story

Atrios questions the WaPo’s skepticism (in its article quoting Rove’s lawyer Luskin) and points to Lawrence O’Donnell’s follow-up post today on The Huffington Report in which he subtly says that Luskin is full of shit.

I don’t know that I’d characterize Luskin as a liar, however. He doesn’t know exactly what Rove told the grand jury because defense lawyers aren’t allowed in there. He knows what his client told him. He also has absolutely no idea what Cooper’s notes really say — and neither does Karl Rove.

Unless there is something really off the wall developing, it seems pretty obvious that the reason that Fitzgerald wanted to talk to Cooper and Miller is to verify that what Rove said was true, whatever it was — and it’s also reasonable to believe that Fitzgerald has some substantial reasons to think it might not be. The law pretty specifically requires prosecutors to exhaust all other possibilities before a judge cites a reporter with contempt for refusing to reveal sources. Fitzgerald knows full well what a hot potato this is. He’s not fucking with Time magazine, the NY Times and Karl Rove for his health. He has reason to believe that Matt Cooper and Judith Miller have something to tell him or he wouldn’t have gone this far.

I hesitate to bring this up, but it’s relevant to this case. From Peter Tiersma, law professor at Loyola University and expert on the language of the law:

One of the famous (or infamous) scenes from the impeachment proceedings is Clinton’s remark about the meaning of “is.”

During the deposition, Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, objected to questions being asked about Lewinsky, and made the following statement:

“I question the good faith of counsel, the innuendo of the question. Counsel is fully aware that Ms. Lewinsky has filed–has an affidavit, which they are in possession of, saying that there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with President Clinton.”

Clinton said nothing.

During the grand jury proceedings, Kenneth Starr accused Clinton of making an “utterly false statement” by not speaking up and correcting his lawyer’s comment. Clinton responded that Bennett’s statement was not necessarily false. He explained: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” and remarked that in the present tense, the statement was true.

Even though Clinton was subjected to much ridicule for this reponse, it is actually completely true. Clinton’s physical relationship with Lewinsky had ended some time before the deposition.

As I mentioned, Rove may have lied to his lawyer or withheld the truth. Clinton certainly didn’t come clean with Bennett about Lewinsky, although he was a very clever lawyer himself and understood the language of the law and didn’t need a lot of advice about how to avoid perjuring himself. Rove is not a lawyer.

In that light, I find Luskin’s language a little bit interesting. He says Rove never “identified” Valerie Plame to Cooper. What does that mean exactly? Did he not identify her by name? Or did he not identify her as a CIA operative? In other words, did Karl Rove call up Matt Cooper and say, ” Joe Wilson’s wife is a CIA operative and she got him the job,” which technically means that he didn’t “identify” her, but he sure put old Matt on the trail. It wouldn’t have been hard to find out who Joseph Wilson was married to. Or maybe he meant something else entirely. But the wording is unusual — just as Clinton’s wording “I did not have ‘sexual relations’with that woman” was strange. Why didn’t just say “sex”? Because he was carefully using a legal definition. When lawyers word things in a careful way like this, there’s usually a reason for it.

But public opinion doesn’t care about such nuances. To them sex and sexual relations are the same thing. And the meaning of “is,” is is. And “identifying” and identifying are the same thing. And it is in the court of public opinion that this is finally moving.

So, in spite of what I wrote above, I don’t think we should get ourselves caught up in some sort of legal mumbo-jumbo legal definition of what “identify” means. It’s their turn to squirm on the parse machine and try to explain why the clear meaning of cover-up isn’t cover-up. That’s the key my friends, and that’s the level on which the American people will come to understand this if we do it right.

People forgave Clinton for lying about an affair. Most Americans, including a good many people reading this blog today, have some personal experience with situations like that. Infidelity is a common occurence of everyday life. People didn’t need experts to explain to them what was going on. And they decided that they didn’t like the spectacle of the politicians and the law sticking its nose into something so personal.

This isn’t about some middle aged jerk getting excited over a chubby eager beaver exposing her thong. This is about a powerful political operative exposing an undercover CIA agent in order to exact revenge and cover up the president’s lies about the Iraq war.

Kevin Drum wrote correctly back in 2003, Keep It Simple:

Top White officials blew the identity of an undercover CIA agent, potentially endangering both lives and intelligence operations, solely to gain political payback against a guy who had risen to the top of their enemies list.

That’s not so complicated, is it?

That remains true. But the context has changed quite dramatically and there is more to it now. It has become obvious to a majority of Americans that the Bush administration was lying when it made its case for war. The public is much more likely to see this Plame leak for what it was. A cover-up by smear and intimidation. And it looks much more serious in this new light. Here’s how I would update it:

The Bush administration lied about its reasons for the war in Iraq. When a critic stepped up to expose one of the lies the Whitehouse blew his wife’s identity as an undercover CIA agent. They did this to exact revenge against what they saw as a political enemy and to intimidate those who would further expose the administration, potentially endangering both lives and intelligence operations around the world.

That’s the story. And regardless of what comes out about who leaked what to whom first, the sick fucking thing is Rove has actually already admitted to being the biggest asshole on the planet regardless of his legal culpability. When they are apprised of this, in the context of the Iraq lies, people may not be as amenable to forgive or write off as some think. Even if Karl Rove didn’t break the law, here is what we already know he did do:

President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel’s investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Here’s the thing, though. Let’s not forget that Wilson was right. There was no yellowcake. Rove and his minions discredited Wilson and destroyed his wife’s cover because he was telling the truth.

If Democrats start going on Matthews to talk about this, they need to hammer this point home over and over again. They can debate the Barbizon school of blond former prosecutors all they want, but every single time, their point must be that this was a very serious matter of national security, weapons of mass destruction, lying about war —- life and death. There was no yellow cake and there were no WMD and Bush and Rove and the rest have been lying their asses off from the beginning. And when anyone in a position to know spoke up, they were subjected to what Karl Rove openly admits to believing is a “legitimate means to counter criticism” — leaking and disseminating derogatory information about Bush’s critics. In common parlance that’s called character assasination. And when you do it to discredit someone who is telling the truth it’s a cover-up.

Democrats really need to rise to the occasion this time. There remains a serious danger of the whole thing getting purposefully muddied by GOP spin artists as it usually is and there is just no excuse for it. As David Corn said back in 2003:

The strategic point here — and there is one — is for the GOP’ers to make this scandal look like another one of those nasty partisan mud-wrestles that the public never likes. Turn it into a political controversy, not a criminal one. Then it all comes out blurry and muddy in the wash. (Bad metaphor, I know.) But that is the intent: to fuzzy up the picture and cause people to shrug their shoulders and say, “it’s just politics.”

That’s why we have to be prepared with a story people can understand and be prepared to tie it in to what they are beginning to see happened with the Iraq war. In Hollywood, screewriters and readers are asked to distill the plot into a single sentence called a logline. Here’s the logline for the Plame Scandal:

Karl Rove and others in the White House exposed an undercover CIA agent in order to cover up their lies about Iraq.

Update: Needlenose has a very interesting theory about Judith Miller’s role in all this — and Josh Marshall seems to be leaning in a similar direction.

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