Rovedirt

A new story focusing on Rove in the WaPo:

Questions Remain on the Leaker and the Law

There’s a lot of interesting info, most of which we who have been following the story know, but which has not been put all together in a mainstream story. It’s quite provocative.

But here’s one little tid-bit I’m not actually sure about:

Fitzgerald long has made a distinction in his investigation between conversations held before Novak’s column was publicly available (it was moved to his newspaper clients on July 11, 2003) and after, on the assumption that once Plame’s name was in the public domain, there was no criminal liability for administration officials to discuss it. Which may be one reason it could be difficult to obtain indictments.

We don’t actually know if this is true. There has been speculation that the law may not actually say that. From Josh Marshall 3/24/04:

A couple weeks back a legal memo fell into my hands from the sky. And it suggests that even the facts Rove has apparently admitted to put him in clear legal jeopardy.

[…]

The essential argument is that the law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, does more than simply prohibit a governmental official with access to classified information from divulging the identities of covert operatives. The interpretation of the law contained in the memo holds that a government insider, with access to classified information, such as Rove is also prohibited from confirming or further disseminating the identity of a covert agent even after someone else has leaked it.

I won’t try to explain it anymore than that. The memo is only a few pages long and I’ve marked the key passages.

There is one point the author of the memo doesn’t raise. My layman’s reading of the memo suggests to me that it would be critical to ascertain whether Rove learned of Plame’s identity before the Novak article appeared or whether he learned of it for the first time when he read Novak’s column.

If the latter, then I’m not sure the argument contained in the memo holds up.

Here’s the memo(pdf). Read it for yourself.

If its true that Rove could be held liable for making Plame “fair game” after Novak’s column, if he learned of her status before the column, then Arianna’s reported speculation among the cognescenti last night about a “meeting between Rove and Libby” makes sense, regardless of whether Rove was the original leaker..

In any case, I don’t think it’s actually been determined that Rove could not be prosecuted for spreading the tale after Novak’s column. Everybody is just assuming that because it’s “out there” that government officials continuing to spread classified information is not a crime. That may not actually be so.

It’s possible that Rove’s arrogance may get him in big trouble:

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.

I discovered the Marshall post via this very helpful timeline put out by American Progress Action Report