Roadkill
From David Corn:
…tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine’s Matt Cooper and that Rove–prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official–told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson’s now-controversial trip to Niger.
To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it’s only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I’m told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove–despite his lawyers claim that Rove “did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA”–did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson’s wife was in the CIA. No wonder special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursued Cooper so fiercely. And Fitzgerald must have been delighted when Time magazine–over Cooper’s objection–surrendered Cooper’s emails and notes, which, according to a previous Newsweek posting by Michael Isikoff, named Rove as Cooper’s source. In court on Wednesday, Fitzgerald said that following his receipt of Cooper’s emails and notes “it is clear to us we need [Cooper’s] testimony perhaps more so than in the past.” This was a clue that Fitzgerald had scored big when he obtained the Cooper material.
This new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or, at least it should).
I think we may be getting close to a time where Karl Rove is going to decide to spend more time with his family. Bush is too politically weak to finesse this and the story comes awfully close to the Iraq lies to try to brazen it out.
I want to know the truth,’ president tells reporters
Wednesday, February 11, 2004 Posted: 1:46 AM EST
WASHINGTON (CNN) –President Bush said Tuesday he welcomes a Justice Department investigation into who revealed the classified identity of a CIA operative.
“If there’s a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is,” Bush told reporters at an impromptu news conference during a fund-raising stop in Chicago, Illinois. “If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of.
“I welcome the investigation. I am absolutely confident the Justice Department will do a good job.
“I want to know the truth,” the president continued. “Leaks of classified information are bad things.”
He added that he did not know of “anybody in my administration who leaked classified information.”
Bush said he has told his administration to cooperate fully with the investigation and asked anyone with knowledge of the case to come forward.
In the summer of 2003 Karl Rove thought he could get away with anything.
hubris HYOO-bruhs, noun:
Overbearing pride or presumption.
Update:
… NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time’s editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine’s corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a “big warning” not to “get too far out on Wilson.” Rove told Cooper that Wilson’s trip had not been authorized by “DCIA”—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, “it was, KR said, wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.” Wilson’s wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: “not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger… “
[…]
A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was “absolutely no inconsistency” between Cooper’s e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. “A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame’s identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false,” the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson’s trip to Africa.
Uh. Bullshit. It was an effort to keep TIME from publishing things that turned out to be true. The big question that was swirling wasn’t who sent Wilson on the trip, for gawds sake. It was whether they knew the Niger documents were forgeries and spread it around anyway. Karl’s little phone call was an effort to cover-up the fact that the administration had lied its ass off making the case for war — Valerie Plame was a pawn they used to try to taint Wilson as some kind of hen-pecked househusband when he exposed an element of their bogus evidence. Regardless of whether Rove knew she was an NOC, and this doesn’t prove it one way or the other, it proves he was a scumbag who was engineering a cover-up. One thing we know for sure is that Wilson was right.
Karl Rove and others in the White House exposed an undercover CIA agent in order to cover up their lies about Iraq.
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