Spinning Fitz

by digby

Last night it looked as though Jim VandeHei had broken the Plame case wide open when he said on Hardball that Stephen Hadley had told Rove about Plame. Today, the WaPo is backtracking, saying that VandeHei meant Libby, not Rove. VandeHei wrote last October:

White House adviser Karl Rove told the grand jury in the CIA leak case that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, may have told him that CIA operative Valerie Plame worked for the intelligence agency before her identity was revealed, a source familiar with Rove’s account said yesterday.

In a talk that took place in the days before Plame’s CIA employment was revealed in 2003, Rove and Libby discussed conversations they had had with reporters in which Plame and her marriage to Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV were raised, the source said. Rove told the grand jury the talk was confined to information the two men heard from reporters, the source said.

This is very likely to be the “official A” conversation mentioned in the Libby indictment:

On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House (“Official A”) who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson’s wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson’s trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson’s wife.

(Assuming he isn’t covering for a sourse who told him Hadley was Rove’s original source) VandeHei’s comment yesterday indicates that he thinks it makes sense that Rove “learned” about Plame in the very same conversation in which he told Libby he’d confirmed Plame’s CIA status to Bob Novak. I think that’s ridiculous and I suspect that this is one of the bizarre Rovian explanations that keeps Rove in Fitz’s sites.

I was trying to explain how we got to this point to a friend who had lost the threads of this story and so I wrote a little primer, as I understand it. I thought that some readers might find it useful:

The Rove version of events seems to be that Rove heard about Plame from “someone outside the white house” whose identity he can’t remember. Although he lied about it to the FBI, he admitted to the Grand Jury that he confirmed that Plame was CIA to Bob Novak and that Novak told him that he was going to write a story about it. But he also said that it wasn’t until July 10th or 11th, when he happened to be chattering in the office to Libby about this Novak call, that he really learned about Plame. He then spoke to Matt Cooper (on the morning of the 11th) spilled the beans about Plame, shot off an e-mail to Hadley saying that he “didn’t take the bait” — and then forgot all about that Cooper conversation and the e-mail.

He didn’t remember talking to Cooper when, just a week after the conversation, all hell broke loose in Washington when Novak’s column came out and it was revealed that Plame was an NOC.

He didn’t remember when he was asked to search for any documentation about Wilson and he didn’t find that e-mail to Hadley either.

He didn’t remember the conversation with Cooper when the FBI talked to him and he didn’t remember it when he first testified before the Grand Jury.

It wasn’t until the following spring when Viveca Novak “pushed back” Bob Luskin, revealing that she knew Rove was Cooper’s source and Luskin then fortuitously “found” the missing e-mail, that Rove apparently remembered the conversation.

Oddly, throughout this time he apparently did remember the Novak confirmation. And it would seem (although we don’t know this) that he remembered the Libby conversation from the beginning while completely forgetting he talked to Cooper or wrote an e-mail to Hadley on the very same day.

After the miracle e-mail appears, Rove testifies to the GJ in October of 2004 about his conversation with Cooper. He has no reason to worry about what Cooper might say because even though he issued a “waiver”, Cooper is refusing to testify and he and TIME are fighting all attempts to get them to cooperate.

At this point, it appears that all anyone knows is “gossip” that Cooper and Rove spoke. Rove says the Plame matter was a passing reference in a conversation about welfare reform.

But TIME, surprisingly, gives up the notes the next summer when the Supreme Court refuses to take the appeal and Cooper’s lawyer finds a way to get Rove to release Cooper from his promise on the day he is slated to go to jail. Unfortunately for Rove, Cooper testifies (and his notes confirm) that Rove never mentioned welfare reform and spoke at greater length and in much greater detail about Plame than he had testified to earlier.

Again,it seems that Rove has not been completely forthcoming with the prosecutor.

Fitzgerald apparently did not buy the convenient Hadley e-mail memory restoration business. (He may have been convinced that other aspects of Rove’s story don’t add up either.) He was ready to indict. It is supposedly at this point that Luskin comes forward with yet another piece of previously undisclosed information — reporter Viveca Novak is the one who set him on the trail of the Hadley e-mail back in the first part of 2004, long before Karl could have known that Cooper was on the hot seat. How this is supposed to exonerate Rove, we still don’t know.

According to VandeHei, Luskin says that this conversation took place in January of 2004 and Luskin told Rove about it before he went before the grand jury:

One possible explanation of why the date is so important is that Luskin could contend it would have been foolish for Rove to try to cover up his role when he knew — because of Novak’s disclosure to Luskin — that a number of people knew he had talked to Cooper and that it probably would soon become public.

The “why would he do something so stupid” defense rarely works and Luskin knows it. If this is his story he just threw the Hail Mary to the wrong end zone. In fact, the story is so absurd that VandeHei’s the only one who’s reporting it.

The conventional wisdom is that Luskin claimed that he started the e-mail search after he talked to Viveca Novak in either March or May, prompting Rove to go before the grand jury in October to say the e-mail jogged his memory and he now remembered the whole thing. We all assume that this is a crappy defense because it wouldn’t have taken between March and October (or May and October) to locate this e-mail. (But as Jeralyn points out, it’s possible that Luskin turned this e-mail over and offered up Rove’s recantation earlier than October and that Fitzgerald just didn’t call him to testify before then for unknown reasons.)

I don’t know how relevant it is but there seems to be a discrepancy between what Luskin and Viveca Novak told Fitzgerald. According to Novak, Fitzgerald spoke to her informally for a couple of hours on Novemnber 10th. She says that she couldn’t remember when she spoke with Luskin but it was most likely May. We know that he then put Robert Luskin himself under oath on December 2, 2005. (By all acouunts, it is highly unusual to put a suspect’s lawyer under oath.) Fitz then called Novak and requested she come in again to testify under oath this time. She says that she discovered by that time that that she had also spoken with Luskin in March but she still doesn’t know when she spilled the beans about Rove and Cooper.

I’m sure there are missing elements in what we know of Rove’s story, but this is the gist of what we know:

He lied to the FBI about being Novak’s source. He says he has forgotton important conversations and when he belatedly does remember them, he remembers them very differently than others do. He only “finds” important documents months after they are subpoenaed and when they can be used to bolster his evolving explanations. At the final hour, just as he is about to be indicted, his lawyer comes forward with yet more undisclosed information.

Time after time, Rove has played Fitzgerald for a chump, doling out bits of information only as he has to as if he were playing the Washington spin game instead of dealing with a federal prosecutor. But unlike the credulous DC press corps, who seem to have trouble keeping this story straight in their minds, Fitzgerald has a cadre of prosecutors and FBI agents, as well as a memory like a steel trap, that is keeping track of all this. Rove can’t spin his way out of this.

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