He Threw it Away A Long Time Ago
by digby
Josh Marshall has a nice response up to Jonah Goldberg’s plaintive cry of “where can Rove go to get his reputation back?”
As Andrew Sullivan aptly quips, maybe Rove can go look for it in South Carolina. More to the point, let’s not forget the salient facts here. The question going back three years ago now is whether Karl Rove knowingly participated in leaking the identity of a covert CIA operative for the purpose of discrediting a political opponent who was revealing information about the White House’s use of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
That was the issue. From the beginning, Rove, through Scott McClellan, denied that he did any of that. There weren’t even any clever circumlocutions. He just lied. From admissions from Rove, filings in the Libby case, and uncontradicted reportage, we know as clearly as we ever can that Rove did do each of those things.
So he did do what he was suspected of and he did lie about it.
These things may not have risen to a level of criminality, but they were low-down political dirty tricks at the very least. We know this. And we know that Rove has done whisper campaigns about judges being pedophiles and governors being lesbians and war heroes being cowards. He plays a form of despicable hardball politics by character assassination. He makes no bones about it. These things are not illegal. But they are despicable and loathesome, nonetheless.
As Marshall points out, Fitzgerald gave up on charging under the leak statute early on. This has always been about perjury and obstruction. Whether Rove cut a deal or Fitz just couldn’t make a case for those two crimes is unknown. What is not unknown is whether Rove is a lying, scumbag piece of shit. He is.
And when the the Libby trial happens next winter, I suspect it will be spelled out in uncertain terms just how low these people are willing to go.
Remember this:
[Rove] 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.
And this:
Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times reported on July 18 that top White House aides were in a state of mania around this time two years ago, “intensely focused on discrediting” Joseph Wilson after he wrote his now-famous New York Times op-ed piece.
Hamburger’s and Wallsten’s sources tell them that Karl Rove’s animus toward Wilson was so intense that curiosity arose within the White House about it. When asked about this, Rove reportedly said, “He’s a Democrat.”
I’m sure that many Republicans feel that this was just great. It shows that Karl has the biggest balls in town. But I suspect there are others who aren’t quite so enamored of this petty political crapola when it comes to serious issues like why went into Iraq.
As I wrote earlier, Karl’s testimony should be very interesting.
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