Making Rove Happy
by digby
Murray Waas has a very interesting article up today that reveals that the Plame smear happened concurrently with another smear job against Francis Townsend. It’s pretty clear that the cabal around Cheney has been operating as a shadow government within the White house agitating for its own policies from the beginning. (And Scooter Libby is a real piece ‘o work.)
The senior staff in the Office of the Vice President adamantly opposed Townsend’s appointment. The staff included two of Cheney’s closest aides: Libby, then the chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president; and David Addington, who at the time was Cheney’s counsel but who has since succeeded Libby as chief of staff.
Among other things, Libby and Addington believed that Townsend would bring a more traditional approach to combating terrorism, and feared she would not sign on to, indeed might even oppose, the OVP’s policy of advocating the use of aggressive and controversial tools against terror suspects. One of those techniques is known as “extraordinary rendition,” in which terror suspects are taken to foreign countries, where they can be interrogated without the same legal and human-rights protections afforded to those in U.S. custody, including the protection from torture.
Libby’s opposition to Townsend was so intense that he asked at least two other people in the White House to obtain her personnel records. These records showed that she had been turned down for two lesser positions in the Bush administration because of her political leanings, according to accounts provided by current and former administration officials. Libby also spoke about leaking the material to journalists or key staffers or members on Capitol Hill, to possibly undercut Townsend, according to the same accounts.
I am going to take a great speculative leap here and suggest that Rove helped Libby with the Wilson smear at least partially as a way to smooth things over after he was ordered to support Townsend. Maybe that’s what led him to take that walk down the hall and tell Scoot that he’d gotten the job done with Novak.
After all, “Official A” not only mentioned that he had spoken with Novak — he told Libby that Novak was going to write a story about it.
Libby: Junior must have blown a gasket on that Novak column about Townsend. You’re slipping old man.
(High fives Addington)
Rove: Hey, you owe me one, dude. I got him to run with the Wilson thing.
Libby: Awesome!
(high fives all around.)
There have been reports that Rove was seriously pissed that he got caught up in one of Cheney’s little bag jobs without having all the facts (for instance that Plame was a NOC.)
According to Waas, Novak and Rove corroborate each others’ version of events in the Plame matter. Novak happened to be pursuing this story on Townsend and Plame came up at the end of the conversation:
The papers on Frances Townsend that Rove had on his desk on July 9 appear to have corroborated Rove’s and Novak’s accounts to prosecutors that the principal focus of their conversation was Townsend’s appointment. But on the issue of Valerie Plame, prosecutors have been unable to determine whether in fact Novak was the one who first broached the subject, and whether Rove simply confirmed something that Novak already knew. Sources close to the investigation say this uncertainty is one of the foremost reasons Fitzgerald has not decided yet whether to bring criminal charges against Rove.
I’m not sure why that’s relevant, actually, unless Fitz has been trying to nail Rove on a conspiracy charge. As far as I know (and contrary to an earlier Waas story) Rove apparently admitted the Novak conversation from the beginning. His problems stem from his strangely vague recollection of where he got the information and repeatedly lying about the Cooper conversation, doling out the truth only in dribs and drabs as he was absolutely forced to do so.
I wouldn’t necessarily be able to prove it in a court of law, but it’s obvious to anyone who’s followed this story that there was a concerted effort to out Plame. This story today actually serves more as supplemental proof that the White house is a cauldron of intrigue and double dealing, a place in which it’s perfectly believable that outing a CIA agent for political purposes or because of interagency pique is common practice. That’s the type of people we are dealing with. But then we knew that.
But there is a little tid-bit in this article that I find very, very interesting:
Novak indicated to Rove that he was still going to write a column that would be critical of Townsend. But according to an account that Novak later provided of his conversation with Rove, he also signaled to Rove that Wilson and Plame would be the subject of one of his columns. “I think that you are going to be unhappy with something that I write,” he said to Rove, “and I think you are very much going to like something that I am about to write.”
On July 10, Novak’s column appeared in newspapers across the country, with a headline suggested by Novak’s syndicate: “Bush Sets Himself Up for Another Embarrassment.”
The column referred to Townsend as another potential “enemy within.” Novak opined that Townsend would likely prove disloyal to Bush, because she had been “an intimate adviser of Janet Reno as the Clinton administration’s attorney general,” and he pointedly noted that earlier in her career, “Townsend’s boss and patron … was [then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York] Jo Ann Harris, whose orientation was liberal Democratic.”
Four days later, on July 14, Novak wrote his now-famous column on Plame, in which he outed her as an “agency operative.”
According to the article, Rove had not been in favor of her appointment originally, but he’d been tasked by Bush to defend her in the press and by all accounts he followed orders and did that. If Novak’s statement is true, then the column that Novak thought Rove was going to be unhappy about was the Townsend article. That means that Novak knew that the column about Wilson was going to make Rove happy.
In order to understand why this is significant, you have to go back and look at the column in which Novak outs Plame. It quite mildly states that the Vice President didn’t send Wilson (which Wilson had never claimed) but it is not particularly critical of Wilson — the man with whom both Rove and Libby are reported to have been obsessed. In fact, it is surprisingly complimentary:
Wilson’s mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a “con man.” This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.
That’s where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein’s wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed “the stuff of heroism.” President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. “I will not answer any question about my wife,” Wilson told me.
If Novak told Rove that he would be happy with that column there can be only one reason —- Plame. And you can see why. After all, Rove has admitted to coordinating a campaign to circulate the information about Plame after Novak’s column was published.
Wilson told NEWSWEEK that in the days after the Novak story appeared, he got calls from several well-connected Washington reporters. One was NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. She told NEWSWEEK that she said to Wilson: “I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that that was the real story.” The next day Wilson got a call from Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show “Hardball.”? According to a source close to Wilson, Matthews said, “?I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.” (Matthews told NEWSWEEK: “I am not going to talk about off-the-record conversations.”?)
You can certainly see why Rove would be “happy” that Novak had taken the bait. It gave them the hook they needed to really go after Wilson. They were running a double game with Tenet publicly falling on his sword to calm down the yellowcake story while they were prodding the press throughout to taint Wilson as a henpecked loser who needed his wife to give him something to do.
In the end the case against Rove does appear to turn on his rolling disclosures to the prosecutor about Cooper. We pretty much knew that. But the more you hear about how this all came about the more you see what a devious, paranoid atmosphere pervades this White House. I think perhaps the country would be far better off if they were all getting blow jobs from interns instead of expending all this energy plotting against their rivals and enemies, both perceived and real.
.