Bob Somerby takes John Aravosis and me to task today for some good reasons. He says:
Liberals and Dems simply can’t afford to play the dim games of the kooky-con right. But all across the liberal web, we find the virus spreading—a virus in which every bit of reasoning, no matter how daft, is accepted as seminal brilliance as long as it “proves” King Karl’s guilt. Yesterday, we were amazed when the sagacious Digby praised this post from John Aravosis:
ARAVOSIS (7/11/05): Perhaps it’s legally relevant if Rove “knew” Plame was undercover or not, but it’s not relevant in terms of him keeping his job. Rove intentionally outed a CIA agent working on WMD, it is irrelevant whether he did or didn’t know if she was an undercover agent. First off, he knew she wasn’t THAT public about her identity or there’d have been no need to “out” here—everyone would have known her already.
Aravosis makes some excellent points in his longer post. But that paragraph, which Digby featured, makes almost no sense at all. The last sentence is completely absurd. The second sentence isn’t much better.
The point I was making, and that I think Aravosis was making, is really captured in the first sentence: “It doesn’t matter if Rove ‘knew’ Plame was undercover or not, it’s not relevant in terms of him keeping his job.” If I had it to do over again I would leave it at that.
The issue I was concerned with was that political and legal culpability aren’t the same thing, not so much that King Karl was guilty of outing Plame. The newsweak article proved that Rove disclosed to a reporter on deep backround that Joseph Wilson’s wife was with the CIA, working on weapons of mass destruction. That was a reckless thing for a top White House official to do if he did not know her status — and possibly illegal if he did. We don’t know if he committed a crime, but we do know that what he did was at least negligent. Valerie Plame WAS an undercover operative whose cover was blown when white house officials leaked the fact that she worked with the CIA to the press. He should resign for having done that, regardless of his motives or knowledge of her undercover status. It’s the act, not the intent, that should govern whether he remains in the White House with a top security clearance.
I admit that John’s paragraph was not the clearest thing he’s ever written, or that I ever endorsed. I suspect that we were both a little bit overexcited and mentally fatigued. (Aravosis at least has the excuse that he’d been crammed like a sardine on airplanes all week — I’m just overdosing on schaudenfreude.) The larger point, however, remains valid.
But Somerby’s not an ass for pointing this out. It’s what he does. If you can’t take the heat, y’know…
“Knowing Rove, he’s still having eight different policy meetings and sticking to his game plan,” said one veteran Republican strategist in Washington who often works with the White House. “But this issue now is looming, and as they peel away another layer of the onion, there’s a lot of consternation. Rove needs to be on his A game now, not huddled with lawyers and press people.”
A senior Congressional Republican aide said most members of Congress were still waiting to learn more about Mr. Rove’s involvement and to assess whether more disclosures about his role were likely.
“The only fear here is where does this go,” the aide said. “We can’t know.”
Getting Rove off his A game is almost worth as much as getting him out. He’s man known for his surly temperament in the best of times and this has been a bad second term so far for the GOP maestro. Social Security, his “legacy” project, is dead in the water. Iraq is a quagmire. Schiavo was a huge mistake and the SCOTUS battles ahead need his personal attention — the religious right is his very special constituency. Bush’s ratings are in the toilet. This, he did not need.
So, we will see whether The Magician is capable of handling the spotlight and all the pressure — at a time when you can be sure that his little Prince is very, very unhappy with his performance. Junior may remain loyal, but never think that it has to do with real personal loyalty. It has to do with never being willing to admit to a mistake. Bush will make Karl’s life a living hell. Do you think he really likes the guy who’s called “Bush’s Brain?” Does Karl strike anyone as a “W” kinda guy?
No, Karl is now under the worst kind of pressure imaginable. We’re not going to see his “A” game.
And as for “where does this go?” I think it’s time to start asking why George W. Bush, from the very beginning of this saga, has been saying things like “he’ll be taken care of” instead of “he’ll be fired.” His careful statements strong imply that he’s known from the start that someone important to him was the leaker.Otherwise, he would do his cowboy routine and issue a steely eyed threat (making Peggy Noonan moan in ecstacy.) If so, the question would be, did Rove confess after the fact or was Bush in on it from the beginning? WDTPKAWDHKI.
Michael Isikoff’s hinting yesterday about a classified file being the source of the leak is certainly tantalizing in that regard.
ISIKOFF: But the problem that people in the White House, Rove among them, may have is how did they know that Valerie Plame, or Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA? What we do know is there was a classified State Department report that said this, that was taken by Secretary of State Powell with him on the trip to Africa that President Bush was then on, and many senior White House aides were on.
That classified State Department report appears to have been — or may well have been the source for the information that Rove and others were then dishing out to reporters. And if that’s the case, there still may be — we don’t know yet, but there still may be an instance where classified information was provided to reporters.
The Grand Jury subpoenaed the phone records of Air Force One during that period. Who knows what they found? But if they found something, it’s come quite close to Colin Powell — and Bush himself. Air Force One isn’t that big.
Here’s the Newsweak story from last year about Powell’s grand jury appearance:
Powell’s appearance on July 16 is the latest sign the probe being conducted by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is highly active and broader than has been publicly known. Sources close to the case say prosecutors were interested in discussions Powell had while with President George W. Bush on a trip to Africa in July 2003, just before Plame’s identity was leaked to columnist Robert Novak. A senior State Department official confirmed that, while on the trip, Powell had a department intelligence report on whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger—a claim Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, discounted after a trip to Niger on behalf of the CIA. The report stated that Wilson’s wife had attended a meeting at the CIA where the decision was made to send Wilson to Niger, but it did not mention her last name or undercover status. At the time, White House officials were seeking to discredit Wilson, who had become a public critic of the Bush administration. There’s no indication Powell is a subject of the probe; the department official said the secretary never talked to Novak about the Plame matter.
In today’s NY Times piece, there’s this, which I’ve heard bandied about quite a bit in the right blogosphere:
There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.
“She had a desk job in Langley,” said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.’s headquarters. “When you want someone in deep cover, they don’t go back and forth to Langley.”
It is highly doubtful that the special prosecutor would convene a grand jury and investigate the White House for two years without first determining whether there was any potential crime to investigate since determining her status was the easiest element of the case — finding out who did it and whether they knew she was undercover, which is obviously what he’s been doing, is the difficult part. It’s hard to believe that he’d send a journalist to jail and interview the president only to come up later and admit she wasn’t actually an undercover agent after all, so fuggedaboudit. And it’s pretty clear that the judges who have reviewed the classified documents in the contempt cases agree, by the way. They all say the case concerns a breach of national security.
One might also assume that since the CIA sent the damn referral to the justice department that they considered her undercover too! Who else is going to make that determination — Highpockets?
By the way, has there ever been a scandal in which Republican shill Victoria Toensing is not a media ready expert on the underlying crime?
I am well aware of what was said previously. I remember well what was said previously. And at some point I look forward to talking about it. But until the investigation is complete, I’m just not going to do that.
And unfortunately, as somebody who likes to write, I’d like to say a lot about the case, but because of my attorney’s advice I can’t. But I will. And there might be some surprising things.
I am a big fan of Garance Franke-Ruta, but I think this is funny:
If there is one thing that reporters hate, it’s being played for patsies. McClellan has publicly humiliated some of the most prominent reporters in the country by persistently feeding them information that has now been revealed to be false, and I’m pretty darn sure that they are not going to grant him any favors and extend him the benefit of the doubt in the future.
I’m glad to know that they feel huniliated by being persistently fed information that has been revealed to be false, but it certainly isn’t unprecedented. It’s not unprecedented by a long shot. In fact, they have been just such patsies for years.
I suspect that the real reason they acted up today is they have been treated like shit by George W Bush’s administration and one of their own is sitting in jail. That’s not the same thing. But I’ll take it.
Rep. Louise Slaughter is pistol. She’s got a petition going to demand President Bush fire Karl Rove. If you feel like you want to do something, dammit, go sign it.
“The media feeding frenzy will, indeed, be massive. But absent a serious claim of a statutory violation or perjury, it’s questionable whether anyone apart from liberal bloggers and other pre-existing Bush haters will partake in the media’s dog food. This isn’t a top presidential aide accepting an expensive gift, or engaging in lewd sexual conduct. It’s a top aide providing truthful information to journalists in response to lies told to embarrass the administration and our government.”
You might wonder why he did it on double secret backround if it was all on the up and up, but whatever. Highpockets and pals got the memo.
This is, of course, precisely the opposite of the truth, as one would expect from Bush apologists with serious projection problems. While it’s true that this isn’t about taking expensive gifts (Dukester call your office) or engaging in lewd sexual conduct which I agree is always an appropriate reqason to call in the feds — this is in fact a case of a top aide providing false information to journalists in response to truths told to expose the administration’s lies. This is upside-downism at its finest.
The exceedingly unpleasant Deborah Orin just framed this exactly the same way on Matthews. Poor Karl, he was just trying to correct the record on that liar Joe Wilson, who has been completely discredited — even saying that his report actually backed up the claims about the yellowcake rather than refuted it. Matthews interjected, wondering why the White House has taken this long to produce that explanation and openly pondering whether it was all connected to the larger Iraq lies, specifically naming Cheney. Unfortunately, Dionne merely tried to deflect the Wilson calumny and said that this was about Rove, not Wilson.
He should have gone for the bigger question. Democrats need to develop some conventional wisdom about this right away and they need to filter it into the punditocrisy. Oddly, Chris Matthews has it right.
Update: Arthur has a stinging set-down of the Powerline boys here. I neglected to add the sickening coup de grace to the the above entry:
Valerie Plame isn’t very convincing as a covert agent of the United States, although she did fairly well as an agent of her husband and the president’s other enemies.
Apparently these pathetic geeks haven’t even ever seen a James Bond Movie. I’m sure they turn away at the “lewd sexual” parts and read passages from the Bible.
Just heard the CNN anchor say “are his days numbered in the White House?” referring to our favorite turdblossom.
This is a very good thing, my friends. Once they start asking that, it’s hard to turn things around. Bill Clinton did, but Karl Rove is no Bill Clinton.
Rove did not mention her name to Cooper,” Luskin said. “This was not an effort to encourage Time to disclose her identity. What he was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren’t true.”
In particular, Rove was urging caution because then-CIA Director George J. Tenet was about to issue a statement regarding Iraq’s alleged interest in African uranium and its inaccurate inclusion in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. Tenet took the blame for allowing a misleading paragraph into the speech, but Tenet also said that the president, vice president and other senior officials were never briefed on Wilson’s report.
Right. Rove was “protecting” Cooper from making a mistake and believing Wilson when he said Cheney knew the yellowcake story was bogus; it was really all “Slam Dunk” Tenet’s fault, remember? All they really meant to say was that it was “the CIA” that requested the Wilson trip. Making it sound like Wilson was some kind of emasculated wimp whose macho spy wife had to get him work was just for fun.
(Using the wife is one of their oldest tricks, from the canuck letter (a Don Segretti special — one of Karl Rove’s mentors) to Cindy McCain’s drug problems. They try to get their marks to overreact to attacks on their wives. The mafia does this too.)
I expect the white house to continue to say that they were only trying to knock down an incorrect story that Cheney knew about the Niger Report and in the course of that they accidentally let the cat out of the bag. Remember, they told us that nobody in the white house had any idea that this Niger stuff was bogus because Condi forgot to check her in-box, Steven Hadley developed amnesia and medal-of-freedom-whore George Tenet forgot to read his draft of the SOTU speech. The whole staff was just a bunch of wacky butterfingers who made the same mistake over and over again. That’s what we were all supposed to believe.
Remember this?
I can tell you, I either didn’t see the memo, I don’t remember seeing the memo, the fact is it was a set of clearance comments, it was three and a half months before the State of the Union.
Q: Should you have seen the memo?
A: Well, the memo came over. It was a clearance memo. It had a set of comments about the [Oct. 7 Cincinnati] speech. [The yellowcake reference] had already been taken out of the speech, from my point of view and from the point of view of Steve Hadley. Steve Hadley runs the clearance process. And when Director Tenet says something takes something out of a speech, we take it out. We don’t really even ask for an explanation. If the DCI, the director of Central Intelligence, is not going to stand by something, if he doesn’t think that he has confidence in it, we’re not going to put that into a presidential speech. We have no desire to have the president use information that is anything but the information in which we have the best confidence, the greatest confidence.
And so when Director Tenet said take it out of the speech, I think people simply took it out of the speech and didn’t think any more about why we had taken it out of the speech.
Convincing, no? That was the national Security Advisor, Condi Rice. Good thing she’s been promoted. Tim Noah at Slate dealt with this nonsense two years ago:
Both Rice and Hadley state that they had already removed the offending line from the Cincinnati speech when Tenet sent them a memo urging them to remove it. Tenet had already told Hadley by phone to take it out, and Hadley had complied. If, as Rice says, it’s axiomatic that when the CIA director wants something out of a presidential speech, it comes out, Tenet would have known there was no danger that his complaint – the way Rice makes it sound, it was more like a command – would go unheeded. So why did Tenet – a man who is so busy fighting the war on terrorism that three months later he didn’t have time to read an advance draft of the State of the Union, an oversight that made him Yellowcakegate’s Fall Guy No. 1 – write a superfluous memo?
Because, Chatterbox believes, it wasn’t superfluous. Tenet knew that his complaint was not a command and that somebody at the White House still needed convincing. But who would have the standing to tell the CIA director to go jump in the lake? Surely not Fall Guy No. 2, the National Security Council’s nonproliferation expert, Robert Joseph. Surely not Fall Guy No. 3, the NSC’s deputy, Steve Hadley. And surely not even Fall Person No. 4, Condi Rice, who’d have to be insane to lie, on national television, about dissing Tenet. (Tenet, she surely knows, is superb at exacting revenge.)
Chatterbox therefore posits the existence of a Fall Guy No. 5, Vice President Dick Cheney. The one person in the White House who has no patience for addressing the Yellowcakegate mystery at all and who questions the patriotism of anybody who does.
This is really where the rubber meets the road on this story. Cheney had become engaged in a virtual fantasy about Saddam’s nuclear capability before and even after the war when it became clear that there was none. He is almost certainly the guy who put the yellowcake back in the speech. And his personal assassin, Scooter Libby, is knee deep in the Plame outing.
The Niger episode was one of the first windows into the Iraq lies and Wilson directly implicated Cheney. That’s why they were panicking and that’s why they mishandled this smear job so badly.
The reality is that it doesn’t matter if Cheney received a full briefing on Wilson’s findings because it’s patently obvious that he and Tenet and Rice and a whole bunch of other people (likely including the president if he wasn’t too busy tending to his scrapes and bruises) all knew it was bullshit and put it in the SOTU anyway. They doctored it up with “the British have learned” or whatever it was and that’s turned out to be crap too. Rove and his pals can try to pretend that they were knocking down an erroneous story by impugning Wilson’s allegedly partisan motives, (and, oopsie, “accidentally” outing a CIA agent) but it doesn’t make sense in light of what we already know.
They were knocking down a true story, which is an entirely different thing.
The WaPo article ends with this, which is really laughable:
After the investigation into the leak began, Luskin said, Rove signed a waiver in December 2003 or January 2004 authorizing prosecutors to speak to any reporters Rove had previously engaged in discussion, which included Cooper.
“His written waiver included the world,” Luskin said. “It was intended to be a global waiver. . . . He wants to make sure that the special prosecutor has everyone’s evidence. That reflects someone who has nothing to hide.”
Then why in the hell didn’t he just openly admit that he’d spoken to Cooper instead of having TIME litigate this mess for months on end, have the government spend god knows how many millions and leave poor Matt Cooper thinking until the very last minute that he was going to have to do jail time to protect him?
If Rove didn’t expect Cooper to keep his confidence all he ever had to do was explicitly tell Cooper that he had no problem with him testifying to what he’d said. Cooper kept the confidence because he was sure that his journalistic reputation would be smeared (by Rove presumably) if he accepted the “global waiver” — I suspect because he knew that what he had to say was revealing. Perhaps others, like Walter PIncus, either didn’t have that information or weren’t worried about Rove’s retaliation. We don’t know for sure. But in Cooper’s case we know absolutely that when Rove personally released him he agreed to cooperate with the prosecutor. Rove could have done that at any time in the last two years. He didn’t.
I seem to remember a lot of bloviating a while back that said that the president should have admitted to extra-marital blowjobs in order to spare the country the expense of pursuing the case. I think most people can understand why it’s not any of the government’s (or the country’s) business what consenting adults do alone together and that it’s worth fighting for the principle that investigating such people’s sex lives is off limits.
This, however, is something very different. The principle at stake for Rove, if not the reporters, is the right to use the press for his own purposes and be protected by the reporters privilege. Rove could have saved the country a bunch of money and bunch of time by simply admitting publicly that he’d talked to Cooper. If he isn’t guilty of committing this crime it wouldn’t have mattered a year ago any more than it mattered last week.
He should resign for smearing Wilson and outing his wife (whether inadvertantly or not) merely because Wilson exposed the fact that the government knew the yellowcake story was bullshit. Wilson was right.
And he should also resign for having the chutzpah to release Matt Cooper from his obligation at the very last minute, after sitting back and allowing the government to spend its resources for years getting him to do it.
I’m glad to see that Harry Reid has weighed in:
“I agree with the President when he said he expects the people who work for him to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration. I trust they will follow through on this pledge. If these allegations are true this rises above politics and is about our national security.”
And MoveOn is launching a campaign demanding Rove’s resignation but they are taking the next step as well and asking “what did the president know and when did he know it?” This is what partisan groups should do. They should make the pivot to the president first. It re-positions the Rove question further to the center.
The liklihood that Rove will actually resign is still quite small although it’s growing. But the liklihood that this will become a major distraction for him and the administration is getting bigger by the day. Let’s see how well these guys can compartmentalize, shall we?
Update II: Just caught the gaggle over on Crooks and Liars. Scotty had a rough day. One gets the feeling that the White House press corps may have been waiting for this opening for some time. I especially emjoyed it when someone asked him if he’d gotten his own lawyer. Ouch.
Update III: Missed the NY Times piece on Cooper this morning. Looks like Karl was more than willing to see Cooper go to jail rather than talk. It was his lawyer who shot his mouth off and gave Cooper the opportunity to claim he’d been released. Nice. Nonetheless, the point remains. Rove could have “cleaned this up” as Gergen just put it on Lou Dobbs’ show, very simply a long time ago if he wanted to. He didn’t and there’s a reason for that. If it turns out it was about blow-jobs I’ll back his right to keep his mouth shut. Otherwise, he’s got some splainin’ to do. After he resigns.
John is absolutely right about this. It makes no difference for our purposes whether Rove is legally culpable because he did or did not know that Plame was undercover. He was a very, very, very high level official in the White House and he shouldn’t have been telling anyone anything about CIA agents for political reasons, particularly ones he knew worked in the field of weapons of mass destruction, period. He may have broken the law; the investigation will proceed apace whether we think he did or not. But regardless, the fact is that Rove conducted a smear operation in which a CIA agent was outed.
Aravosis says:
Bush said he wanted to get to the bottom of this over a year ago. Why then did we have to waste all this money on a special prosecutor and a grand jury if Rove knew from day one that he was the guy who leaked Plame’s identity? If Rove was so innocent, why didn’t he just come forward immediately and say “yeah, it was me, but I didn’t realize she was undercover”? Did he tell the president it was him? And if so, why didn’t the president go public and put this investigation to an end? Or did Rove refuse the president’s request and NOT come forward a year ago? And if so, what is he still doing working in the white House?
Perhaps it’s legally relevant if Rove “knew” Plame was undercover or not, but it’s not relevant in terms of him keeping his job. Rove intentionally outed a CIA agent working on WMD, it is irrelevant whether he did or didn’t know if she was an undercover agent. First off, he knew she wasn’t THAT public about her identity or there’d have been no need to “out” here – everyone would have known her already.
All of us and all of the Democrats should be screaming bloody murder for what we know he did — and we should be demanding his resignation.
I realize that Bush is not going to fall over weeping when we do this, and the press will probably somnambulently tip-toe until roused, but it begins the drumbeat and it puts pressure on the White House. We are about to enter a huge fight over two Seats on the Supreme Court. Anything to put them off their game is a good thing.
And there is no reason that Rove should not be forced to resign over this. If it were any other White House we would naturally assume it would happen. But I think that for some reason everyone, wingnuts and moonbats alike are invested in the idea that Rove is omnipotent. He’s not. He’s a cheap thug. And while it may be true that if he is forced to resign he will still be able to advise the president, it’s also true that the president would not have his single most necessary and loyal lieutenant by his side every day. Rove is the most malevolent force in the Republican party. He’s building a criminal Republican machine — that’s his legacy. It’s vitally important that we stop him if he can. Wringing our hands and saying nothing will ever happen because he’s Superman is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The dirtiest most devious president in history was brought down by his own paranoia and sloppiness. Karl Rove is no more omnipotent than he was.