For two years, the White House has insisted that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a CIA officer's identity. And President Bush said the leaker would be fired.
But Mr. Bush's spokesman wouldn't repeat any of those assertions Monday in the face of Rove's own lawyer saying his client spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified in a newspaper column.
Rove described the woman to a reporter as someone who "apparently works" at the CIA, according to an e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine.
And that's "apparently" illegal. Of course, the case will now delve into the Clintonian semantics of whether Rove "knowingly" outed Plame, but come on. This is the highest echelon of the federal government of the United States of America, and Plame worked at the place where the running joke among average Americans is "I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you". Is it unfair to assume that common sense tells you that, regardless of specific knowledge, you err on the side of caution in sensitive matters such as this?
This is what it's come to -- they crucified Clinton for everything from blowjobs to firing a few people in the WH travel office. Every damned thing was an excuse to go headhunting. But now they want to close ranks. Well, fuck that. They wanted war with the "liberals", they got it.
Funny how Scott's not quite as forthcoming as he was two years ago when this shit first hit the proverbial fan of "ignore". Billmon has disseminated a nice compilation of McClellan's previous averrals on the issue. Bring your hip-waders.
Here is a brief rundown of this morning's proceedings:
Scott McClellan’s press briefing is beginning now (you can watch it live here) — but a reporter inside today’s untelevised press gaggle just shot us an email. Apparently Scottie was asked 5 different times about the Rove revelations, and 5 different times he said he “would not comment on an ongoing investigation.”
UPDATE: This press briefing is stunning. McClellan is refusing to say anything at all, not one word, about the Plame case. The reporters are outraged - NBC’s David Gregory just told McClellan that his stonewalling was “ridiculous.”
Well, better late than never, I guess. It would have been nice if they had been this intrepid, say, back when the whole thing first broke two years ago, but the fact that they've finally gotten off the couch says something.
Finally, the article that touched off today's feeding frenzy:
In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. 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 ... "
Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.
Again, for the young enterprising would-be journalist looking to barbecue s'mores on Nantucket with Chris Matthews and L'il Russ, there are still more juicy questions to be asked and answered, contained right in the context of the Newsweek article. For instance, whence did the now-infamous forged Niger documents come? Apparently a SISMI (Italian intelligence) agent named Rocco Martino was behind it. But who prompted Martino in this undertaking and why? And who passed the info about Wilson's wife along to the White House? Could it have been John Bolton?
Finally, who else is in the loop on this? It's been common knowledge for two years now. Has Rove just not told anyone at all about any of this, which seems incredibly unlikely, or do we have a set of high-level personnel in the know. Whether or not he knew specifically about Plame's undercover status, Rove gave her up, and this "I'm just a simple fella who didn't know what I was doin'" shit doesn't cut it. Rove's a lot of things, but he isn't stupid. If he is that stupid, he shouldn't be where he is in the first place.
So Bush has a choice to make here real soon. Karl may have to euphemistically spend time with his family or whatever, but he's gotta go, and W and Dick know it. The question is just how much they know about all this, and how long they've kept it under wraps.
There's so much worth investigating here for the liberal media, it's hard to know just where to begin. As long as they get started, that's the main thing. It's never the crime, it's always the cover-up that gets these weasels.
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