Think I'll toss a tidbit in here:
Gannon/Plame research thread: White House Press Briefings.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/29/215946/913
Full Version: Karl Rove - Volume four
Rove Timeline(or political obituary, whatever.... 
)
washingtonpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1201202_pf.html
Key Dates in the Life of Karl Rove
By The Associated Press
The Associated Press
Tuesday, July 12, 2005; 6:36 PM
_Dec. 25, 1950: Karl Christian Rove born in Denver.
_High school years: Family moves to Salt Lake City, where Rove volunteers for a Republican senator's re-election campaign.
_1969-71: Attends the University of Utah and joins College Republicans.
_1971-1977: Executive director and then chairman of College Republican National Committee.
_1974-1975: Republican National Committee Chairman George H.W. Bush hires Rove to be his special assistant. Around this time, Rove meets Bush's son, George W. Bush.
_1977: Moves to Texas and becomes aide to George H.W. Bush's political action committee. Rove leaves the job to work in the gubernatorial campaign of Bill Clements, who in 1978 becomes Texas' first Republican governor in more than a century.
_1980: When George H.W. Bush announces his decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination, Rove is the first person the campaign hires.
_1984: Rove helps Phil Gramm win election to Senate from Texas. Gramm had recently left the Democratic Party.
_1986: Rove's client, former Texas Gov. Bill Clements, and Democratic Gov. Mark White were running neck and neck in their race for governor when Rove announced he'd found an electronic listening device in his office. The controversy helped deliver the election to Clements. A federal prosecutor later clears both sides. Many Texas Democrats believe Rove concocted the story.
_1994: Political adviser in George W. Bush's first run for Texas governor, an upset victory over Democratic incumbent Ann Richards. Bush wins a landslide re-election in 1998.
_2000: Orchestrates Bush's presidential campaign, which ends in victory after Supreme Court intervenes.
_Sept 29, 2003: The White House dismisses as "ridiculous" the suggestion Rove was involved in disclosing the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.
_June 10, 2004: Bush pledges to fire anyone in his administration found to have been a leaker in the Plame case.
_Oct. 16, 2004: Rove testifies before grand jury investigating the leak. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, says prosecutors have assured Rove he is not a target of the criminal probe.
_Nov. 3, 2004: Bush wins re-election with Rove as his chief political adviser.
_July 10, 2005: Newsweek reports that in 2003 Rove talked to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about Plame, but did not identify her by name. Cooper later writes a story in which he uses Plame's name.
_July 11: Under intense questioning from reporters, White House spokesman Scott McClellan refuses to repeat claims that Rove had nothing to do with the leak.
_July 12: Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., say Rove should be fired. McClellan says Bush still has confidence in Rove.
___
Sources: Complete Marquis Who's Who, 2005; Who's Who in American Politics, 1999; Current Biography, 2000; Associated Press.
)washingtonpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1201202_pf.html
Key Dates in the Life of Karl Rove
By The Associated Press
The Associated Press
Tuesday, July 12, 2005; 6:36 PM
_Dec. 25, 1950: Karl Christian Rove born in Denver.
_High school years: Family moves to Salt Lake City, where Rove volunteers for a Republican senator's re-election campaign.
_1969-71: Attends the University of Utah and joins College Republicans.
_1971-1977: Executive director and then chairman of College Republican National Committee.
_1974-1975: Republican National Committee Chairman George H.W. Bush hires Rove to be his special assistant. Around this time, Rove meets Bush's son, George W. Bush.
_1977: Moves to Texas and becomes aide to George H.W. Bush's political action committee. Rove leaves the job to work in the gubernatorial campaign of Bill Clements, who in 1978 becomes Texas' first Republican governor in more than a century.
_1980: When George H.W. Bush announces his decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination, Rove is the first person the campaign hires.
_1984: Rove helps Phil Gramm win election to Senate from Texas. Gramm had recently left the Democratic Party.
_1986: Rove's client, former Texas Gov. Bill Clements, and Democratic Gov. Mark White were running neck and neck in their race for governor when Rove announced he'd found an electronic listening device in his office. The controversy helped deliver the election to Clements. A federal prosecutor later clears both sides. Many Texas Democrats believe Rove concocted the story.
_1994: Political adviser in George W. Bush's first run for Texas governor, an upset victory over Democratic incumbent Ann Richards. Bush wins a landslide re-election in 1998.
_2000: Orchestrates Bush's presidential campaign, which ends in victory after Supreme Court intervenes.
_Sept 29, 2003: The White House dismisses as "ridiculous" the suggestion Rove was involved in disclosing the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.
_June 10, 2004: Bush pledges to fire anyone in his administration found to have been a leaker in the Plame case.
_Oct. 16, 2004: Rove testifies before grand jury investigating the leak. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, says prosecutors have assured Rove he is not a target of the criminal probe.
_Nov. 3, 2004: Bush wins re-election with Rove as his chief political adviser.
_July 10, 2005: Newsweek reports that in 2003 Rove talked to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about Plame, but did not identify her by name. Cooper later writes a story in which he uses Plame's name.
_July 11: Under intense questioning from reporters, White House spokesman Scott McClellan refuses to repeat claims that Rove had nothing to do with the leak.
_July 12: Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., say Rove should be fired. McClellan says Bush still has confidence in Rove.
___
Sources: Complete Marquis Who's Who, 2005; Who's Who in American Politics, 1999; Current Biography, 2000; Associated Press.
QUOTE(graham4anything @ Jul 14 2005, 05:05 PM)
Why are you guys publicizing rightwing radio.
We have our own. Let's just put up what Randi Rhoades and Jerry Springer and the others are saying on their boards.
What do you thinkn the morons on those stations would say
"Ooh, we are sorry, we are terrible, Rove should quit? It will never happen.
Spawn and Rush are paid to spew right wing crap.
We have our own. Let's just put up what Randi Rhoades and Jerry Springer and the others are saying on their boards.
What do you thinkn the morons on those stations would say
"Ooh, we are sorry, we are terrible, Rove should quit? It will never happen.
Spawn and Rush are paid to spew right wing crap.
But it's like knowing the course of some hideous disease. We need to know what is going on. It doesn't mean that we like the disease. It's good to know what their line is so that we can be better prepared to counter it.
QUOTE(Arneoker @ Jul 15 2005, 08:05 AM)
But it's like knowing the course of some hideous disease. We need to know what is going on. It doesn't mean that we like the disease. It's good to know what their line is so that we can be better prepared to counter it.
Agree knowledge is power.
QUOTE(Mac2 @ Jul 14 2005, 05:26 PM)
Aren't you forgetting about the "espionage" part of the indictment in this topics title?
Isn't this quibbling? We're discussing the possibility of Rove's indictment, the possibility of someone else's indictment and the Rove scandal in general, which is a scandal whether or not anyone is indicted, IMO.
QUOTE(graham4anything @ Jul 14 2005, 05:27 PM)
I like the idea somebody had the other day
George Soros should purchase their stations (rumor has it Disney is selling ABC radio which in NY runs Sean and Rush, although doesn't own either), but Soros
should purchase them and force Sean and Rush to work as liberals for the next five years.
that would be priceless.
George Soros should purchase their stations (rumor has it Disney is selling ABC radio which in NY runs Sean and Rush, although doesn't own either), but Soros
should purchase them and force Sean and Rush to work as liberals for the next five years.
that would be priceless.
I hate to say this, but if Soros purchases Rush and Sean's stations he would probably leave them alone, because they would still be making money for the stations, and Soros is a businessman. But there's nothing that would keep him from promoting some liberal personalities. AAR proves that there is a market out there for liberal talk radio.
But it's a cute thought though.
I just want to say that I've never noticed so many "edited posts" in a single thread before! I saw the mod comment and I understand this has to happen, but what does this tell you about Rove? 
QUOTE(USA#1 @ Jul 14 2005, 05:10 PM)
I didn't mean to get her a little bit pregnant. Said Rove
You can not get a little bit pregnant Rove.
You can not get a little bit pregnant Rove.
"I didn't mean to cut off the wrong leg," says the surgeon!
QUOTE(graham4anything @ Jul 14 2005, 09:18 PM)
Pegatha-after 9-11 when they had the smallpox and anthrax alerts, my dentist asked me if I wanted a suicide pill to hold on to. He showed me a little case he had where his were in the office, and said if they release smallpox, he would not be around, and neither would his wife. true story.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz (drill)
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz (drill)
G4A - Before I was married, I dated a few Nurses in my time and I came accross a few that said if anything should ever happen to me ... pull my plug. They made pacts with each other to do what needed to be done.
QUOTE(Arneoker @ Jul 15 2005, 06:11 AM)
I hate to say this, but if Soros purchases Rush and Sean's stations he would probably leave them alone, because they would still be making money for the stations, and Soros is a businessman. But there's nothing that would keep him from promoting some liberal personalities. AAR proves that there is a market out there for liberal talk radio.
But it's a cute thought though.
But it's a cute thought though.
I agree. We don't need to censure even Hannity or the others. We simply need to ensure the other POV is represented. BUt, I suspect the GOP would not Soros purchase as many media outlets as they allowed Murdoch to do. They are balking even at Soros' desire to buy a baseball team.
QUOTE(hughesfan @ Jul 15 2005, 09:14 AM)
I just want to say that I've never noticed so many "edited posts" in a single thread before! I saw the mod comment and I understand this has to happen, but what does this tell you about Rove?
Just a hunch, but I think that it means that people here don't like him too much.
The concern of the moderators is that even when talking about Rove, certain things are out of bounds.
QUOTE(Arneoker @ Jul 15 2005, 06:55 AM)
Just a hunch, but I think that it means that people here don't like him too much.
The concern of the moderators is that even when talking about Rove, certain things are out of bounds.
The concern of the moderators is that even when talking about Rove, certain things are out of bounds.
What kinds of things are you referring to? I didn't see the post by the mods.
QUOTE(Sunshine @ Jul 15 2005, 09:26 AM)
What kinds of things are you referring to? I didn't see the post by the mods.
You have to go back a few pages.
But people seem to be keeping things reasonably decent now. There was some stuff that was just too offensive to tolerate, and that's all I'm going to say unless the problem surfaces again.
QUOTE(Sunshine @ Jul 15 2005, 08:55 AM)
I agree. We don't need to censure even Hannity or the others. We simply need to ensure the other POV is represented. BUt, I suspect the GOP would not Soros purchase as many media outlets as they allowed Murdoch to do. They are balking even at Soros' desire to buy a baseball team.
Exactly the OPOV has to be available and ready to be said ... they have a one track mind ... their way or the highway ... it why I listen, I want to know the message their sending and see if its a) beleivable
swallowed c) true d) inconsistant e) taken out of context f) a snippet of the actual quote.I'm tired of their brainwashing, and the religios right has always been easily brainwashed.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0507/S00227.htm
QUOTE
Friday, 15 July 2005, 3:24 pm
Report Shows Karl Rove May Have Lied to Federal Agents, a Federal Crime, During Oct 2003 Testimony Into CIA Agent Leak
By Jason Leopold
Looks like Karl Rove did break the law, the same federal law that got Martha Stewart sentenced to six months in prison.
It now appears that Rove, President Bush’s chief of staff, may have lied to the FBI in October 2003—a federal crime—when he was questioned by federal agents investigating who was responsible for leaking information about a covert CIA operative to the media.
During questioning by the FBI about his role in the Plame affair, Rove told federal agents that he only started sharing information about Plame with reporters and White House officials for the first time after conservative columnist Robert Novak identified her covert CIA status in his column on July 14, 2003.
But Rove wasn’t truthful with the FBI, what with the recent disclosure of Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails, which reveal Rove as the source for Cooper’s own July 2003 story identifying Plame as a CIA operative, and show that Rove spoke to Cooper nearly a week before Novak’s column was published and, according to previously published news reports, spoke to a half-dozen other reporters about Plame as early as June 2003.
“Iit was, Karl Rove said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized (Wilson’s) trip," Cooper’s July 11, 2003, email to his editor, obtained by Newsweek, says:
“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 ... '"
During the same week that Rove spoke to Time's Matt Cooper about Wilson, so did Scooter Libby and Libby went on the record for Cooper's July 17, 2003 story.
In an exclusive interview with Time, Lewis Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff, told TIME:
"The Vice President heard about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger in February 2002. As part of his regular intelligence briefing, the Vice President asked a question about the implication of the report. During the course of a year, the Vice President asked many such questions and the agency responded within a day or two saying that they had reporting suggesting the possibility of such a transaction. But the agency noted that the reporting lacked detail. The agency pointed out that Iraq already had 500 tons of uranium, portions of which came from Niger, according to the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA). The Vice President was unaware of the trip by Ambassador Wilson and didn't know about it until this year when it became public in the last month or so. "Moreover, evidence suggests that President Bush was aware as early as October 2003 that Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, were the sources who leaked Plame’s undercover CIA status to reporters. And after the president was briefed about the issue the president said publicly that the source of the leak will never be found.
Furthermore, a few aides to Condoleeza Rice, then head of the National Security Council, may have played a role as well by being the first officials to learn about Plame’s role as a CIA operative and giving that information to Rove, Libby and other senior administration officials.
The disclosure of Plame’s name and CIA status was an attempt by the White House to discredit Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war who had alleged that President Bush misspoke when he said in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq acquired yellow-cake uranium from Niger.
Wilson was recommended by Plame, his wife, to travel to Niger to investigate the yellow-cake claims, but he said publicly that Cheney’s office sent him there. Cheney did in fact contact the CIA at first to arrange the mission, but Plame ultimately recommended Wilson. Still, in February 2002, he went to Niger and reported back to the CIA that there was no truth to those claims.
Here’s the fullest account yet of how the events leading up to the disclosure that Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative unfolded, and how it all leads back to Rove. But first let’s get to the real story behind the leak, the catalyst behind this issue.
Bush and senior administration officials misled Congress and the public into supporting a war predicated on the fact that Iraq was concealing weapons of mass destruction that threatened its neighbors in the Middle East and posed a grave threat to the United States.
In his State of the Union address in January 2003, two months prior to the Iraq war, Bush said Iraq tried to buy yellow-cake uranium, the key component in designing a nuclear bomb, from Niger, which was the silver bullet in getting Congress to support military action two months later. To date, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq and the country barely had a weapons program, according to a report from the Iraq Survey Group.
Like other officials, including former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, both of whom provided evidence that Bush and senior members of his administration of being obsessed with attacking Iraq shortly after 9/11 and manipulating intelligence reports as a way to get Congress and the public to back the war, the White House launched a full-scale attack against Wilson beginning in June 2003, when Wilson was quoted anonymously in various news reports as saying that the 16 words in Bush State of the Union address alleging that Iraq bought yellow-cake uranium from Niger was totally untrue.
On July 14, 2003, Novak first disclosed Plame by name in his column as well as her undercover CIA status. Citing two “senior administration officials.” Novak said Wilson wasn’t trustworthy because his wife recommended him for the trip to Niger.
According to a preliminary FBI investigation, White House officials, including Rove and Libby, first learned of Plame’s name and CIA status in June 2003 when questions surrounding Wilson’s Niger trip were first brought to the attention of Cheney’s aides by reporters, according to an Oct 13, 2003 report in the Washington Post.
“One reason investigators are looking back (to June 2003) is that even before Novak's column appeared, government officials had been trying for more than a month to convince journalists that Wilson's mission wasn't as important as it was being portrayed,” the Post reported.
Several CIA officers assigned to the White House and working mainly on the National Security staff may have been the first individuals to have learned that Plame was an undercover operative and that Wilson was her husband.
According to an Oct. 13, 2003 story in the Post, a “former NSC staff member said one or more of those officers may have been aware of the Plame-Wilson relationship” and briefed Cheney and Rove about her status, that she was married to Wilson and that she recommended him for the fact-finding trip to Niger.
A May 6, 2003, column by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times was the first public mention of Wilson's trip to Niger but Kristoff’s column did not identify Wilson by name. Kristoff had been on a panel with Wilson four days earlier and said that Wilson told him that intelligence documents that proved Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger were forged and the White House should have known that before allowing Bush to include it in his State of the Union speech.
Wilson told Kristoff he could write about his trip and the forged documents but asked the columnist not to print Wilson’s name as the source behind those statements. The column also mentioned for the first time the alleged role Cheney’s office played in sending Wilson to Niger.
“That was when Cheney aides became aware of Wilson's mission and they began asking questions about him within the government,” the Post reported, citing an unnamed administration official.
Shortly after Kristoff’s column appeared in the Times, a handful of reporters started searching for Kristoff’s anonymous source.
At this time Wilson spoke to two congressional committees that were investigating why Bush had mentioned the uranium allegation in his State of the Union address.
Also in early June, Wilson told his story to The Washington Post on the condition that he not be named. On June 12, 2003, the Post published a detailed account of Wilson’s trip and the fact that there was no truth to the claims that Iraq had tried to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger.
Beginning that week, officials in the White House, Cheney's office, the CIA and the State Department repeatedly played down the importance of Wilson's trip in interviews with several reporters, and his oral report to the CIA, which was turned into a 1 ½ page CIA intelligence memo for the White House and the National Security Council. By tradition, Wilson’s identity as the source, even though he traveled to Niger on behalf of the CIA, was not disclosed.
As soon as the Post’s story was published a number of officials in the Bush administration became concerned and started questioning who Wilson was and why he was criticizing the president, a senior administration official told the Post.
By Wilson’s own account, he said he ratcheted up the pressure on the White House to come clean about its error in giving credence to the Niger uranium claims by calling some present and former senior administration officials who knew then National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice, asking his colleagues to tell Rice she was flat wrong in saying on NBC's "Meet the Press" on June 8 that there may be some intelligence "in the bowels of the agency" but that there was no doubt the uranium story was true.
Wilson said Rice told him through intermediaries that she was uninterested in what he had to say and urged Wilson to tell his story publicly if he wanted to state his case. So he did.
On July 6, 2003 Wilson was interviewed for a story that appeared in the Washington Post and accused the White House of "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war." That same day he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which said that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
The very next day, July 7, 2003, the White House admitted it had erred in including the references about uranium in Bush's State of the Union speech.
Two days later, two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists, an administration official told The Post in an article published Sept. 28, 2003.
Those two officials were Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.
“The source elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson,” the Post reported in the Sept. 28, 2003 story.
On July 12, 2003, two days before Novak wrote his column, a Washington Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction. Plame's name was never mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure did not appear to be to generate an article, but rather to undermine Wilson's report.
That source was Karl Rove and the unidentified reporter was Walter Pincus who covers the White House.
Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails show that Rove gave Cooper the same exact information about Plame that he gave to the Post. Moreover, Rove called several other reporters that week in July 2003 and reportedly said that Wilson’s wife was “fair game” because Novak had already blew her undercover status by identifying her in his column.
A few months later, on Oct. 7, 2003, President Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said during a press conference that the White House ruled out three administration officials—Rove, Libby and Elliot Abrams, a senior official on the National Security Council, as sources of the leak—a day before FBI questioned the three of them—based on questions McClellan said he asked the men.
A day later Rove told FBI investigators that he spoke to journalists about Plame for the first time after Novak’s column was published—a lie, it appears—based on Time reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails, the contents of which were reported by Newsweek earlier this month.
That same day in October 2003, in an unusual move, Bush said he doubted that a Justice Department investigation would ever turn up the source of the leak, suggesting that it was a waste of time for lawmakers to question the administration and for reporters to follow up on the story.
"I mean this is a town full of people who like to leak information," Bush told reporters following a meeting with Cabinet members on Oct. 7, 2003. "And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea.”
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, responded to the president’s statement in an Oct. 10, 2003, interview with the New York Times.
“If the president says, 'I don't know if we're going to find this person,' what kind of a statement is that for the president of the United States to make?'' Lautenberg asked. “Would he say that about a bank-robbery investigation?”
During this time the White House was facing a deadline on turning over documents, emails and phone logs to Justice Department officials probing whether or not the leak came from the White House. Bush said that the White House could invoke executive privilege and withhold some “sensitive” documents related to the leak case leading many Democrats to believe that the White House had something to hide.
At the same time, the White House first started to lay the groundwork for a defense, specifically related to the role Rove played in the leak and whether he or anyone else in the administration knew Plame was covert CIA operative and intentionally blew her cover in order to undercut Wilson’s credibility.
On Oct. 6, 2003, McClellan, in response to questions about whether Rove was Novak’s source, tried to explain the difference between unauthorized disclosure of classified information and "setting the record straight" about Wilson’s public criticism of the administrations handling of intelligence on Iraq.
“There is a difference between setting the record straight and doing something to punish someone for speaking out,” McClellan said. "There were some statements made (by Wilson) and those statements were not based on facts," McClellan said. "And we pointed out that it was not the vice president's office that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger. (CIA Director George) Tenet made it very clear in his statement that it was people in the counter proliferation area that made that decision on their own initiative."
The difference is crucial in that knowingly making an unauthorized leak of classified information is a federal crime. But repeating the leak when it has already been reported may not be considered a serious offense.
Still, when the Justice Department failed to convict Martha Stewart on insider trading charges, prosecutors had enough evidence to convince a jury that the style maven lied to federal investigators and obstructed justice. She wound up with a felony conviction and six months in jail.
Now that the evidence shows that Karl Rove and others White House officials lied to federal investigators about what they knew and when they knew it maybe they too will meet the same fate.
Report Shows Karl Rove May Have Lied to Federal Agents, a Federal Crime, During Oct 2003 Testimony Into CIA Agent Leak
By Jason Leopold
Looks like Karl Rove did break the law, the same federal law that got Martha Stewart sentenced to six months in prison.
It now appears that Rove, President Bush’s chief of staff, may have lied to the FBI in October 2003—a federal crime—when he was questioned by federal agents investigating who was responsible for leaking information about a covert CIA operative to the media.
During questioning by the FBI about his role in the Plame affair, Rove told federal agents that he only started sharing information about Plame with reporters and White House officials for the first time after conservative columnist Robert Novak identified her covert CIA status in his column on July 14, 2003.
But Rove wasn’t truthful with the FBI, what with the recent disclosure of Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails, which reveal Rove as the source for Cooper’s own July 2003 story identifying Plame as a CIA operative, and show that Rove spoke to Cooper nearly a week before Novak’s column was published and, according to previously published news reports, spoke to a half-dozen other reporters about Plame as early as June 2003.
“Iit was, Karl Rove said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized (Wilson’s) trip," Cooper’s July 11, 2003, email to his editor, obtained by Newsweek, says:
“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 ... '"
During the same week that Rove spoke to Time's Matt Cooper about Wilson, so did Scooter Libby and Libby went on the record for Cooper's July 17, 2003 story.
In an exclusive interview with Time, Lewis Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff, told TIME:
"The Vice President heard about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger in February 2002. As part of his regular intelligence briefing, the Vice President asked a question about the implication of the report. During the course of a year, the Vice President asked many such questions and the agency responded within a day or two saying that they had reporting suggesting the possibility of such a transaction. But the agency noted that the reporting lacked detail. The agency pointed out that Iraq already had 500 tons of uranium, portions of which came from Niger, according to the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA). The Vice President was unaware of the trip by Ambassador Wilson and didn't know about it until this year when it became public in the last month or so. "Moreover, evidence suggests that President Bush was aware as early as October 2003 that Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, were the sources who leaked Plame’s undercover CIA status to reporters. And after the president was briefed about the issue the president said publicly that the source of the leak will never be found.
Furthermore, a few aides to Condoleeza Rice, then head of the National Security Council, may have played a role as well by being the first officials to learn about Plame’s role as a CIA operative and giving that information to Rove, Libby and other senior administration officials.
The disclosure of Plame’s name and CIA status was an attempt by the White House to discredit Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war who had alleged that President Bush misspoke when he said in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq acquired yellow-cake uranium from Niger.
Wilson was recommended by Plame, his wife, to travel to Niger to investigate the yellow-cake claims, but he said publicly that Cheney’s office sent him there. Cheney did in fact contact the CIA at first to arrange the mission, but Plame ultimately recommended Wilson. Still, in February 2002, he went to Niger and reported back to the CIA that there was no truth to those claims.
Here’s the fullest account yet of how the events leading up to the disclosure that Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative unfolded, and how it all leads back to Rove. But first let’s get to the real story behind the leak, the catalyst behind this issue.
Bush and senior administration officials misled Congress and the public into supporting a war predicated on the fact that Iraq was concealing weapons of mass destruction that threatened its neighbors in the Middle East and posed a grave threat to the United States.
In his State of the Union address in January 2003, two months prior to the Iraq war, Bush said Iraq tried to buy yellow-cake uranium, the key component in designing a nuclear bomb, from Niger, which was the silver bullet in getting Congress to support military action two months later. To date, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq and the country barely had a weapons program, according to a report from the Iraq Survey Group.
Like other officials, including former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, both of whom provided evidence that Bush and senior members of his administration of being obsessed with attacking Iraq shortly after 9/11 and manipulating intelligence reports as a way to get Congress and the public to back the war, the White House launched a full-scale attack against Wilson beginning in June 2003, when Wilson was quoted anonymously in various news reports as saying that the 16 words in Bush State of the Union address alleging that Iraq bought yellow-cake uranium from Niger was totally untrue.
On July 14, 2003, Novak first disclosed Plame by name in his column as well as her undercover CIA status. Citing two “senior administration officials.” Novak said Wilson wasn’t trustworthy because his wife recommended him for the trip to Niger.
According to a preliminary FBI investigation, White House officials, including Rove and Libby, first learned of Plame’s name and CIA status in June 2003 when questions surrounding Wilson’s Niger trip were first brought to the attention of Cheney’s aides by reporters, according to an Oct 13, 2003 report in the Washington Post.
“One reason investigators are looking back (to June 2003) is that even before Novak's column appeared, government officials had been trying for more than a month to convince journalists that Wilson's mission wasn't as important as it was being portrayed,” the Post reported.
Several CIA officers assigned to the White House and working mainly on the National Security staff may have been the first individuals to have learned that Plame was an undercover operative and that Wilson was her husband.
According to an Oct. 13, 2003 story in the Post, a “former NSC staff member said one or more of those officers may have been aware of the Plame-Wilson relationship” and briefed Cheney and Rove about her status, that she was married to Wilson and that she recommended him for the fact-finding trip to Niger.
A May 6, 2003, column by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times was the first public mention of Wilson's trip to Niger but Kristoff’s column did not identify Wilson by name. Kristoff had been on a panel with Wilson four days earlier and said that Wilson told him that intelligence documents that proved Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger were forged and the White House should have known that before allowing Bush to include it in his State of the Union speech.
Wilson told Kristoff he could write about his trip and the forged documents but asked the columnist not to print Wilson’s name as the source behind those statements. The column also mentioned for the first time the alleged role Cheney’s office played in sending Wilson to Niger.
“That was when Cheney aides became aware of Wilson's mission and they began asking questions about him within the government,” the Post reported, citing an unnamed administration official.
Shortly after Kristoff’s column appeared in the Times, a handful of reporters started searching for Kristoff’s anonymous source.
At this time Wilson spoke to two congressional committees that were investigating why Bush had mentioned the uranium allegation in his State of the Union address.
Also in early June, Wilson told his story to The Washington Post on the condition that he not be named. On June 12, 2003, the Post published a detailed account of Wilson’s trip and the fact that there was no truth to the claims that Iraq had tried to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger.
Beginning that week, officials in the White House, Cheney's office, the CIA and the State Department repeatedly played down the importance of Wilson's trip in interviews with several reporters, and his oral report to the CIA, which was turned into a 1 ½ page CIA intelligence memo for the White House and the National Security Council. By tradition, Wilson’s identity as the source, even though he traveled to Niger on behalf of the CIA, was not disclosed.
As soon as the Post’s story was published a number of officials in the Bush administration became concerned and started questioning who Wilson was and why he was criticizing the president, a senior administration official told the Post.
By Wilson’s own account, he said he ratcheted up the pressure on the White House to come clean about its error in giving credence to the Niger uranium claims by calling some present and former senior administration officials who knew then National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice, asking his colleagues to tell Rice she was flat wrong in saying on NBC's "Meet the Press" on June 8 that there may be some intelligence "in the bowels of the agency" but that there was no doubt the uranium story was true.
Wilson said Rice told him through intermediaries that she was uninterested in what he had to say and urged Wilson to tell his story publicly if he wanted to state his case. So he did.
On July 6, 2003 Wilson was interviewed for a story that appeared in the Washington Post and accused the White House of "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war." That same day he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which said that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
The very next day, July 7, 2003, the White House admitted it had erred in including the references about uranium in Bush's State of the Union speech.
Two days later, two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists, an administration official told The Post in an article published Sept. 28, 2003.
Those two officials were Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.
“The source elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson,” the Post reported in the Sept. 28, 2003 story.
On July 12, 2003, two days before Novak wrote his column, a Washington Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction. Plame's name was never mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure did not appear to be to generate an article, but rather to undermine Wilson's report.
That source was Karl Rove and the unidentified reporter was Walter Pincus who covers the White House.
Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails show that Rove gave Cooper the same exact information about Plame that he gave to the Post. Moreover, Rove called several other reporters that week in July 2003 and reportedly said that Wilson’s wife was “fair game” because Novak had already blew her undercover status by identifying her in his column.
A few months later, on Oct. 7, 2003, President Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said during a press conference that the White House ruled out three administration officials—Rove, Libby and Elliot Abrams, a senior official on the National Security Council, as sources of the leak—a day before FBI questioned the three of them—based on questions McClellan said he asked the men.
A day later Rove told FBI investigators that he spoke to journalists about Plame for the first time after Novak’s column was published—a lie, it appears—based on Time reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails, the contents of which were reported by Newsweek earlier this month.
That same day in October 2003, in an unusual move, Bush said he doubted that a Justice Department investigation would ever turn up the source of the leak, suggesting that it was a waste of time for lawmakers to question the administration and for reporters to follow up on the story.
"I mean this is a town full of people who like to leak information," Bush told reporters following a meeting with Cabinet members on Oct. 7, 2003. "And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea.”
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, responded to the president’s statement in an Oct. 10, 2003, interview with the New York Times.
“If the president says, 'I don't know if we're going to find this person,' what kind of a statement is that for the president of the United States to make?'' Lautenberg asked. “Would he say that about a bank-robbery investigation?”
During this time the White House was facing a deadline on turning over documents, emails and phone logs to Justice Department officials probing whether or not the leak came from the White House. Bush said that the White House could invoke executive privilege and withhold some “sensitive” documents related to the leak case leading many Democrats to believe that the White House had something to hide.
At the same time, the White House first started to lay the groundwork for a defense, specifically related to the role Rove played in the leak and whether he or anyone else in the administration knew Plame was covert CIA operative and intentionally blew her cover in order to undercut Wilson’s credibility.
On Oct. 6, 2003, McClellan, in response to questions about whether Rove was Novak’s source, tried to explain the difference between unauthorized disclosure of classified information and "setting the record straight" about Wilson’s public criticism of the administrations handling of intelligence on Iraq.
“There is a difference between setting the record straight and doing something to punish someone for speaking out,” McClellan said. "There were some statements made (by Wilson) and those statements were not based on facts," McClellan said. "And we pointed out that it was not the vice president's office that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger. (CIA Director George) Tenet made it very clear in his statement that it was people in the counter proliferation area that made that decision on their own initiative."
The difference is crucial in that knowingly making an unauthorized leak of classified information is a federal crime. But repeating the leak when it has already been reported may not be considered a serious offense.
Still, when the Justice Department failed to convict Martha Stewart on insider trading charges, prosecutors had enough evidence to convince a jury that the style maven lied to federal investigators and obstructed justice. She wound up with a felony conviction and six months in jail.
Now that the evidence shows that Karl Rove and others White House officials lied to federal investigators about what they knew and when they knew it maybe they too will meet the same fate.
Start Flooding the Phone Lines to Hannity ...
The above article states that Cheney's Office Knew who Wilson WAS!
The disinformation SPIN of Sean. If Cheney didn't know who Wilson was his office staff knew ... making very unlikely that Cheney didn't know anything. like he doesn't talk with his staff about anything ...
RIGHT !!
Sean ... GOTCHA !!!
I think, no, I KNOW that i would trust the statements made by a former Ambassador of the US, namely Wilson. Nuff Said! SPIN SPIN SPIN!!!
In Marth's case SECURITY WAS NOT THE ISSUE ... HERE IT IS. ROVE'S JAILTIME SHOULD BE MUCH MUCH LONGER ...
The above article states that Cheney's Office Knew who Wilson WAS!
The disinformation SPIN of Sean. If Cheney didn't know who Wilson was his office staff knew ... making very unlikely that Cheney didn't know anything. like he doesn't talk with his staff about anything ...
RIGHT !!
Sean ... GOTCHA !!!
I think, no, I KNOW that i would trust the statements made by a former Ambassador of the US, namely Wilson. Nuff Said! SPIN SPIN SPIN!!!
In Marth's case SECURITY WAS NOT THE ISSUE ... HERE IT IS. ROVE'S JAILTIME SHOULD BE MUCH MUCH LONGER ...
QUOTE
Still, when the Justice Department failed to convict Martha Stewart on insider trading charges, prosecutors had enough evidence to convince a jury that the style maven lied to federal investigators and obstructed justice. She wound up with a felony conviction and six months in jail.
Now that the evidence shows that Karl Rove and others White House officials lied to federal investigators about what they knew and when they knew it maybe they too will meet the same fate.
Now that the evidence shows that Karl Rove and others White House officials lied to federal investigators about what they knew and when they knew it maybe they too will meet the same fate.
Time To Call Hannity People - Radio Show Begins at 3:00 PM EDT
Phone Number: 1-800-941-7326
Phone Number: 1-800-941-7326
QUOTE(USA#1 @ Jul 15 2005, 10:29 AM)
Time To Call Hannity People - Radio Show Begins at 3:00 PM EDT
Phone Number: 1-800-941-7326
Phone Number: 1-800-941-7326
Every time they change the story, they have to remember each little bit they lied the first time, then re-piece it together.
Nobody can remember everything, and BINGO it's over.
The cover-up gets you.
It is like George Lucas pieceing together the latest star-wars to tie into the original first one. It took alot of tinkering to get everything to mesh (including changing a bunch of things in the original three and also some actors.)
This isn't hollywood though. You CANNOT keep those little lies consistant and then change the story.
Not when there are tapes and notes and a prosecutor who wants something and a press that is finally angry, because one of their's in jail.
AND CALL Phone Number: 1-800-941-7326 if you wanna put up with Hannity.
Remind him, the issue is NOT Wilson. They tried to smear him originally and the DSM prooved there was no reason to go to IRaq, NO WMD No yellow-cake. No nothing. Don't let them distract.
This is the big one. And they are going down.
It's funny that it took them a week to come up with some
b.s. this time. Hannity usually has some right away but
this one took some time!
b.s. this time. Hannity usually has some right away but
this one took some time!
QUOTE(Buster0001 @ Jul 15 2005, 02:11 PM)
It's funny that it took them a week to come up with some
b.s. this time. Hannity usually has some right away but
this one took some time!
b.s. this time. Hannity usually has some right away but
this one took some time!
can you picture them in a room trying to figure out what to say
It probably is like the Three Stooges
Urghh Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk
slap
bong
hit
Nyuk
urgha
Nyuk
We can't say that
blong
Nyuk they will buy this
You dumb rascle, no one in the world would buy this excuse, its so silly let's try it
5 leaks:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/14/102829/370
So WE know for sure that Rove talked about Plame's identity with Cooper and we also know someone talked about the Plame case with Miller. On purpose, to penalize Wilson and Plame. But what about the other leaks:
- The Iran code break
- That we had a double agent in Al Qaeda UK
- That US was going to investigate some Arab charities
- Larry Franklin, a Pentagon Iranian analyst, was trying to hand over documents to AIPAC guys and Chalabi?
Putting all players in a chart we can see that Chalabi and his "spokesperson" Judy Miller show up a lot... Could they be related ?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/14/102829/370
So WE know for sure that Rove talked about Plame's identity with Cooper and we also know someone talked about the Plame case with Miller. On purpose, to penalize Wilson and Plame. But what about the other leaks:
- The Iran code break
- That we had a double agent in Al Qaeda UK
- That US was going to investigate some Arab charities
- Larry Franklin, a Pentagon Iranian analyst, was trying to hand over documents to AIPAC guys and Chalabi?
Putting all players in a chart we can see that Chalabi and his "spokesperson" Judy Miller show up a lot... Could they be related ?
AGH! I'm just now getting my husband to understand the leak
and now it's more complicated!
and now it's more complicated!
QUOTE
can you picture them in a room trying to figure out what to say
It probably is like the Three Stooges
Urghh Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk
slap
bong
hit
Nyuk
urgha
Nyuk
It probably is like the Three Stooges
Urghh Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk
slap
bong
hit
Nyuk
urgha
Nyuk
Ahhh... somebody finally figured out why I picked my most recent avatar.
Reader's digest version: Everyone in BushCo either leaked something, knew about leaks or commited perjury.
QUOTE(Buster0001 @ Jul 15 2005, 10:43 AM)
AGH! I'm just now getting my husband to understand the leak
and now it's more complicated!
and now it's more complicated!
But it's more like:
Alright you numbskulls. We gotta figure a way out of this mess.
Hey! I got an idea! Let's give them a tax break! No, let's give them TWO tax breaks! Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
A wise guy, ey? You want two tax breaks?
Yea!!!
Okay, pick two.
One, two!
Boink! (Two fingers to the eyes!) Here's your tax break!
Ow ow ow! Hey! What gives you the right to do that?
Because I'm from Taxas, you dope.
Alright you numbskulls. We gotta figure a way out of this mess.
Hey! I got an idea! Let's give them a tax break! No, let's give them TWO tax breaks! Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
A wise guy, ey? You want two tax breaks?
Yea!!!
Okay, pick two.
One, two!
Boink! (Two fingers to the eyes!) Here's your tax break!
Ow ow ow! Hey! What gives you the right to do that?
Because I'm from Taxas, you dope.
QUOTE(MrJim @ Jul 15 2005, 02:54 PM)
But it's more like:
Alright you numbskulls. We gotta figure a way out of this mess.
Hey! I got an idea! Let's give them a tax break! No, let's give them TWO tax breaks! Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
A wise guy, ey? You want two tax breaks?
Yea!!!
Okay, pick two.
One, two!
Boink! (Two fingers to the eyes!) Here's your tax break!
Ow ow ow! Hey! What gives you the right to do that?
Because I'm from Taxas, you dope.
Alright you numbskulls. We gotta figure a way out of this mess.
Hey! I got an idea! Let's give them a tax break! No, let's give them TWO tax breaks! Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
A wise guy, ey? You want two tax breaks?
Yea!!!
Okay, pick two.
One, two!
Boink! (Two fingers to the eyes!) Here's your tax break!
Ow ow ow! Hey! What gives you the right to do that?
Because I'm from Taxas, you dope.
Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/07/15/dean.rove/
It doesn't look good for Karl Rove
John Dean
FindLaw Columnist
Special to CNN.com
(FindLaw) -- As the scandal over the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity has continued to unfold, there is a renewed focus on Karl Rove -- the White House deputy chief of staff whom President Bush calls his political "architect."
Newsweek has reported that Matt Cooper, in an e-mail to his bureau chief at Time magazine, wrote that he had spoken "to Rove on double super-secret background for about two min[ute]s before he went on vacation ..." In that conversation, Rove gave Cooper "big warning" that Time should not "get too far out on Wilson."
Rove was referring, of course, to former Ambassador Joe Wilson's acknowledgment of his trip to Africa, where he discovered that Niger had not, in fact, provided uranium to Iraq that might be part of a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program.
Cooper's email indicates that Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney; rather, Rove claimed, "it was ... [W]ilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on [WMD] issues who authorized the trip." (Rove was wrong about the authorization.)
Only the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, and his staff have all the facts on their investigation at this point, but there is increasing evidence that Rove (and others) may have violated one or more federal laws. At this time, it would be speculation to predict whether indictments will be forthcoming.
Identities Protection Act
As I pointed out when the Valerie Plame Wilson leak first surfaced, the Intelligence Identities And Protection Act is a complex law. For the law to apply to Rove, a number of requirements must be met.
Rove must have had "authorized access to classified information" under the statute. Plame was an NCO (non-covered officer). White House aides, and even the president, are seldom, if ever, given this information. So it is not likely Rove had "authorized access" to it.
In addition, Rove must have "intentionally" -- not "knowingly" as has been mentioned in the news coverage -- disclosed "any information identifying such a covert agent." Whether or not Rove actually referred to Mrs. Wilson as "Valerie Plame," then, the key would be whether he gave Matt Cooper (or others) information that Joe Wilson's wife was a covert agent.
Also, the statute requires that Rove had to know, as a fact, that the United States was taking, or had taken, "affirmative measures to conceal" Valerie Plame's covert status. Rove's lawyer says he had no such knowledge.
In fact, there is no public evidence that Valerie Wilson had the covert status required by the statute. A covert agent, as defined under this law, is "a present or retired officer or employee" of the CIA, whose identity as such "is classified information," and this person must be serving outside of the United States, or have done so in the last five years.
There is no solid information that Rove, or anyone else, violated this law designed to protect covert CIA agents. There is, however, evidence suggesting that other laws were violated. In particular, I have in mind the laws invoked by the Bush Justice Department in the relatively minor leak case that it vigorously prosecuted, though it involved information that was not nearly as sensitive as that which Rove provided Matt Cooper (and possibly others).
Leak prosecution precedent
I am referring to the prosecution and conviction of Jonathan Randel. Randel was a Drug Enforcement Agency analyst, a Ph.D. in history, working in the Atlanta office of the DEA.
Randel was convinced that British Lord Michael Ashcroft (a major contributor to Britain's Conservative Party, as well as American conservative causes) was being ignored by DEA and its investigation of money laundering. (Lord Ashcroft is based in South Florida and the off-shore tax haven of Belize.)
Randel leaked the fact that Lord Ashcroft's name was in the DEA files, and this fact soon surfaced in the London news media. Ashcroft sued, and learned the source of the information was Randel. Using his clout, soon Ashcroft had the U.S. attorney in pursuit of Randel for his leak.
By late February 2002, the Department of Justice indicted Randel for his leaking of Lord Ashcroft's name. It was an eighteen count "kitchen sink" indictment; they threw everything they could think of at Randel. Most relevant for Karl Rove's situation, count one of Randel's indictment alleged a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 641. This is a law that prohibits theft (or conversion for one's own use) of government records and information for non-governmental purposes. But its broad language covers leaks, and it has now been used to cover just such actions.
Randel, faced with a life sentence (actually 500 years) if convicted on all counts, on the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty to violating Section 641. On January 9, 2003, Randel was sentenced to a year in a federal prison, followed by three years probation. This sentence prompted the U.S. attorney to boast that the conviction of Randel made a good example of how the Bush administration would handle leakers.
Precedent bodes ill for Rove
Rove may be able to claim that he did not know he was leaking "classified information" about a "covert agent," but there can be no question he understood that what he was leaking was "sensitive information." The very fact that Matt Cooper called it "double super-secret background" information suggests Rove knew of its sensitivity, if he did not know it was classified information (which by definition is sensitive).
United States District Court Judge Richard Story's statement to Jonathan Randel, at the time of sentencing, might have an unpleasant ring for Rove.
Judge Story told Randel that he surely must have appreciated the risks in leaking DEA information. "Anything that would affect the security of officers and of the operations of the agency would be of tremendous concern, I think, to any law-abiding citizen in this country," the judge observed. Judge Story concluded this leak of sensitive information was "a very serious crime."
"In my view," he explained, "it is a very serious offense because of the risk that comes with it, and part of that risk is because of the position" that Randel held in DEA. But the risk posed by the information Rove leaked is multiplied many times over; it occurred at a time when the nation was considering going to war over weapons of mass destruction. And Rove was risking the identity of, in attempting to discredit, a WMD proliferation expert, Valerie Plame Wilson.
Judge Story acknowledged that Randel's leak did not appear to put lives at risk, nor to jeopardize any DEA investigations. But he also pointed out that Randel "could not have completely and fully known that in the position that [he] held."
Is not the same true of Rove? Rove had no idea what the specific consequences of giving a reporter the name of a CIA agent (about whom he says he knew nothing) would be--he only knew that he wanted to discredit her (incorrectly) for dispatching her husband to determine if the rumors about Niger uranium were true or false.
Given the nature of Valerie Plame Wilson's work, it is unlikely the public will ever know if Rove's leak caused damage, or even loss of life of one of her contracts abroad, because of Rove's actions. Dose anyone know the dangers and risks that she and her family may face because of this leak?
It was just such a risk that convinced Judge Story that "for any person with the agency to take it upon himself to leak information poses a tremendous risk; and that's what, to me, makes this a particularly serious offense." Cannot the same be said about Rove's leak? It dealt with matters related to national security; if the risk Randel was taking was a "tremendous" risk, surely Rove's leak was monumental.
While there are other potential violations of the law that may be involved with the Valerie Plame Wilson case, it would be speculation to consider them. But Karl Rove's leak to Matt Cooper is now an established fact.
First, there is Matt Cooper's e-mail record. And Cooper has now confirmed that he has told the grand jury he spoke with Rove. If Rove's leak fails to fall under the statute that was used to prosecute Randel, I do not understand why.
There are stories circulating that Rove may have been told of Valerie Plame's CIA activity by a journalist, such as Judith Miller, as recently suggested in Editor & Publisher. If so, that doesn't exonerate Rove. Rather, it could make for some interesting pairing under the federal conspiracy statute (which was the statute most commonly employed during Watergate).
John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to President Nixon.
It doesn't look good for Karl Rove
John Dean
FindLaw Columnist
Special to CNN.com
(FindLaw) -- As the scandal over the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity has continued to unfold, there is a renewed focus on Karl Rove -- the White House deputy chief of staff whom President Bush calls his political "architect."
Newsweek has reported that Matt Cooper, in an e-mail to his bureau chief at Time magazine, wrote that he had spoken "to Rove on double super-secret background for about two min[ute]s before he went on vacation ..." In that conversation, Rove gave Cooper "big warning" that Time should not "get too far out on Wilson."
Rove was referring, of course, to former Ambassador Joe Wilson's acknowledgment of his trip to Africa, where he discovered that Niger had not, in fact, provided uranium to Iraq that might be part of a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program.
Cooper's email indicates that Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney; rather, Rove claimed, "it was ... [W]ilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on [WMD] issues who authorized the trip." (Rove was wrong about the authorization.)
Only the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, and his staff have all the facts on their investigation at this point, but there is increasing evidence that Rove (and others) may have violated one or more federal laws. At this time, it would be speculation to predict whether indictments will be forthcoming.
Identities Protection Act
As I pointed out when the Valerie Plame Wilson leak first surfaced, the Intelligence Identities And Protection Act is a complex law. For the law to apply to Rove, a number of requirements must be met.
Rove must have had "authorized access to classified information" under the statute. Plame was an NCO (non-covered officer). White House aides, and even the president, are seldom, if ever, given this information. So it is not likely Rove had "authorized access" to it.
In addition, Rove must have "intentionally" -- not "knowingly" as has been mentioned in the news coverage -- disclosed "any information identifying such a covert agent." Whether or not Rove actually referred to Mrs. Wilson as "Valerie Plame," then, the key would be whether he gave Matt Cooper (or others) information that Joe Wilson's wife was a covert agent.
Also, the statute requires that Rove had to know, as a fact, that the United States was taking, or had taken, "affirmative measures to conceal" Valerie Plame's covert status. Rove's lawyer says he had no such knowledge.
In fact, there is no public evidence that Valerie Wilson had the covert status required by the statute. A covert agent, as defined under this law, is "a present or retired officer or employee" of the CIA, whose identity as such "is classified information," and this person must be serving outside of the United States, or have done so in the last five years.
There is no solid information that Rove, or anyone else, violated this law designed to protect covert CIA agents. There is, however, evidence suggesting that other laws were violated. In particular, I have in mind the laws invoked by the Bush Justice Department in the relatively minor leak case that it vigorously prosecuted, though it involved information that was not nearly as sensitive as that which Rove provided Matt Cooper (and possibly others).
Leak prosecution precedent
I am referring to the prosecution and conviction of Jonathan Randel. Randel was a Drug Enforcement Agency analyst, a Ph.D. in history, working in the Atlanta office of the DEA.
Randel was convinced that British Lord Michael Ashcroft (a major contributor to Britain's Conservative Party, as well as American conservative causes) was being ignored by DEA and its investigation of money laundering. (Lord Ashcroft is based in South Florida and the off-shore tax haven of Belize.)
Randel leaked the fact that Lord Ashcroft's name was in the DEA files, and this fact soon surfaced in the London news media. Ashcroft sued, and learned the source of the information was Randel. Using his clout, soon Ashcroft had the U.S. attorney in pursuit of Randel for his leak.
By late February 2002, the Department of Justice indicted Randel for his leaking of Lord Ashcroft's name. It was an eighteen count "kitchen sink" indictment; they threw everything they could think of at Randel. Most relevant for Karl Rove's situation, count one of Randel's indictment alleged a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 641. This is a law that prohibits theft (or conversion for one's own use) of government records and information for non-governmental purposes. But its broad language covers leaks, and it has now been used to cover just such actions.
Randel, faced with a life sentence (actually 500 years) if convicted on all counts, on the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty to violating Section 641. On January 9, 2003, Randel was sentenced to a year in a federal prison, followed by three years probation. This sentence prompted the U.S. attorney to boast that the conviction of Randel made a good example of how the Bush administration would handle leakers.
Precedent bodes ill for Rove
Rove may be able to claim that he did not know he was leaking "classified information" about a "covert agent," but there can be no question he understood that what he was leaking was "sensitive information." The very fact that Matt Cooper called it "double super-secret background" information suggests Rove knew of its sensitivity, if he did not know it was classified information (which by definition is sensitive).
United States District Court Judge Richard Story's statement to Jonathan Randel, at the time of sentencing, might have an unpleasant ring for Rove.
Judge Story told Randel that he surely must have appreciated the risks in leaking DEA information. "Anything that would affect the security of officers and of the operations of the agency would be of tremendous concern, I think, to any law-abiding citizen in this country," the judge observed. Judge Story concluded this leak of sensitive information was "a very serious crime."
"In my view," he explained, "it is a very serious offense because of the risk that comes with it, and part of that risk is because of the position" that Randel held in DEA. But the risk posed by the information Rove leaked is multiplied many times over; it occurred at a time when the nation was considering going to war over weapons of mass destruction. And Rove was risking the identity of, in attempting to discredit, a WMD proliferation expert, Valerie Plame Wilson.
Judge Story acknowledged that Randel's leak did not appear to put lives at risk, nor to jeopardize any DEA investigations. But he also pointed out that Randel "could not have completely and fully known that in the position that [he] held."
Is not the same true of Rove? Rove had no idea what the specific consequences of giving a reporter the name of a CIA agent (about whom he says he knew nothing) would be--he only knew that he wanted to discredit her (incorrectly) for dispatching her husband to determine if the rumors about Niger uranium were true or false.
Given the nature of Valerie Plame Wilson's work, it is unlikely the public will ever know if Rove's leak caused damage, or even loss of life of one of her contracts abroad, because of Rove's actions. Dose anyone know the dangers and risks that she and her family may face because of this leak?
It was just such a risk that convinced Judge Story that "for any person with the agency to take it upon himself to leak information poses a tremendous risk; and that's what, to me, makes this a particularly serious offense." Cannot the same be said about Rove's leak? It dealt with matters related to national security; if the risk Randel was taking was a "tremendous" risk, surely Rove's leak was monumental.
While there are other potential violations of the law that may be involved with the Valerie Plame Wilson case, it would be speculation to consider them. But Karl Rove's leak to Matt Cooper is now an established fact.
First, there is Matt Cooper's e-mail record. And Cooper has now confirmed that he has told the grand jury he spoke with Rove. If Rove's leak fails to fall under the statute that was used to prosecute Randel, I do not understand why.
There are stories circulating that Rove may have been told of Valerie Plame's CIA activity by a journalist, such as Judith Miller, as recently suggested in Editor & Publisher. If so, that doesn't exonerate Rove. Rather, it could make for some interesting pairing under the federal conspiracy statute (which was the statute most commonly employed during Watergate).
John W. Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former counsel to President Nixon.
http://tomburka.com/archives2/2005_07.php#000832
QUOTE
July 15, 2005
Rove Entirely Dependent on Novak for Top-Secret Government Information, Says Super-Secret White House Source
A White House source who declined to be identified because it did not serve his purposes -- Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff -- leaked to reporters today that Karl Rove was entirely dependent on columnist Bob Novak for confidential government information. For instance, Libby said, Rove did not leak Valerie Plame's name and occupation to Robert Novak; Novak leaked it to him.
"I understand that it is rare for a a government official at the highest levels of the federal government, in the White House, virtually sitting in the President's lap, to be entirely dependent on a reporter for top-secret, highly confidential government information, but that's the case here," said Libby anonymously.
Libby asked to be known to the public only by the nickname "Hand Job," in the tradition of other famous government leakers.
"Sadly, despite Rove's powerful influence in the White House, his top-secret clearance, and his intimate association with the heads of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, DIA, DNA and DDT, he knew nothing about anything until Bob Novak clued him on it," said Libby. "This is Karl's terrible little secret."
In related news, Minority Leader Bill Frist said that Democrats calling for Rove's ouster were resorting to partisan war chants and refused to "pass the peace pipe" and "make'um nice."
"I have set the tone for working with my comrades on the other side of the aisle," said Frist. "It's awfully sad when democrats feel they have to be as fiercely partisan as I have been."
Posted by Tom at 10:15 AM
Rove Entirely Dependent on Novak for Top-Secret Government Information, Says Super-Secret White House Source
A White House source who declined to be identified because it did not serve his purposes -- Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff -- leaked to reporters today that Karl Rove was entirely dependent on columnist Bob Novak for confidential government information. For instance, Libby said, Rove did not leak Valerie Plame's name and occupation to Robert Novak; Novak leaked it to him.
"I understand that it is rare for a a government official at the highest levels of the federal government, in the White House, virtually sitting in the President's lap, to be entirely dependent on a reporter for top-secret, highly confidential government information, but that's the case here," said Libby anonymously.
Libby asked to be known to the public only by the nickname "Hand Job," in the tradition of other famous government leakers.
"Sadly, despite Rove's powerful influence in the White House, his top-secret clearance, and his intimate association with the heads of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, DIA, DNA and DDT, he knew nothing about anything until Bob Novak clued him on it," said Libby. "This is Karl's terrible little secret."
In related news, Minority Leader Bill Frist said that Democrats calling for Rove's ouster were resorting to partisan war chants and refused to "pass the peace pipe" and "make'um nice."
"I have set the tone for working with my comrades on the other side of the aisle," said Frist. "It's awfully sad when democrats feel they have to be as fiercely partisan as I have been."
Posted by Tom at 10:15 AM
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/15/111941/747
QUOTE
Debunking the "Rove heard it from a journalist" lie
by Jeff Seemann For Congress
Fri Jul 15th, 2005 at 08:19:41 PDT
As the spin makes the Republicans more and more dizzy, it's quite possible that they don't realize how easy their lies can be cast aside.
As I learned when I was a small boy, covering up a lie by telling a bigger lie never, EVER works. And it won't work here either.
The latest lie being floated by Karl Rove and the GOP machine is that "Rove claims he learned about Plame being CIA from other journalists and not from government sources." Of course, the Republicans think that this will exonerate their new hero.
It will not. As a matter of fact, it only goes to show this White House as being WORSE on National Security.
If it were true, that a senior White House aide heard from a journalist about a person who was CIA, then wouldn't the following steps have taken place?
1. Rove should have immediately informed the reporter or reporters that discussing the identity of a CIA agent may be illegal.
2. Rove should have then called George Tenet and inquired about whether or not the agent was undercover.
3. Upon learning the undercover status of said agent, Rove should have then told Tenet to quickly alert the agent and inform them that their cover had been blown.
4. Rove should have then turned over the names of the reporters to the CIA for investigation.
NONE of the above four actions took place. Had Rove actually heard Plame's name from the media, this is EXACTLY what Rove should have done.
Well, at least it's what a Democratic administration would have done....but then, we're the ones who actually give a rat's ass about our national security.
by Jeff Seemann For Congress
Fri Jul 15th, 2005 at 08:19:41 PDT
As the spin makes the Republicans more and more dizzy, it's quite possible that they don't realize how easy their lies can be cast aside.
As I learned when I was a small boy, covering up a lie by telling a bigger lie never, EVER works. And it won't work here either.
The latest lie being floated by Karl Rove and the GOP machine is that "Rove claims he learned about Plame being CIA from other journalists and not from government sources." Of course, the Republicans think that this will exonerate their new hero.
It will not. As a matter of fact, it only goes to show this White House as being WORSE on National Security.
If it were true, that a senior White House aide heard from a journalist about a person who was CIA, then wouldn't the following steps have taken place?
1. Rove should have immediately informed the reporter or reporters that discussing the identity of a CIA agent may be illegal.
2. Rove should have then called George Tenet and inquired about whether or not the agent was undercover.
3. Upon learning the undercover status of said agent, Rove should have then told Tenet to quickly alert the agent and inform them that their cover had been blown.
4. Rove should have then turned over the names of the reporters to the CIA for investigation.
NONE of the above four actions took place. Had Rove actually heard Plame's name from the media, this is EXACTLY what Rove should have done.
Well, at least it's what a Democratic administration would have done....but then, we're the ones who actually give a rat's ass about our national security.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5071500978.html
The Second Source
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, July 15, 2005; 1:00 PM
Two newspapers and the Associated Press have stories this morning -- sparked by what appears to be a strategically crafted leak from Karl Rove's camp -- that shed a little more light on the role the president's chief political strategist played in the disclosure of Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation.
Here's what the stories say:
· Rove was apparently the "second source" for Robert Novak's July 14, 2003, column about Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, in which Plame, Wilson's wife, was first outed.
· While Rove was the first source for Time magazine Matthew Cooper's July 17, 2003, story, in neither case was Rove reportedly pushing the Plame angle aggressively.
· And Rove claims that he initially learned about the role of Wilson's wife from a reporter whose name he can't remember -- and then first learned her actual name from Novak.
The new leak is clearly intended to suggest that Rove's actions were neither criminal nor particularly unethical.
But many serious questions remain. Among them:
· Even under the circumstances described in today's stories, was Rove's behavior ethically acceptable? And if so, why didn't he come forward sooner?
· Did press secretary Scott McClellan know Rove was Novak's second source when he insisted that it was ridiculous to suggest that Rove was involved? What did Rove tell Bush about this, and when?
There are at least two new questions:
· Who it this mysterious reporter who allegedly told Rove about Plame in the first place?
· And who is this new anonymous leaker?
And of course, we still don't know about Novak's first source and his or her motives.
The New Leak
David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson write in the New York Times: "Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a C.I.A. officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said. . . .
After hearing Novak's account of Plame's role in her husband's trip to Niger to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, "the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: 'I heard that, too.' . . .
"The person who provided the information about Mr. Rove's conversation with Mr. Novak declined to be identified, citing requests by Mr. Fitzgerald that no one discuss the case. The person discussed the matter in the belief that Mr. Rove was truthful in saying that he had not disclosed Ms. Wilson's identity. . . .
"On Oct. 1, 2003, Mr. Novak wrote another column in which he described calling two officials who were his sources for the earlier column. The first source, whose identity has not been revealed, provided the outlines of the story and was described by Mr. Novak as 'no partisan gunslinger.' Mr. Novak wrote that when he called a second official for confirmation, the source said, 'Oh, you know about it.' . . .
"Asked by investigators how he knew enough to leave Mr. Novak with the impression that his information was accurate, Mr. Rove said he had heard parts of the story from other journalists but had not heard Ms. Wilson's name."
Mike Allen writes in The Washington Post: "White House senior adviser Karl Rove indirectly confirmed the CIA affiliation of an administration critic's wife for Robert D. Novak the week before the columnist named her and revealed her position, a lawyer involved in the case said last night. . . .
"The lawyer, who has knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors, said President Bush's deputy chief of staff has told investigators that he first learned about the operative from a journalist and that he later learned her name from Novak. . . .
"The new account means that Rove talked to both of the journalists who are known to have published original accounts about Plame. Rove's representatives have said that he mentioned the issue in the most general terms and did not name Plame. Democrats say he was trying to fuel stories that would punish an administration critic."
Allen also writes: "Sources who have reviewed some of the testimony before the grand jury say there is significant evidence that reporters were in some cases alerting officials about Plame's identity and relationship to Wilson -- not the other way around."
John Solomon writes for the Associated Press: "Chief presidential adviser Karl Rove testified to a grand jury that he talked with two journalists before they divulged the identity of an undercover CIA officer but that he originally learned about the operative from the news media and not government sources, according to a person briefed on the testimony. . . .
"Rove told the grand jury that by the time Novak had called him, he believes he had similar information about Wilson's wife from another member of the news media but he could not recall which reporter had told him about it first, the person said."
A Cover Up?
And there's another possible blockbuster story this morning from Thomas M. DeFrank and Kenneth R. Bazinet , who write in the New York Daily News: "The special prosecutor probing the outing of a CIA spy is looking beyond who leaked Valerie Plame's identity, seeking whether White House aides tried to cover their tracks after her name went public, sources told the Daily News.
"Along with Bush political guru Karl Rove, the grand jury is investigating what role, if any, ex-White House mouthpiece Ari Fleischer may have played in the revelation that the former covert operative Plame was married to former Ambassador Joe Wilson. . . .
"A State Department memo that included background on Wilson -- and who in the White House had access to it -- appears to be a key to revealing who gave conservative columnist Robert Novak Plame's name, [two] sources said."
Bloglust
The blogosphere, where mistrust of the mainstream media transcends politics, is going absolutely bananas over the possibility that the press itself is responsible for this whole mess.
Tom Maguire writes: "[I]f the media is really just keeping quiet about their role in this, well, I can't imagine how I could respect our media less, but I will think of something."
Lorie Byrd writes: "This report from the NYT, if true, strikes me as a bombshell, Rove is innocent, Dems are full of it, and reporters have gotten this story completely wrong revelation."
Even ABC News's The Note asks archly: "Does the reporter who allegedly first told Karl Rove about Valerie Plame know who he or she is?"
Mickey Kaus writes on Slate.com that it's possible New York Times reporter Judith Miller was Rove's source. "[T]his theory is what many MSM journalists, who know more about the case than I do, are worried about."
Tom on the Corrente blog writes: "Am I the only person who realizes that it doesn't matter how Rove found out? Rove simply shouldn't have disclosed anything at all. . . . He disclosed it and therefore broke the law and it really doesn't matter how he found out."
The Liberal Oasis blog points out some interesting foreshadowing of today's leak.
"Why do we know this is the White House strategy? Because Fox News already told us, during Wednesday's pundit roundtable on Special Report with Brit Hume:
"JEFF BIRNBAUM (W. Post): We are missing an important fact. And that is, where did Karl Rove get his information? --
"HUME: Well, I do know one thing. I know what the Rove camp says. The Rove camp says he actually heard about it from a journalist. . . .
"BIRNBAUM: . . . if Karl Rove did not get his information from the CIA or from someone who should not have told him under this law . . . then he's sort of off-the-hook."
Show of Support
Charles Babington writes in The Washington Post: "Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, accompanied the president on a trip to Indianapolis -- both men walking together from the White House to the Marine One helicopter on the South Lawn. Bush usually walks alone to the helicopter, and their public stroll was widely perceived as a presidential show of support."
John King showed that clip on CNN. "If it were anyone else, Karl Rove might have advised the president to keep his distance from a political lightning rod like himself. But today in the midst of the CIA leak investigation, Mr. Bush and his uberstrategist stood and walked shoulder to shoulder," King said.
He asked John Harris, political editor of The Washington Post: "What do you make of the pictures today?"
Harris replied: "Well, I think they say everything. That clearly that was what the message they want to say. Look, forget about it if you're going to chase Rove out of town in this frenzy. It's not going to happen. And I take that at face value. I don't think Rove is going anywhere."
The Luskin Factor
It's not clear if the Times, The Post, and the Associated Press shared a single source on their stories. Who exactly is in a position to be "officially briefed" on Rove's grand jury testimony? What sort of lawyer "has knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors?"
Up until now, of course, the official voice of Rove on this matter has been that of his lawyer, Robert Luskin. And he himself is coming under closer scrutiny.
Howard Kurtz writes in washingtonpost.com about some of Luskin's more arguable assertions.
For instance: "Luskin told The Washington Post : 'Karl did nothing wrong. Karl didn't disclose Valerie Plame's identity to Mr. Cooper or anybody else,' adding that the question remains unanswered: 'Who outed this woman? . . . It wasn't Karl.'
"This answer now seems to be a) hair-splittingly legalistic, misleading, or c) flatly untrue. You decide. Depends on the meaning of the word 'disclose,' I guess."
Kurtz also notes that "Luskin, in 1998, had to return $245,000 in fees from a client convicted of drug-money laundering. The settlement with the Justice Department, which argued that the attorney should have known he was receiving tainted money, followed the disclosure that Luskin had accepted half a million of his payment in gold bars."
Luskin is a partner at the Patton Boggs law firm.
1992 -- a Foreshadowing?
It's come up now and again, but just recently there have been a spate of mentions of a story that dates back to 1992 and involves a possible leak from Rove to Novak.
Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten wrote about it in their Rove profile in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday:
"During George H.W. Bush's second presidential campaign, Rove was fired from the campaign team because of suspicions that he had leaked information to columnist Robert Novak -- the same columnist who first reported Plame's CIA role in 2003, citing anonymous administration sources."
Ken Herman mentioned it in his Cox News Service report yesterday.
And Johnston and Stevenson mention it in today's New York Times: "This is not the first time Mr. Rove has been linked to a leak reported by Mr. Novak. . . . "
Taking It to the Hill
Charles Babington writes in The Washington Post: "In bitingly partisan exchanges yesterday, lawmakers plunged into the dispute over Karl Rove's hand in leaking a covert CIA operative's identity."
Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) proposed an amendment aimed at Rove "to deny access to classified information to any federal employee who discloses a covert CIA agent's identity."
Then Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) retaliated by offering an amendment designed to strip the security clearances of the chamber's top two Democrats, Reid and Democratic Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.).
Reid's amendment fell by a party-line vote. Twenty Republicans joined all present Democrats in voting against Frist's.
Agenda Worries
John D. McKinnon writes in the Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Rove, who has been largely responsible for Mr. Bush's triumphs, now could become the undoing of Mr. Bush's second-term agenda, unless he can find a way to put the story to rest. . . .
"A decision by prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald to charge Mr. Rove, either with illegally leaking Valerie Plame's name or with perjury over his grand-jury testimony, would force the president's hand. . . .
"Mr. Bush's calculations would turn on the extent to which Mr. Rove was a distraction from administration goals, and how much the strategist's effectiveness has been damaged."
Yesterday's Grilling
Press secretary Scott McClellan didn't do a full briefing yesterday, only an in-flight gaggle on the way to Indiana.
It was brief, but not merciful. An excerpt:
"Q Will Karl come back and talk to us at the event?
"MR. McCLELLAN: No, I don't expect that today.
"Q Why not?
"MR. McCLELLAN: I just don't -- there's no plans for him to do that.
"Q How long is he going to stay on the staff?
"MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think I expressed the President's views yesterday, when it comes to Karl.
"Q Remind me, how long is he going to stay on the staff?
"MR. McCLELLAN: That's a nice try. . . . "
Former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry writes on Huffingtonpost.com that he feels bad for McClellan.
Howard Fineman writes on Newsweek.com: "Several media, political and Washington vectors intersected to create an explosive Rove Reaction."
Opinion Watch
Washington Post editorial: "There are serious questions about Mr. Rove's behavior, as well as his misleading public accounting for it during the past two years. . . . But much is still unknown, and Democratic demands that Mr. Rove be fired immediately seem premature given the murky state of the evidence."
Los Angeles Times editorial: "The White House cannot justify remaining silent by hiding behind the ongoing investigation. Bush's press secretary, Scott McClellan, who once called the notion of Rove being the leaker 'totally ridiculous,' has looked ridiculous himself in recent days while dodging questions about the matter. Bush must order Rove to come clean about what he said to reporters, and when he said it. Otherwise, Bush will soon look 'totally ridiculous' too."
National Review editorial: "At the appropriate time, Rove and McClellan may owe some apologies. But we doubt that there will be firing offenses here, still less indictable ones. Democrats searching for a way to best the man who has done more than anyone but President Bush to win the last three elections, and reporters on the hunt for a big second-term scandal, will have to look elsewhere."
Paul Krugman in the New York Times: "John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell."
E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post: "As long ago as October 2002, when Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank wrote a memorable story under the headline 'For Bush, Facts Are Malleable,' the administration has been accused of distortions, exaggerations and falsehoods. The spectacle of McClellan's being unable to back up his previous denials -- he said in the fall of 2003 that Rove and two other administration officials 'assured me they were not involved in this' -- brought this problem home as no catalogue of questionable administration statements ever could."
Dick Morris in The Hill: "Washington is a mean town where human sacrifice has been raised to an art form. But Karl Rove does not deserve this fate. He has served loyally and well, resisting enormous opportunities to leave midway and reap a bonanza of income in the private sector. He has shown himself to be a man of uncommon integrity and selflessness in serving this administration and this country. He should not be tossed to the partisan wolves."
San Francisco Chronicle editorial: "The person who should step down immediately is White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
"Every White House correspondent knows that a press secretary's job involves a good deal of 'spin' and administration-friendly interpretations of the facts. But it can't involve what now seem like outright falsehoods. And that is the trap in which McClellan now finds himself."
Bubble Ahead
Jim Morrill and Tim Funk write in the Charlotte Observer: "President Bush will visit a Belmont textile plant Friday during a whirlwind visit to shore up thin Southern support for a controversial new trade pact. . . .
"In coming to Rep. Sue Myrick's 9th Congressional District, the president is coming to the only district in the Carolinas whose representative publicly supports the pact. . . .
"Traveling to Myrick's district was apparently not the White House's first choice in planning the trip. Weeks ago, Bush's advisers had hoped to send the president to Rep. Howard Coble's district to try to turn the Greensboro Republican into a key 'yes' vote on CAFTA.
" 'They called and asked us how would we feel about the president coming to the 6th (Congressional) District and how would that affect his vote on CAFTA,' Coble spokesman Ed McDonald said. 'We said it would not move (Coble) one inch closer (to supporting the treaty).' "
Megan Ward writes in the Shelby (N.C.) Star that Bush's speech will be held at Gaston College. But "the college has had no say in who will appear at the event. . . .
"Jeanie Mamo, a White House spokeswoman, said Bush will meet with textile workers and community and business leaders. The Gaston College speech is a by-ticket-only event."
Poll Watch
A new Associated Press-Ipsos poll has Bush's overall job approval down one point from last month, to 42 percent, with 56 percent disapproving.
A new Fox News poll has Bush's job approval rating down a point from last month to 47, with disapproval up four points to 47.
Social Security Watch
Jonathan Weisman writes in The Washington Post: "With their disputes only deepening, House and Senate lawmakers agreed yesterday to put off action on Social Security restructuring again -- this time until September at the earliest."
Supreme Court News
Gina Holland writes for the Associated Press: "Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's pledge to continue working despite his thyroid cancer leaves the White House with just one Supreme Court seat to fill, suddenly changing the dynamic of the summer confirmation battle."
Charles Lane and Peter Baker write in The Washington Post: "The White House had no notice of Rehnquist's intentions, press secretary Scott McClellan said. 'We didn't know before the statement,' he said by telephone last night. McClellan added: 'The chief justice is doing an outstanding job, and we are pleased that he will continue his great service to the nation.' "
Bush and Blacks
Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post: "Making a rare appearance before a predominantly black audience, President Bush on Thursday touted his administration's initiatives to bolster education, increase homeownership and restructure Social Security, saying those efforts accrue to the benefit of African Americans. . . .
"Before Thursday's speech, Indiana Black Expo honored Bush with its lifetime achievement award."
Here's the text of his speech.
Matthew Tully , a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, writes that Bush "had a lot of time to prepare a thoughtful, meaningful speech for a major black organization -- but . . . struck out woefully with a boy-is-the-world-great defense of his presidency."
While in Indianapolis
Bill McCleery writes in the Indianapolis Star: "President George W. Bush met for 10 minutes Thursday with the parents and two siblings of Claire Tatom, the 7-year-old Fortville girl who died July 4 of brain cancer.
"The president comforted the family and talked of his own sister who died of leukemia as a child, said Shane Tatom, Claire's father. . . .
"Bush talked of having grown closer to God over the years, giving up drinking at the age of 40 and spending more time reading his Bible, Tatom said."
The Second Source
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, July 15, 2005; 1:00 PM
Two newspapers and the Associated Press have stories this morning -- sparked by what appears to be a strategically crafted leak from Karl Rove's camp -- that shed a little more light on the role the president's chief political strategist played in the disclosure of Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation.
Here's what the stories say:
· Rove was apparently the "second source" for Robert Novak's July 14, 2003, column about Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, in which Plame, Wilson's wife, was first outed.
· While Rove was the first source for Time magazine Matthew Cooper's July 17, 2003, story, in neither case was Rove reportedly pushing the Plame angle aggressively.
· And Rove claims that he initially learned about the role of Wilson's wife from a reporter whose name he can't remember -- and then first learned her actual name from Novak.
The new leak is clearly intended to suggest that Rove's actions were neither criminal nor particularly unethical.
But many serious questions remain. Among them:
· Even under the circumstances described in today's stories, was Rove's behavior ethically acceptable? And if so, why didn't he come forward sooner?
· Did press secretary Scott McClellan know Rove was Novak's second source when he insisted that it was ridiculous to suggest that Rove was involved? What did Rove tell Bush about this, and when?
There are at least two new questions:
· Who it this mysterious reporter who allegedly told Rove about Plame in the first place?
· And who is this new anonymous leaker?
And of course, we still don't know about Novak's first source and his or her motives.
The New Leak
David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson write in the New York Times: "Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a C.I.A. officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said. . . .
After hearing Novak's account of Plame's role in her husband's trip to Niger to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, "the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: 'I heard that, too.' . . .
"The person who provided the information about Mr. Rove's conversation with Mr. Novak declined to be identified, citing requests by Mr. Fitzgerald that no one discuss the case. The person discussed the matter in the belief that Mr. Rove was truthful in saying that he had not disclosed Ms. Wilson's identity. . . .
"On Oct. 1, 2003, Mr. Novak wrote another column in which he described calling two officials who were his sources for the earlier column. The first source, whose identity has not been revealed, provided the outlines of the story and was described by Mr. Novak as 'no partisan gunslinger.' Mr. Novak wrote that when he called a second official for confirmation, the source said, 'Oh, you know about it.' . . .
"Asked by investigators how he knew enough to leave Mr. Novak with the impression that his information was accurate, Mr. Rove said he had heard parts of the story from other journalists but had not heard Ms. Wilson's name."
Mike Allen writes in The Washington Post: "White House senior adviser Karl Rove indirectly confirmed the CIA affiliation of an administration critic's wife for Robert D. Novak the week before the columnist named her and revealed her position, a lawyer involved in the case said last night. . . .
"The lawyer, who has knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors, said President Bush's deputy chief of staff has told investigators that he first learned about the operative from a journalist and that he later learned her name from Novak. . . .
"The new account means that Rove talked to both of the journalists who are known to have published original accounts about Plame. Rove's representatives have said that he mentioned the issue in the most general terms and did not name Plame. Democrats say he was trying to fuel stories that would punish an administration critic."
Allen also writes: "Sources who have reviewed some of the testimony before the grand jury say there is significant evidence that reporters were in some cases alerting officials about Plame's identity and relationship to Wilson -- not the other way around."
John Solomon writes for the Associated Press: "Chief presidential adviser Karl Rove testified to a grand jury that he talked with two journalists before they divulged the identity of an undercover CIA officer but that he originally learned about the operative from the news media and not government sources, according to a person briefed on the testimony. . . .
"Rove told the grand jury that by the time Novak had called him, he believes he had similar information about Wilson's wife from another member of the news media but he could not recall which reporter had told him about it first, the person said."
A Cover Up?
And there's another possible blockbuster story this morning from Thomas M. DeFrank and Kenneth R. Bazinet , who write in the New York Daily News: "The special prosecutor probing the outing of a CIA spy is looking beyond who leaked Valerie Plame's identity, seeking whether White House aides tried to cover their tracks after her name went public, sources told the Daily News.
"Along with Bush political guru Karl Rove, the grand jury is investigating what role, if any, ex-White House mouthpiece Ari Fleischer may have played in the revelation that the former covert operative Plame was married to former Ambassador Joe Wilson. . . .
"A State Department memo that included background on Wilson -- and who in the White House had access to it -- appears to be a key to revealing who gave conservative columnist Robert Novak Plame's name, [two] sources said."
Bloglust
The blogosphere, where mistrust of the mainstream media transcends politics, is going absolutely bananas over the possibility that the press itself is responsible for this whole mess.
Tom Maguire writes: "[I]f the media is really just keeping quiet about their role in this, well, I can't imagine how I could respect our media less, but I will think of something."
Lorie Byrd writes: "This report from the NYT, if true, strikes me as a bombshell, Rove is innocent, Dems are full of it, and reporters have gotten this story completely wrong revelation."
Even ABC News's The Note asks archly: "Does the reporter who allegedly first told Karl Rove about Valerie Plame know who he or she is?"
Mickey Kaus writes on Slate.com that it's possible New York Times reporter Judith Miller was Rove's source. "[T]his theory is what many MSM journalists, who know more about the case than I do, are worried about."
Tom on the Corrente blog writes: "Am I the only person who realizes that it doesn't matter how Rove found out? Rove simply shouldn't have disclosed anything at all. . . . He disclosed it and therefore broke the law and it really doesn't matter how he found out."
The Liberal Oasis blog points out some interesting foreshadowing of today's leak.
"Why do we know this is the White House strategy? Because Fox News already told us, during Wednesday's pundit roundtable on Special Report with Brit Hume:
"JEFF BIRNBAUM (W. Post): We are missing an important fact. And that is, where did Karl Rove get his information? --
"HUME: Well, I do know one thing. I know what the Rove camp says. The Rove camp says he actually heard about it from a journalist. . . .
"BIRNBAUM: . . . if Karl Rove did not get his information from the CIA or from someone who should not have told him under this law . . . then he's sort of off-the-hook."
Show of Support
Charles Babington writes in The Washington Post: "Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, accompanied the president on a trip to Indianapolis -- both men walking together from the White House to the Marine One helicopter on the South Lawn. Bush usually walks alone to the helicopter, and their public stroll was widely perceived as a presidential show of support."
John King showed that clip on CNN. "If it were anyone else, Karl Rove might have advised the president to keep his distance from a political lightning rod like himself. But today in the midst of the CIA leak investigation, Mr. Bush and his uberstrategist stood and walked shoulder to shoulder," King said.
He asked John Harris, political editor of The Washington Post: "What do you make of the pictures today?"
Harris replied: "Well, I think they say everything. That clearly that was what the message they want to say. Look, forget about it if you're going to chase Rove out of town in this frenzy. It's not going to happen. And I take that at face value. I don't think Rove is going anywhere."
The Luskin Factor
It's not clear if the Times, The Post, and the Associated Press shared a single source on their stories. Who exactly is in a position to be "officially briefed" on Rove's grand jury testimony? What sort of lawyer "has knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors?"
Up until now, of course, the official voice of Rove on this matter has been that of his lawyer, Robert Luskin. And he himself is coming under closer scrutiny.
Howard Kurtz writes in washingtonpost.com about some of Luskin's more arguable assertions.
For instance: "Luskin told The Washington Post : 'Karl did nothing wrong. Karl didn't disclose Valerie Plame's identity to Mr. Cooper or anybody else,' adding that the question remains unanswered: 'Who outed this woman? . . . It wasn't Karl.'
"This answer now seems to be a) hair-splittingly legalistic,
misleading, or c) flatly untrue. You decide. Depends on the meaning of the word 'disclose,' I guess."Kurtz also notes that "Luskin, in 1998, had to return $245,000 in fees from a client convicted of drug-money laundering. The settlement with the Justice Department, which argued that the attorney should have known he was receiving tainted money, followed the disclosure that Luskin had accepted half a million of his payment in gold bars."
Luskin is a partner at the Patton Boggs law firm.
1992 -- a Foreshadowing?
It's come up now and again, but just recently there have been a spate of mentions of a story that dates back to 1992 and involves a possible leak from Rove to Novak.
Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten wrote about it in their Rove profile in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday:
"During George H.W. Bush's second presidential campaign, Rove was fired from the campaign team because of suspicions that he had leaked information to columnist Robert Novak -- the same columnist who first reported Plame's CIA role in 2003, citing anonymous administration sources."
Ken Herman mentioned it in his Cox News Service report yesterday.
And Johnston and Stevenson mention it in today's New York Times: "This is not the first time Mr. Rove has been linked to a leak reported by Mr. Novak. . . . "
Taking It to the Hill
Charles Babington writes in The Washington Post: "In bitingly partisan exchanges yesterday, lawmakers plunged into the dispute over Karl Rove's hand in leaking a covert CIA operative's identity."
Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) proposed an amendment aimed at Rove "to deny access to classified information to any federal employee who discloses a covert CIA agent's identity."
Then Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) retaliated by offering an amendment designed to strip the security clearances of the chamber's top two Democrats, Reid and Democratic Whip Richard J. Durbin (Ill.).
Reid's amendment fell by a party-line vote. Twenty Republicans joined all present Democrats in voting against Frist's.
Agenda Worries
John D. McKinnon writes in the Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Rove, who has been largely responsible for Mr. Bush's triumphs, now could become the undoing of Mr. Bush's second-term agenda, unless he can find a way to put the story to rest. . . .
"A decision by prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald to charge Mr. Rove, either with illegally leaking Valerie Plame's name or with perjury over his grand-jury testimony, would force the president's hand. . . .
"Mr. Bush's calculations would turn on the extent to which Mr. Rove was a distraction from administration goals, and how much the strategist's effectiveness has been damaged."
Yesterday's Grilling
Press secretary Scott McClellan didn't do a full briefing yesterday, only an in-flight gaggle on the way to Indiana.
It was brief, but not merciful. An excerpt:
"Q Will Karl come back and talk to us at the event?
"MR. McCLELLAN: No, I don't expect that today.
"Q Why not?
"MR. McCLELLAN: I just don't -- there's no plans for him to do that.
"Q How long is he going to stay on the staff?
"MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think I expressed the President's views yesterday, when it comes to Karl.
"Q Remind me, how long is he going to stay on the staff?
"MR. McCLELLAN: That's a nice try. . . . "
Former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry writes on Huffingtonpost.com that he feels bad for McClellan.
Howard Fineman writes on Newsweek.com: "Several media, political and Washington vectors intersected to create an explosive Rove Reaction."
Opinion Watch
Washington Post editorial: "There are serious questions about Mr. Rove's behavior, as well as his misleading public accounting for it during the past two years. . . . But much is still unknown, and Democratic demands that Mr. Rove be fired immediately seem premature given the murky state of the evidence."
Los Angeles Times editorial: "The White House cannot justify remaining silent by hiding behind the ongoing investigation. Bush's press secretary, Scott McClellan, who once called the notion of Rove being the leaker 'totally ridiculous,' has looked ridiculous himself in recent days while dodging questions about the matter. Bush must order Rove to come clean about what he said to reporters, and when he said it. Otherwise, Bush will soon look 'totally ridiculous' too."
National Review editorial: "At the appropriate time, Rove and McClellan may owe some apologies. But we doubt that there will be firing offenses here, still less indictable ones. Democrats searching for a way to best the man who has done more than anyone but President Bush to win the last three elections, and reporters on the hunt for a big second-term scandal, will have to look elsewhere."
Paul Krugman in the New York Times: "John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell."
E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post: "As long ago as October 2002, when Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank wrote a memorable story under the headline 'For Bush, Facts Are Malleable,' the administration has been accused of distortions, exaggerations and falsehoods. The spectacle of McClellan's being unable to back up his previous denials -- he said in the fall of 2003 that Rove and two other administration officials 'assured me they were not involved in this' -- brought this problem home as no catalogue of questionable administration statements ever could."
Dick Morris in The Hill: "Washington is a mean town where human sacrifice has been raised to an art form. But Karl Rove does not deserve this fate. He has served loyally and well, resisting enormous opportunities to leave midway and reap a bonanza of income in the private sector. He has shown himself to be a man of uncommon integrity and selflessness in serving this administration and this country. He should not be tossed to the partisan wolves."
San Francisco Chronicle editorial: "The person who should step down immediately is White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
"Every White House correspondent knows that a press secretary's job involves a good deal of 'spin' and administration-friendly interpretations of the facts. But it can't involve what now seem like outright falsehoods. And that is the trap in which McClellan now finds himself."
Bubble Ahead
Jim Morrill and Tim Funk write in the Charlotte Observer: "President Bush will visit a Belmont textile plant Friday during a whirlwind visit to shore up thin Southern support for a controversial new trade pact. . . .
"In coming to Rep. Sue Myrick's 9th Congressional District, the president is coming to the only district in the Carolinas whose representative publicly supports the pact. . . .
"Traveling to Myrick's district was apparently not the White House's first choice in planning the trip. Weeks ago, Bush's advisers had hoped to send the president to Rep. Howard Coble's district to try to turn the Greensboro Republican into a key 'yes' vote on CAFTA.
" 'They called and asked us how would we feel about the president coming to the 6th (Congressional) District and how would that affect his vote on CAFTA,' Coble spokesman Ed McDonald said. 'We said it would not move (Coble) one inch closer (to supporting the treaty).' "
Megan Ward writes in the Shelby (N.C.) Star that Bush's speech will be held at Gaston College. But "the college has had no say in who will appear at the event. . . .
"Jeanie Mamo, a White House spokeswoman, said Bush will meet with textile workers and community and business leaders. The Gaston College speech is a by-ticket-only event."
Poll Watch
A new Associated Press-Ipsos poll has Bush's overall job approval down one point from last month, to 42 percent, with 56 percent disapproving.
A new Fox News poll has Bush's job approval rating down a point from last month to 47, with disapproval up four points to 47.
Social Security Watch
Jonathan Weisman writes in The Washington Post: "With their disputes only deepening, House and Senate lawmakers agreed yesterday to put off action on Social Security restructuring again -- this time until September at the earliest."
Supreme Court News
Gina Holland writes for the Associated Press: "Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's pledge to continue working despite his thyroid cancer leaves the White House with just one Supreme Court seat to fill, suddenly changing the dynamic of the summer confirmation battle."
Charles Lane and Peter Baker write in The Washington Post: "The White House had no notice of Rehnquist's intentions, press secretary Scott McClellan said. 'We didn't know before the statement,' he said by telephone last night. McClellan added: 'The chief justice is doing an outstanding job, and we are pleased that he will continue his great service to the nation.' "
Bush and Blacks
Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post: "Making a rare appearance before a predominantly black audience, President Bush on Thursday touted his administration's initiatives to bolster education, increase homeownership and restructure Social Security, saying those efforts accrue to the benefit of African Americans. . . .
"Before Thursday's speech, Indiana Black Expo honored Bush with its lifetime achievement award."
Here's the text of his speech.
Matthew Tully , a columnist for the Indianapolis Star, writes that Bush "had a lot of time to prepare a thoughtful, meaningful speech for a major black organization -- but . . . struck out woefully with a boy-is-the-world-great defense of his presidency."
While in Indianapolis
Bill McCleery writes in the Indianapolis Star: "President George W. Bush met for 10 minutes Thursday with the parents and two siblings of Claire Tatom, the 7-year-old Fortville girl who died July 4 of brain cancer.
"The president comforted the family and talked of his own sister who died of leukemia as a child, said Shane Tatom, Claire's father. . . .
"Bush talked of having grown closer to God over the years, giving up drinking at the age of 40 and spending more time reading his Bible, Tatom said."
QUOTE(rox63 @ Jul 15 2005, 01:09 PM)
Debunking the "Rove heard it from a journalist" lie
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/15/111941/747
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/15/111941/747
Thnx i was actually breaking out into hysterical fits of laughter
......see my previous two posts in the last thread on Pincus story
Paul Krugman in the New York Times: "John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell."
-Pegatha
-Pegatha
Rove is, of course innocent. Why? Because the White House knows more than we do and they haven't distanced themselves from Rove!
Here is the first part of the WSJ's pathetic opinion piece; they go on to say that the major news outlets confirm that Rove learned this top secret information from Novak....
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110...ojrss=frontpage
"Let's conduct a little thought experiment, shall we? Suppose that people in Washington generally had the sense that Karl Rove was soon to be indicted in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. How would they react?
It seems to us the White House would be working to distance itself from Rove, possibly planning for him to make a quiet exit, much as John Kerry's campaign "disappeared" Joe Wilson last summer when Wilson's credibility fell apart. The Democrats, on the other hand, would act high-minded and talk of "letting the process work," at least as long as Rove remained on the job. An actual indictment, after all, would do maximal political damage to the Bush administration.
Instead, the White House (which knows a lot more about the investigation than any of us) is confidently standing behind Rove, while the Democrats are waging a hysterical attack that would be premature if it were based on anything real. Partisan Democrats don't want to talk about the facts of the case (facts are irrelevant, as a former Enron adviser insists) or about the law. They just want to pound the table and insist that Rove is metaphysically guilty."
Here is the first part of the WSJ's pathetic opinion piece; they go on to say that the major news outlets confirm that Rove learned this top secret information from Novak....
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110...ojrss=frontpage
"Let's conduct a little thought experiment, shall we? Suppose that people in Washington generally had the sense that Karl Rove was soon to be indicted in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. How would they react?
It seems to us the White House would be working to distance itself from Rove, possibly planning for him to make a quiet exit, much as John Kerry's campaign "disappeared" Joe Wilson last summer when Wilson's credibility fell apart. The Democrats, on the other hand, would act high-minded and talk of "letting the process work," at least as long as Rove remained on the job. An actual indictment, after all, would do maximal political damage to the Bush administration.
Instead, the White House (which knows a lot more about the investigation than any of us) is confidently standing behind Rove, while the Democrats are waging a hysterical attack that would be premature if it were based on anything real. Partisan Democrats don't want to talk about the facts of the case (facts are irrelevant, as a former Enron adviser insists) or about the law. They just want to pound the table and insist that Rove is metaphysically guilty."
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Jul 15 2005, 12:32 PM)
This is about Bush. He was elected president. He is the commander in chief --- the CEO of the nation.
Whatever happens on his watch --- he is responsible for.
Rove --- Rove is his employee.
Rove was acting in his capacity as an advisor to the president.
Bush is responsible.
This needs to stay about Bush --- and Bush only.
Rove is just one of the many minions who have disserved this nation with their lies and incompetent/conduct. However, we did not elect them. They are only accountable insofar as they serve the president and do his bidding.
The Buck Stops With Bush
Lets Hang This Travesty Around His Neck.
He Endangered Our National Security.
He Corrupted Our Ability To Gather Intelligence.
All to Cover Up The Specious Claims Regarding Niger Yellowcake.
This Was All Done To Conceal A Lie....
Not Rove's Lie -- Not the RNC's Lie -- But George W. Bush's Lie!!!
Let's Make Him Pay Politically.
Papers Are Already Saying He Won't Fire Rove
Why? Because This Is Now About Rove ---
Its our Job To make It About Bush!
Whatever happens on his watch --- he is responsible for.
Rove --- Rove is his employee.
Rove was acting in his capacity as an advisor to the president.
Bush is responsible.
This needs to stay about Bush --- and Bush only.
Rove is just one of the many minions who have disserved this nation with their lies and incompetent/conduct. However, we did not elect them. They are only accountable insofar as they serve the president and do his bidding.
The Buck Stops With Bush
Lets Hang This Travesty Around His Neck.
He Endangered Our National Security.
He Corrupted Our Ability To Gather Intelligence.
All to Cover Up The Specious Claims Regarding Niger Yellowcake.
This Was All Done To Conceal A Lie....
Not Rove's Lie -- Not the RNC's Lie -- But George W. Bush's Lie!!!
Let's Make Him Pay Politically.
Papers Are Already Saying He Won't Fire Rove
Why? Because This Is Now About Rove ---
Its our Job To make It About Bush!
QUOTE(progressivephoenix @ Jul 15 2005, 12:39 PM)
Relax tazvil04. Don't you play chess? To get to the king, you need to either remove or outflank all the lesser pieces.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Jul 15 2005, 12:55 PM)
Mark my words.
Unless Bush gets criticized for this Rove goes nowhere.
You could already see the White House supporting him and Bush defending him.
This is Bush's MO -- he is ultra loyal.
As long as the person is loyal they could have committed murder -- they could have sold secrets to Bin Laden -- Bush will stand by them.
The only way to break Bush down and prevent him from protecting Rove is to go right after Bush. He can't take the heat.
I play chess.
What is our goal. Is it to get Rove or Bush? The bishop or the king.
Right now its our goal to get the bishop because we believe that will lead to the downfall of the king.
This king will protect that Bishop at all costs. As long as the king is not threatened it can do that well -- but the best way to get the wary bishop is to distract the king and make the king choose between his own safety and that of his subject -- the bishop. Otherwise, the king will do everything in his power to protect the bishop....
Unless Bush gets criticized for this Rove goes nowhere.
You could already see the White House supporting him and Bush defending him.
This is Bush's MO -- he is ultra loyal.
As long as the person is loyal they could have committed murder -- they could have sold secrets to Bin Laden -- Bush will stand by them.
The only way to break Bush down and prevent him from protecting Rove is to go right after Bush. He can't take the heat.
I play chess.
What is our goal. Is it to get Rove or Bush? The bishop or the king.
Right now its our goal to get the bishop because we believe that will lead to the downfall of the king.
This king will protect that Bishop at all costs. As long as the king is not threatened it can do that well -- but the best way to get the wary bishop is to distract the king and make the king choose between his own safety and that of his subject -- the bishop. Otherwise, the king will do everything in his power to protect the bishop....
PP ---
White Queen to Black King Four Check...
QUOTE(DWB04 @ Jul 15 2005, 01:12 PM)
Thnx i was actually breaking out into hysterical fits of laughter ......see my previous two posts in the last thread on Pincus story
......see my previous two posts in the last thread on Pincus storyI'm going to post the TPM analysis of the Pincus article 7/6/2005...comments below are also interesting.....
Pincus: Wilson "discredited" in 2002
By p lukasiak
ALthough most of us have been following the Cooper revelations with regard to Karl Rove, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post has also spilled some beans. And the beans he spilled strongly suggest that the effort to discredit Wilson via his wife was not the result of Wilson's disclosing his trip in a NY Times column, but was being done in 2002 in order to discredit his reporting, and "fix the facts and intelligence" around the policy.
Jul 10, 2005 -- 09:59:28 AM EST
Here is the key quote from the Pincus piece in Niemanwatch...
On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.
In other words, the White House was not merely aware of Wilson's trip and its findings, someone had gone to the trouble to find out how the trip had originated, and then lied about Plame' s involvement in order to discredit his findings. (Plame did not "set up" the trip, as Pincus was told, nor did she "authorize" it, as Rove told Cooper. )
(Pincus's disclosure pretty much puts to rest the speculation that Miller's conversation with Rove was where he first found out about Plame.)
Fitzgerald may be going after whoever told "the White House" that Plame was responsible for the trip --- and really going after the whole effort to "fix the facts and intelligence" in the run-up to the Iraq war. The real questions may now be
Why did someone investigate the detailed circumstances behind the Wilson trip and who did the investigation?
Who is responsible for lying about Plames involvement in order to discredit Wilson's report within the White House (and, one assumes, make it possible for Colin Powell to ignore Wilson's findings as well?)
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/10/95928/2698
In addition: it may be nothing but in the Pincus article he clarifies that he is using the pronoun HE for convenience sake........could that imply his source in the admin was a female? Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Condi?........just a thought
Oh yes, the White House and the Bush Regime will sure like to shut-up every voice that screams for the truth! Boy, are they scared that, at long last, more and more Americans are beginning to realize that the Bush Regime use crooked means to enrich and empower their Gang members to a point of illegally selling off and endangering America and its People. The more America succeeds in exposing their 'Watergate' strategies, the quicker we can save America's Justice, Honor, Integrity and Health.
New Republic: "If the press is so liberal, why does it insist on protecting Karl Rove?"
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050725&s=cohn072505
QUOTE
TRB FROM ANN ARBOR
Going to the Matt
by Jonathan Cohn Post date: 07.15.05
Issue date: 07.25.05
So this is how serious the controversy over Karl Rove has gotten for the White House: On Monday, Press Secretary Scott McClellan actually had to dodge a question from Fox News.
It came from correspondent Carl Cameron: "Does the president continue to have confidence in Mr. Rove?" Relatively speaking, it was one of the softer inquiries McClellan fielded in an ugly briefing that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank described as "perhaps the worst" of McClellan's two-year tenure. McClellan answered Cameron the same way he answered most of the reporters asking about Rove that day: by refusing to comment.
But the questions won't go away, because we now know that Rove was a key player in the infamous outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. For those unfamiliar with the saga, Plame is married to Joseph Wilson, a former American ambassador whom the CIA had asked to investigate allegations that Iraq sought yellowcake uranium from Niger. Wilson determined the claims were unsubstantiated. After President Bush cited them as justification for the Iraq war, Wilson accused the administration of misleading the public. And that's where Rove comes in. In an apparent effort to discredit Wilson and perhaps intimidate other critics of the war, administration officials began talking to reporters "on background," suggesting that Wilson was not credible because his wife worked at the CIA. (The rather dubious implication seems to have been that Wilson had gotten the original research assignment only out of nepotism.)
The administration itself would eventually admit that it had overstated the intelligence about Niger. But, around the same time, articles about Wilson began to mention Plame and her affiliation, citing anonymous administration officials as sources. That prompted a Justice Department investigation, including subpoenas to journalists, since it is a federal crime to knowingly reveal the identity of a covert operative. Rove was a lead suspect all along. Now the latest edition of Newsweek has finally confirmed it for the public by reporting that Rove had mentioned Wilson's wife--and her work at the CIA--to Matt Cooper of Time magazine.
Legal trouble still seems unlikely for Rove, given the high threshold for proving a transgression, but political trouble is another matter. It's now clear that Rove's past denials of involvement--namely, his statement to CNN last year that "I didn't leak her name"--rest only on the quaintly Clintonian distinction that he never uttered the words "Valerie Plame," referring to her instead as Wilson's wife. Both McClellan and Bush himself have made broad statements about the moral impropriety of leaking such information--and the consequences that would befall any officials caught doing so. "If anyone in this administration was involved in it," McClellan said in 2003, "they would no longer be in this administration."
Or maybe they would. When conservatives make mistakes, they don't admit them. They blame the liberal media conspiracy. And the right has been trying to defuse the Plame controversy that way for a while now. Even before this latest revelation, Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, had called the episode an "absurd media feeding frenzy about a non-crime that journalists relentlessly hyped to hurt the Bush administration." The meme continued this week when, on msnbc's "Hardball," New York Post Washington bureau chief Deborah Orin attacked the media for focusing on Rove instead of Wilson's (alleged) misstatements. On Fox News, Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes made the same argument, suggesting that Rove was under scrutiny only because "three-fourths of the press and 100 percent of the Democrats are out to get him."
That last charge, which we hear every time Republicans get into ethical trouble, is particularly ironic given the sagas of two reporters ensnared in this controversy: Cooper and Judith Miller. Cooper looks like a poster boy for liberal media bias. He's a graduate of the Ivy League (Columbia University). He worked at two left-of-center opinion magazines (The New Republic and The Washington Monthly). He's even married to a former Clinton White House operative (Mandy Grunwald). Yet, when faced with the option of revealing his source--thereby embarrassing the White House--or going to jail, Cooper held fast and prepared for imprisonment. He did agree to testify about his conversation with Rove at the very last minute. But, according to news accounts, it was only after Time, over Cooper's own objections, relinquished e-mails that effectively outed Rove anyway and after Rove's lawyer reminded reporters that Rove had issued a blanket waiver to all reporters involved in the inquiry. Those are hardly the actions of somebody on a crusade to get the White House.
Miller's journalism pedigree, which includes work for The Progressive and National Public Radio, tilts even more to the left than Cooper's. And, of course, she now writes for the institution conservative media critics revile most of all: The New York Times. Yet she is infamous for her credulous reporting hyping the Saddam threat. (Not long before the Bush administration got into trouble for paying reporters to pass along its propaganda breathlessly, Miller was basically doing it for free.) That doesn't fit the media conspiracy theories. Nor does the behavior of her supposedly anti-Bush editors at the Times, who (unlike Cooper's superiors) refused to relinquish Miller's notes, defending her pledge of confidentiality all the way to the jail cell she now occupies.
And look who else was standing behind Cooper and Miller as imprisonment loomed: liberal opinion writers at places like The Washington Post. While some of these writers did so out of personal loyalty to Cooper or Miller, they were also putting professionalism over partisanship. They hardly suggested letting Rove off the hook, but they promoted their journalistic principles even though it meant protecting him.
So where's the liberal media conspiracy? Oh, right, back in the press briefing room, where reporters were pummeling poor Scott McClellan. But when even Fox's correspondent gets on the bandwagon, maybe it's a sign of what's really driving this story: not a partisan or temperamental crusade to bring down the president, but a recognition that administration officials committed sleazy, possibly illegal, acts for which they should finally be held accountable.
Going to the Matt
by Jonathan Cohn Post date: 07.15.05
Issue date: 07.25.05
So this is how serious the controversy over Karl Rove has gotten for the White House: On Monday, Press Secretary Scott McClellan actually had to dodge a question from Fox News.
It came from correspondent Carl Cameron: "Does the president continue to have confidence in Mr. Rove?" Relatively speaking, it was one of the softer inquiries McClellan fielded in an ugly briefing that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank described as "perhaps the worst" of McClellan's two-year tenure. McClellan answered Cameron the same way he answered most of the reporters asking about Rove that day: by refusing to comment.
But the questions won't go away, because we now know that Rove was a key player in the infamous outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. For those unfamiliar with the saga, Plame is married to Joseph Wilson, a former American ambassador whom the CIA had asked to investigate allegations that Iraq sought yellowcake uranium from Niger. Wilson determined the claims were unsubstantiated. After President Bush cited them as justification for the Iraq war, Wilson accused the administration of misleading the public. And that's where Rove comes in. In an apparent effort to discredit Wilson and perhaps intimidate other critics of the war, administration officials began talking to reporters "on background," suggesting that Wilson was not credible because his wife worked at the CIA. (The rather dubious implication seems to have been that Wilson had gotten the original research assignment only out of nepotism.)
The administration itself would eventually admit that it had overstated the intelligence about Niger. But, around the same time, articles about Wilson began to mention Plame and her affiliation, citing anonymous administration officials as sources. That prompted a Justice Department investigation, including subpoenas to journalists, since it is a federal crime to knowingly reveal the identity of a covert operative. Rove was a lead suspect all along. Now the latest edition of Newsweek has finally confirmed it for the public by reporting that Rove had mentioned Wilson's wife--and her work at the CIA--to Matt Cooper of Time magazine.
Legal trouble still seems unlikely for Rove, given the high threshold for proving a transgression, but political trouble is another matter. It's now clear that Rove's past denials of involvement--namely, his statement to CNN last year that "I didn't leak her name"--rest only on the quaintly Clintonian distinction that he never uttered the words "Valerie Plame," referring to her instead as Wilson's wife. Both McClellan and Bush himself have made broad statements about the moral impropriety of leaking such information--and the consequences that would befall any officials caught doing so. "If anyone in this administration was involved in it," McClellan said in 2003, "they would no longer be in this administration."
Or maybe they would. When conservatives make mistakes, they don't admit them. They blame the liberal media conspiracy. And the right has been trying to defuse the Plame controversy that way for a while now. Even before this latest revelation, Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, had called the episode an "absurd media feeding frenzy about a non-crime that journalists relentlessly hyped to hurt the Bush administration." The meme continued this week when, on msnbc's "Hardball," New York Post Washington bureau chief Deborah Orin attacked the media for focusing on Rove instead of Wilson's (alleged) misstatements. On Fox News, Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes made the same argument, suggesting that Rove was under scrutiny only because "three-fourths of the press and 100 percent of the Democrats are out to get him."
That last charge, which we hear every time Republicans get into ethical trouble, is particularly ironic given the sagas of two reporters ensnared in this controversy: Cooper and Judith Miller. Cooper looks like a poster boy for liberal media bias. He's a graduate of the Ivy League (Columbia University). He worked at two left-of-center opinion magazines (The New Republic and The Washington Monthly). He's even married to a former Clinton White House operative (Mandy Grunwald). Yet, when faced with the option of revealing his source--thereby embarrassing the White House--or going to jail, Cooper held fast and prepared for imprisonment. He did agree to testify about his conversation with Rove at the very last minute. But, according to news accounts, it was only after Time, over Cooper's own objections, relinquished e-mails that effectively outed Rove anyway and after Rove's lawyer reminded reporters that Rove had issued a blanket waiver to all reporters involved in the inquiry. Those are hardly the actions of somebody on a crusade to get the White House.
Miller's journalism pedigree, which includes work for The Progressive and National Public Radio, tilts even more to the left than Cooper's. And, of course, she now writes for the institution conservative media critics revile most of all: The New York Times. Yet she is infamous for her credulous reporting hyping the Saddam threat. (Not long before the Bush administration got into trouble for paying reporters to pass along its propaganda breathlessly, Miller was basically doing it for free.) That doesn't fit the media conspiracy theories. Nor does the behavior of her supposedly anti-Bush editors at the Times, who (unlike Cooper's superiors) refused to relinquish Miller's notes, defending her pledge of confidentiality all the way to the jail cell she now occupies.
And look who else was standing behind Cooper and Miller as imprisonment loomed: liberal opinion writers at places like The Washington Post. While some of these writers did so out of personal loyalty to Cooper or Miller, they were also putting professionalism over partisanship. They hardly suggested letting Rove off the hook, but they promoted their journalistic principles even though it meant protecting him.
So where's the liberal media conspiracy? Oh, right, back in the press briefing room, where reporters were pummeling poor Scott McClellan. But when even Fox's correspondent gets on the bandwagon, maybe it's a sign of what's really driving this story: not a partisan or temperamental crusade to bring down the president, but a recognition that administration officials committed sleazy, possibly illegal, acts for which they should finally be held accountable.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050725&s=cohn072505
QUOTE(DWB04 @ Jul 15 2005, 02:35 PM)
I'm going to post the TPM analysis of the Pincus article 7/6/2005...comments below are also interesting.....
Pincus: Wilson "discredited" in 2002
By p lukasiak
ALthough most of us have been following the Cooper revelations with regard to Karl Rove, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post has also spilled some beans. And the beans he spilled strongly suggest that the effort to discredit Wilson via his wife was not the result of Wilson's disclosing his trip in a NY Times column, but was being done in 2002 in order to discredit his reporting, and "fix the facts and intelligence" around the policy.
Jul 10, 2005 -- 09:59:28 AM EST
Here is the key quote from the Pincus piece in Niemanwatch...
On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.
In other words, the White House was not merely aware of Wilson's trip and its findings, someone had gone to the trouble to find out how the trip had originated, and then lied about Plame' s involvement in order to discredit his findings. (Plame did not "set up" the trip, as Pincus was told, nor did she "authorize" it, as Rove told Cooper. )
(Pincus's disclosure pretty much puts to rest the speculation that Miller's conversation with Rove was where he first found out about Plame.)
Fitzgerald may be going after whoever told "the White House" that Plame was responsible for the trip --- and really going after the whole effort to "fix the facts and intelligence" in the run-up to the Iraq war. The real questions may now be
Why did someone investigate the detailed circumstances behind the Wilson trip and who did the investigation?
Who is responsible for lying about Plames involvement in order to discredit Wilson's report within the White House (and, one assumes, make it possible for Colin Powell to ignore Wilson's findings as well?)
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/10/95928/2698
In addition: it may be nothing but in the Pincus article he clarifies that he is using the pronoun HE for convenience sake........could that imply his source in the admin was a female? Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Condi?........just a thought
Pincus: Wilson "discredited" in 2002
By p lukasiak
ALthough most of us have been following the Cooper revelations with regard to Karl Rove, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post has also spilled some beans. And the beans he spilled strongly suggest that the effort to discredit Wilson via his wife was not the result of Wilson's disclosing his trip in a NY Times column, but was being done in 2002 in order to discredit his reporting, and "fix the facts and intelligence" around the policy.
Jul 10, 2005 -- 09:59:28 AM EST
Here is the key quote from the Pincus piece in Niemanwatch...
On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.
In other words, the White House was not merely aware of Wilson's trip and its findings, someone had gone to the trouble to find out how the trip had originated, and then lied about Plame' s involvement in order to discredit his findings. (Plame did not "set up" the trip, as Pincus was told, nor did she "authorize" it, as Rove told Cooper. )
(Pincus's disclosure pretty much puts to rest the speculation that Miller's conversation with Rove was where he first found out about Plame.)
Fitzgerald may be going after whoever told "the White House" that Plame was responsible for the trip --- and really going after the whole effort to "fix the facts and intelligence" in the run-up to the Iraq war. The real questions may now be
Why did someone investigate the detailed circumstances behind the Wilson trip and who did the investigation?
Who is responsible for lying about Plames involvement in order to discredit Wilson's report within the White House (and, one assumes, make it possible for Colin Powell to ignore Wilson's findings as well?)
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/10/95928/2698
In addition: it may be nothing but in the Pincus article he clarifies that he is using the pronoun HE for convenience sake........could that imply his source in the admin was a female? Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Condi?........just a thought
Something stinks around here...
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001601.htm
QUOTE
Frank, Conyers Inquire Into Impeachment of 'Senior White House Officials'
Letter Sent to 'Neutral Legal Authority' at Library of Congress for Clarification of Constitutional Impeachment Clause
Congressmen Express Belief that Clause 'Clearly Applies to High-Ranking Officials'
The BRAD BLOG has learned that Congressmen John Conyers (D-MI) and Barney Frank (D-MA) have inquired with officials at the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service this afternoon into whether impeachment proceedings would be appropriate for Senior White House Officials.
The release of a letter by the two congressmen was accompanied by a press release from the office of the ranking minority House Judiciary Committee member, John Conyers. In the letter, the two seek clarification from "a neutral authority" of whether the U.S. Constitution's Article II, regarding impeachment of a sitting President and Vice-President and "all civil officers", would apply to Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove who is currently embroiled in the on-going criminal investigation into who leaked classified information concerning the outting of covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame.
Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution speaks to impeachment, but is not completely clear about which "civil officers" would fall under its jurisdiction.
The letter from Frank and Conyers attempts to seek clarification of the term "civil officers of the United States" and whether the clause would be applicable to Rove as a "high-ranking official in the White House and Executive Branch," according to their news release.
Here is the letter sent today, followed by the Press Release issued by both Conyers and Frank.
The following news release from Conyers and Frank was released at the same time as the above letter to officials at the Library of Congress.
Letter Sent to 'Neutral Legal Authority' at Library of Congress for Clarification of Constitutional Impeachment Clause
Congressmen Express Belief that Clause 'Clearly Applies to High-Ranking Officials'
The BRAD BLOG has learned that Congressmen John Conyers (D-MI) and Barney Frank (D-MA) have inquired with officials at the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service this afternoon into whether impeachment proceedings would be appropriate for Senior White House Officials.
The release of a letter by the two congressmen was accompanied by a press release from the office of the ranking minority House Judiciary Committee member, John Conyers. In the letter, the two seek clarification from "a neutral authority" of whether the U.S. Constitution's Article II, regarding impeachment of a sitting President and Vice-President and "all civil officers", would apply to Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove who is currently embroiled in the on-going criminal investigation into who leaked classified information concerning the outting of covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame.
Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution speaks to impeachment, but is not completely clear about which "civil officers" would fall under its jurisdiction.
QUOTE
Art II, Sec. 4: "The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors"
The letter from Frank and Conyers attempts to seek clarification of the term "civil officers of the United States" and whether the clause would be applicable to Rove as a "high-ranking official in the White House and Executive Branch," according to their news release.
Here is the letter sent today, followed by the Press Release issued by both Conyers and Frank.
QUOTE
July 14, 2005
Ms. Elizabeth Bazan
Mr. Charles Doyle
American Law Division
Congressional Research Service
The Library of Congress
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, D.C. 20540
Dear Ms. Bazan and Mr. Doyle,
We write to request your opinion as to whether or not very high- ranking members of the President's staff are subject to the Congressional impeachment process. The Constitution in its discussion of impeachment does not spell out with any specificity which federal officials are impeachable. We believe that the rationale for impeachment clearly applies to high-ranking officials who wield presidential authority in many cases with even more impact than some cabinet officers. And we do not see any Constitutional language that would exclude such officials from the impeachment process. But because this appears to be a question of first impression, and because of the grave importance of this matter, we write to ask your opinion as to whether or not it is Constitutionally permissible to initiate impeachment proceedings against the President's Deputy Chief of Staff, or other similarly highly placed officials.
Rep. Barney Frank
Rep. John Conyers
Ms. Elizabeth Bazan
Mr. Charles Doyle
American Law Division
Congressional Research Service
The Library of Congress
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, D.C. 20540
Dear Ms. Bazan and Mr. Doyle,
We write to request your opinion as to whether or not very high- ranking members of the President's staff are subject to the Congressional impeachment process. The Constitution in its discussion of impeachment does not spell out with any specificity which federal officials are impeachable. We believe that the rationale for impeachment clearly applies to high-ranking officials who wield presidential authority in many cases with even more impact than some cabinet officers. And we do not see any Constitutional language that would exclude such officials from the impeachment process. But because this appears to be a question of first impression, and because of the grave importance of this matter, we write to ask your opinion as to whether or not it is Constitutionally permissible to initiate impeachment proceedings against the President's Deputy Chief of Staff, or other similarly highly placed officials.
Rep. Barney Frank
Rep. John Conyers
The following news release from Conyers and Frank was released at the same time as the above letter to officials at the Library of Congress.
QUOTE
Congress of the United States
Washington, DC
For Immediate Release
Friday, July 15, 2005
REPS. CONYERS AND FRANK ASK WHETHER SENIOR WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS CAN BE IMPEACHED BY THE HOUSE
Letter to Library of Congress seeks clarification of who in the government can be impeached by Congress
Washington, DC-House Judiciary Committee Ranking Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) and House Financial Services Ranking Democratic Member Barney Frank (D-MA) today asked the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress whether it is Constitutionally permissible to begin impeachment proceedings against high-ranking federal officials. This would include members of the President's staff such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.
"We write to request your opinion as to whether high-ranking members of the President's staff are subject to the Congressional impeachment process. The Constitution in its discussion of impeachment does not spell out with any specificity which federal officials are impeachable. We believe that the rationale for impeachment clearly applies to high-ranking officials who wield presidential authority in many cases with even more impact than some cabinet officers," Frank and Conyers write in their letter.
"We share the grave concern felt by many Americans about the revelation that the President's Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Political Advisor, Karl Rove, improperly identified a CIA undercover operative to journalists as part of a campaign to discredit her husband, who is a critic of some aspects of administration policy," said Mr. Frank.
Mr. Conyers continued: "Mr. Rove continues to occupy this high position, which means that he continues to have access to the full range of the most secret information available to the federal government, with apparently no compunctions about misusing that information for political purposes. We believe that the impeachment power of Congress is in fact intended to cover precisely this sort of situation - that is, a high-ranking official who has not only abused his power, but appears ready to continue such abuse in the future, and subject to no apparent effective check within the executive branch itself."
Historically, impeachments have been launched against presidents and other officials who have been confirmed by the Senate. However, Conyers and Frank noted the language of the constitution--Art. II, Sec. 4: The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors-does not explicitly impost such a requirement. The question Frank and Conyers are asking is what constitutes "civil officers" and does it include high-ranking officials in the White House and Executive Branch.
Given the importance of this issue, the grave abuse of power and unethical manner in which Mr. Rove has been engaged, impeachment may well be an appropriate response. This issue could be relevant in cases where there may be some uncertainty about the willingness of the Executive Branch, in which the criminal prosecution power lies, fully to use that power against someone so close to the President.
"We have asked a neutral legal authority whose function it is to advise Congress to give us the best judgment of its experts on this question, and we will speak with our colleagues about proceeding accordingly after we have received this advice," concluded Frank.
Washington, DC
For Immediate Release
Friday, July 15, 2005
REPS. CONYERS AND FRANK ASK WHETHER SENIOR WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS CAN BE IMPEACHED BY THE HOUSE
Letter to Library of Congress seeks clarification of who in the government can be impeached by Congress
Washington, DC-House Judiciary Committee Ranking Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) and House Financial Services Ranking Democratic Member Barney Frank (D-MA) today asked the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress whether it is Constitutionally permissible to begin impeachment proceedings against high-ranking federal officials. This would include members of the President's staff such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.
"We write to request your opinion as to whether high-ranking members of the President's staff are subject to the Congressional impeachment process. The Constitution in its discussion of impeachment does not spell out with any specificity which federal officials are impeachable. We believe that the rationale for impeachment clearly applies to high-ranking officials who wield presidential authority in many cases with even more impact than some cabinet officers," Frank and Conyers write in their letter.
"We share the grave concern felt by many Americans about the revelation that the President's Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Political Advisor, Karl Rove, improperly identified a CIA undercover operative to journalists as part of a campaign to discredit her husband, who is a critic of some aspects of administration policy," said Mr. Frank.
Mr. Conyers continued: "Mr. Rove continues to occupy this high position, which means that he continues to have access to the full range of the most secret information available to the federal government, with apparently no compunctions about misusing that information for political purposes. We believe that the impeachment power of Congress is in fact intended to cover precisely this sort of situation - that is, a high-ranking official who has not only abused his power, but appears ready to continue such abuse in the future, and subject to no apparent effective check within the executive branch itself."
Historically, impeachments have been launched against presidents and other officials who have been confirmed by the Senate. However, Conyers and Frank noted the language of the constitution--Art. II, Sec. 4: The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors-does not explicitly impost such a requirement. The question Frank and Conyers are asking is what constitutes "civil officers" and does it include high-ranking officials in the White House and Executive Branch.
Given the importance of this issue, the grave abuse of power and unethical manner in which Mr. Rove has been engaged, impeachment may well be an appropriate response. This issue could be relevant in cases where there may be some uncertainty about the willingness of the Executive Branch, in which the criminal prosecution power lies, fully to use that power against someone so close to the President.
"We have asked a neutral legal authority whose function it is to advise Congress to give us the best judgment of its experts on this question, and we will speak with our colleagues about proceeding accordingly after we have received this advice," concluded Frank.
"No comment" is not how you protect your most trusted aide.
"No comment" is what targets of investigations say.
"No comment" is what friends who feel betrayed say.
"No comment" is what you say when you had to sacrificed your bishop for nothing.
They are saying "no comment" because they are not protecting him. They are letting him orchestrate his own protection through the RNC. If there is no indictment, it will work, because then it's the usual politics. Sad but true. If there is an indictment, then it is a whole new ball, er, chess game.
"No comment" is what targets of investigations say.
"No comment" is what friends who feel betrayed say.
"No comment" is what you say when you had to sacrificed your bishop for nothing.
They are saying "no comment" because they are not protecting him. They are letting him orchestrate his own protection through the RNC. If there is no indictment, it will work, because then it's the usual politics. Sad but true. If there is an indictment, then it is a whole new ball, er, chess game.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Jul 15 2005, 12:27 PM)
PP ---
White Queen to Black King Four Check...
White Queen to Black King Four Check...
Can Rove be impeached?
the non-binding opinion of Supreme Court Justice Story,
"All officers of the United States, therefore, who hold their appointments under the national government, whether their duties are executive or judicial, in the highest or in the lowest departments of the government, with the exception of officers in the army and navy, are properly civil officers within the meaning of the constitution, and liable to impeachment."
the non-binding opinion of Supreme Court Justice Story,
"All officers of the United States, therefore, who hold their appointments under the national government, whether their duties are executive or judicial, in the highest or in the lowest departments of the government, with the exception of officers in the army and navy, are properly civil officers within the meaning of the constitution, and liable to impeachment."
I love Henry Waxman. He says that Bush's own executive orders require that he take action against Rove. Now it is about the President!
Karl Rove’s Nondisclosure Agreement
By: Rep. Waxman
Published: July 15, 2005 at 11:30
Email this article
Printer friendly page
Comment on this article
A fact sheet released today by Rep. Waxman explains that the nondisclosure agreement signed by Karl Rove prohibited Mr. Rove from confirming the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Wilson to reporters. Under the nondisclosure agreement and the applicable executive order, even "negligent" disclosures to reporters are grounds for revocation of a security clearance or dismissal.
Karl Rove's Nondisclosure Agreement
Today, news reports revealed that Karl Rove, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and the President's top political advisor, confirmed the identity of covert CIA official Valerie Plame Wilson with Robert Novak on July 8, 2003, six days before Mr. Novak published the information in a nationally syndicated column. These new disclosures have obvious relevance to the criminal investigation of Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Counsel who is investigating whether Mr. Rove violated a criminal statute by revealing Ms. Wilson's identity as a covert CIA official.
Independent of the relevance these new disclosures have to Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation, they also have significant implications for: (1) whether Mr. Rove violated his obligations under his "Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement" and (2) whether the White House violated its obligations under Executive Order 12958. Under the nondisclosure agreement and the executive order, Mr. Rove would be subject to the loss of his security clearance or dismissal even for "negligently" disclosing Ms. Wilson's identity.
KARL ROVE'S NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT
Executive Order 12958 governs how federal employees are awarded security clearances in order to obtain access to classified information. It was last updated by President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003, although it has existed in some form since the Truman era. The executive order applies to any entity within the executive branch that comes into possession of classified information, including the White House. It requires employees to undergo a criminal background check, obtain training on how to protect classified information, and sign a "Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement," also known as a SF-312, promising not to reveal classified information.1 The nondisclosure agreement signed by White House officials such as Mr. Rove states: "I will never divulge classified information to anyone" who is not authorized to receive it.2
THE PROHIBITION AGAINST "CONFIRMING" CLASSIFIED INFORMATION
Mr. Rove, through his attorney, has raised the implication that there is a distinction between releasing classified information to someone not authorized to receive it and confirming classified information from someone not authorized to have it. In fact, there is no such distinction under the nondisclosure agreement Mr. Rove signed.
One of the most basic rules of safeguarding classified information is that an official who has signed a nondisclosure agreement cannot confirm classified information obtained by a reporter. In fact, this obligation is highlighted in the "briefing booklet" that new security clearance recipients receive when they sign their nondisclosure agreements:
Before … confirming the accuracy of what appears in the public source, the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified. If it has not, … confirmation of its accuracy is also an unauthorized disclosure.3
THE INDEPENDENT DUTY TO VERIFY THE CLASSIFIED STATUS OF INFORMATION
Mr. Rove's attorney has implied that if Mr. Rove learned Ms. Wilson's identity and occupation from a reporter, this somehow makes a difference in what he can say about the information. This is inaccurate. The executive order states: "Classified information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information."4
Mr. Rove was not at liberty to repeat classified information he may have learned from a reporter. Instead, he had an affirmative obligation to determine whether the information had been
Karl Rove’s Nondisclosure Agreement
By: Rep. Waxman
Published: July 15, 2005 at 11:30
Email this article
Printer friendly page
Comment on this article
A fact sheet released today by Rep. Waxman explains that the nondisclosure agreement signed by Karl Rove prohibited Mr. Rove from confirming the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Wilson to reporters. Under the nondisclosure agreement and the applicable executive order, even "negligent" disclosures to reporters are grounds for revocation of a security clearance or dismissal.
Karl Rove's Nondisclosure Agreement
Today, news reports revealed that Karl Rove, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and the President's top political advisor, confirmed the identity of covert CIA official Valerie Plame Wilson with Robert Novak on July 8, 2003, six days before Mr. Novak published the information in a nationally syndicated column. These new disclosures have obvious relevance to the criminal investigation of Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Counsel who is investigating whether Mr. Rove violated a criminal statute by revealing Ms. Wilson's identity as a covert CIA official.
Independent of the relevance these new disclosures have to Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation, they also have significant implications for: (1) whether Mr. Rove violated his obligations under his "Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement" and (2) whether the White House violated its obligations under Executive Order 12958. Under the nondisclosure agreement and the executive order, Mr. Rove would be subject to the loss of his security clearance or dismissal even for "negligently" disclosing Ms. Wilson's identity.
KARL ROVE'S NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT
Executive Order 12958 governs how federal employees are awarded security clearances in order to obtain access to classified information. It was last updated by President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003, although it has existed in some form since the Truman era. The executive order applies to any entity within the executive branch that comes into possession of classified information, including the White House. It requires employees to undergo a criminal background check, obtain training on how to protect classified information, and sign a "Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement," also known as a SF-312, promising not to reveal classified information.1 The nondisclosure agreement signed by White House officials such as Mr. Rove states: "I will never divulge classified information to anyone" who is not authorized to receive it.2
THE PROHIBITION AGAINST "CONFIRMING" CLASSIFIED INFORMATION
Mr. Rove, through his attorney, has raised the implication that there is a distinction between releasing classified information to someone not authorized to receive it and confirming classified information from someone not authorized to have it. In fact, there is no such distinction under the nondisclosure agreement Mr. Rove signed.
One of the most basic rules of safeguarding classified information is that an official who has signed a nondisclosure agreement cannot confirm classified information obtained by a reporter. In fact, this obligation is highlighted in the "briefing booklet" that new security clearance recipients receive when they sign their nondisclosure agreements:
Before … confirming the accuracy of what appears in the public source, the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified. If it has not, … confirmation of its accuracy is also an unauthorized disclosure.3
THE INDEPENDENT DUTY TO VERIFY THE CLASSIFIED STATUS OF INFORMATION
Mr. Rove's attorney has implied that if Mr. Rove learned Ms. Wilson's identity and occupation from a reporter, this somehow makes a difference in what he can say about the information. This is inaccurate. The executive order states: "Classified information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information."4
Mr. Rove was not at liberty to repeat classified information he may have learned from a reporter. Instead, he had an affirmative obligation to determine whether the information had been