Both the Washington Post and the New York Times today have sources telling them
that Karl Rove was indeed one of the sources Robert Novak talked to for his
column outing a CIA NOC agent. From the WaPo version:
"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 operative, Valerie Plame, is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former
ambassador who had publicly disputed the White House's contention that Saddam
Hussein had sought to buy uranium from Niger for possible use in a nuclear
weapon.
"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.
"Rove has said he does not recall who the journalist was who first told him that
Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, or when the conversation occurred, the lawyer
said."
- - - -
But there's a whole bunch of other information tucked into that. First off,
when two competing papers get the same highly specific story on the same day,
that's not an accident. The story was shopped to them both.
Second, the story was shopped by "a lawyer" who had "knowledge" of Rove's
testimony to prosecutors.
Third, this particular story is the only chain of events which even has the
slightest possibility of keeping Karl Rove out of prison. (And even then, it's
touch and go, given Novak's own, shall we say, inconsistencies in describing
how and when he got the information.)
So I'll give you three guesses which "lawyer" shopped this info out, and the
first two guesses don't count. Here's a hint: it's also someone who, when
defending the innocence of a money laundering suspect, accepted payment in the
form of gold bars and transfers from a Swiss bank account.
This is part of a concerted effort to walk the Rove defense back to arguing
over the narrowest part of the case -- whether or not the special counsel can
prove a felony on the part of Rove himself, and presuming for the moment that
he can't, painting Rove's known involvement with the Plame case as some sort of
heroism instead of the petty, flatulent thuggery Rove is famous for. We're
supposed to believe that outing undercover agents is now the heroic move to
take, if someone close to them writes an op-ed in a newspaper that the White
House doesn't like.
Given the brutally uncomfortable recent revelations that a politicized leak on
the part of the U.S. government, describing a then-ongoing classified
intelligence effort -- coinciding with the Democratic National Convention, no
less -- managed to blow that intelligence effort and in all likelihood led to
the escape of some of those that just successfully carried out the terrorist
attack in London, I don't think "heroic" is quite the right word for sabotaging
undercover CIA networks working against WMD proliferation. I think treasonous
sounds a lot closer to the mark.
Setting all that aside, here's where we're at. We now know Karl Rove was one of
the sources in Novak's column. We know he talked to Novak on the 8th, two days
after Wilson's op-ed appeared that rocked the White House and caused them to
admit, on the 7th, that the uranium claims the President cited in his case for
war, were false.
Nevertheless, for the last two years the White House claimed repeatedly that
Karl Rove, by name, was not involved with the case. We know know that to be
patently untrue.
So the question remains. There remain only two possibilities: either the
President of the United States knew about Rove's involvement with the Plame
case, and lied to the country, or Karl Rove lied to the President about his
involvement.
The President must respond to these events. This isn't about the criminal
investigation. This is about Karl Rove's already known involvement -- and the
White House having lied about it for two years.
http://feeds.dailykos.com/dailykos/index.xml?m=108
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