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"He's a Democrat" With those three words revealed, Karl Roves naked partisanship is now a m atter of fact. Other Republicans should be ashamed of him -- and themsel ves.
Email Article White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Mat thew Cooper during Roves first interview with the FBI, according to lega l sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter. The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame's name to c olumnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial inform ation from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sourc es said. Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove's accounts was the claim tha t although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalis t, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sourc es said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has said that Rove never knew that Plame was a covert officer when he discussed her CIA employment with reporters , and that he only first learned of her clandestine status when he read about it in the newspaper. Luskin did not return a telephone call today seeking comment for this story. If recently disclosed press accounts of conversations that Rove had with reporters are correct, Novak and Rove first spoke about Plame on July 8, 2003. It was three days later, on July 11, that Rove also spoke about P lame to Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper. Three days after tha t, on July 14, Novak's column appeared in which he identified Plame as a n "agency operative." According to Novak's account, it was he, not Rove, who first broached the issue of Plame's employment with the CIA, and th at Rove at most simply said that he, too, had heard much the same inform ation. Novak's column came during a period of time when senior White House offic ials were attempting to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Jos eph Wilson, who was then asserting that the Bush administration had reli ed on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq. Wi lson had only recently led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investiga te claims that Saddam Hussein was covertly attempting to buy enriched ur anium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back that the claims were most likely the result of a hoax. But Preside nt Bush had still cited them during a State of the Union address as evid ence that Hussein had an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass d estruction. In the column, Novak called Plame an "agency operative," thus identifying her as a covert CIA agent. But Novak has since claimed that his use of the phrase "agency operative" was a formulation of his own, and that he did not know, or mean to tell his readers, that she had a covert status with the agency. Rove, too, has told federal investigators he did not know that Plame had a covert status with the CIA when he spoke with Novak, and Cooper, about Plame. The distinction as to whether Rove specifically knew Plames status has be en central to the investigation of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; und er the law, a government official can only be prosecuted if he or she kn ew of a person's covert status and "that the information disclosed so id entifies such covert agent." But investigators were also skeptical of Novak's claim that his use of th e term "operative" was a journalistic miscue because it appeared to prov ide legal protection for whoever his source or sources were. And althoug h Novak's and Rove's accounts of their conversations regarding Plame wer e largely consistent, they appeared to be self-serving. It has been, in large part, for all of these reasons that Fitzgerald so z ealously sought the testimony of reporters Cooper and Judith Miller of T he New York Times, according to sources sympathetic to Fitzgerald. Coope r testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury last week, after earlier having b een found in civil contempt for refusing to do so. In contrast, Miller h as refused to testify, and is currently serving a sentence in an Alexand ria, Virginia, jail. Finally, also driving Fitzgerald's investigation has been Rove's assertio ns that he only found out about Plame's status with the CIA from a journ alist -- and one whose name he does not recall. But as The New York Time s first disclosed on July 16, senior Bush administration officials first learned that Plame worked for the CIA from a classified briefing paper on July 7, 2003, exactly a week before Novak's column naming Plame appea red and at the time that senior Bush administration officials were devis ing a strategy to discredit Wilson. The classified memorandum, dated June 10, 2003, was written by Marc Gross man, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs, and reporte dly made claims similar to those made by Wilson: that the Bush administr ation had relied on faulty intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed b y Hussein to make the case to go to war with Iraq. The report was circul ated to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and a slew of other senior administration officials who were then traveling with President Bush to Africa. Fitzgerald has focused on whether Rove might have learned of Plame's iden tity from one of the many senior White House officials who read the memo , according to the Times account and attorneys whose clients have testif ied before the federal grand jury.
Preferred Citation: Murra y Waas, "An Unlikely Story", The American Prospect Online, Jul 19, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compens ation of any kind without prior written permission from the author.
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