An Innocent Man
Best of the Web Today
Wall Street Journal
BY JAMES TARANTO
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 at Best of the Web Today, facts do matter, so let's look at the latest to emerge on the Plame kerfuffle:
The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press all report that, as the AP puts it,
Rove "originally learned about the operative [Plame] from
the news media and not government sources, according to a
person briefed on the testimony," apparently a lawyer
friendly to the White House.
According to the Times account, Rove was the second source for Bob Novak's column identifying Plame's role in arranging Wilson's trip to Niger:
According to the Times account, Rove was the second source for Bob Novak's column identifying Plame's role in arranging Wilson's trip to Niger:
Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the
columnist the name of the C.I.A. officer, who was referred
to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances
in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV,
traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales
to Iraq, the person said.
After hearing Mr. Novak's account, the person who has been
briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist:
"I heard that, too." . . .
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."
That second source was Mr. Rove, the person briefed on
the matter said.
If this account is accurate, then Rove simply confirmed a fact that was already in circulation. He no more "outed" Plame than Wilson did when he peddled his "outing" allegation to various left-wing journalists after Novak's column ran.
Meanwhile, the Washington Times quotes an erstwhile colleague of Plame's who casts further doubt on the Democratic narrative:
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early
in her career yesterday took issue with her identification
as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more
than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and
that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was
a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency
employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a
covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends
knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover
staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store
here. . . . The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency
under "nonofficial cover"--also known as a NOC, the same
status as the wife of Mr. Wilson--also said that she worked
under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since
1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married
Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
In an interview with CNN yesterday, Wilson acknowledged,
"My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob
Novak blew her identity,"
though he refused to say anything about her career before that day.
As we noted yesterday, though, the source for that USA Today report was none other than Wilson himself, in his book, which apparently no one bothered to read until now.
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