Hugh Hewitt talk show interview.
Mickey Kaus explains the Bob Woodward angle in the Plame affair.
HH: Joined now by Mickey Kaus, he of Slate and Kausfiles.com, one of the country's preeminent authorities on the mess known at Plamegate. Mickey, what was your reaction when you heard Bob Woodward's admission today?
MK: My reaction was this has so many ramifications, I can't possibly track them all down.
HH: Let's start, though, with the fact that he kept this from his editor. What do you, as a longtime Washington journalist, think about that?
MK: That doesn't bother me at all. It's the same charge that was made against Judith Miller, and I thought it was bogus with respect to her. I don't tell my editor everything. And if you want to keep it secret, you make a practice of not telling people, even people you trust. Why worry that they'll somehow accidentally leak it?
HH: Even when people are going to the grand jury, and being accused of committing crimes, and this investigation is far-ranging, and you know for a fact that a month before Bob's column came out, you already knew? Doesn't that endanger people of wrongful prosecution, Mickey Kaus?
MK: I don't think it was endangered. I mean, it would have been a crime for Scooter Libby or anybody to disclose Plame's status, even if Woodward already knew. Woodward hadn't published it. He was a dead end.
HH: Okay.
MK: So Fitzgerald's investigating crimes. So presumably we find out the truth, and indict people. And if somebody's wrongfully indicted, then you can step in.
HH: Well, that's what somebody did at this point. They consider this leak to be so significant. Who do you think talked to Woodward?
MK: Powell. That's who I think, if I had to bet.
HH: Oh, that's interesting.
MK: I mean, he's buddies with Powell. He's apparently hinted that it was an ex-official.
HH: Yes, he did.
MK: And Powell is the logical ex-official. Other speculation focuses on Cheney, just because he's the bogeyman of the hour. And also Bush himself. The only evidence of Bush himself would be that there was...remember there was that mysterious meeting between Fitzgerald and Bush's lawyer right before the indictment. You know, why was that going on? One explanation might be that they were talking about this.
HH: Now tell me a little bit more about the significance for the Rove, get Rove movement. This blows that up, doesn't it?
MK: The get Rove movement was sort of running out of steam anyway. The charges against Rove are focused entirely, as far as I can see, on perjury. Keep in mind the basic thing is disclosing this woman's identity does not appear to have been a crime, because there was a source for the Novak article that eventually made public her name. Fitzgerald knows who that source was. We don't know who the source was, but we know it wasn't Rove or Libby. And Fitzgerald has not indicted that person, so obviously, he feels that just merely leaking the name to a reporter was not a crime. So they're focusing on perjury, and did the people try to cover up this non-crime.
HH: Now Mickey Kaus, step back for a second. We are now way into the deep grass, and people are listening on the radio, and they're saying what is this all about.
MK: There's a lot more grass to go.
HH: I know, but what is it all about? It's not Watergate.
MK: It's all about that in the course of discrediting, quite understandably discrediting an administration critic, it came out that the critic's wife worked for the CIA, and it turns out that she was a semi-undercover agent. So all the CIA people are rightly annoyed that this leak occurred. The left has accused the Bush administration of maliciously leaking her name to punish the critic. And there is a law against leaking the names of covert CIA agents. And so, a special prosecutor was called in to see if anybody in the administration violated the law by leaking her name.
HH: And that's all blown to sky high at this point.
MK: Not blown sky high, but it's been pretty much discredited. Certainly the idea that they maliciously outed her, in order to punish Wilson, doesn't seem to be true. And it does seem to be true that they were treating the information very gingerly, and yet Libby decided to go ahead and leak it to Judith Miller. So, he had some consciousness that it wasn't just like harmless information.
HH: But it was out there in the ether. I mean, it was out there for thirty days, and if Woodward, who else? Now let me ask you, if Powell is a possible, does that tell us something about why Larry Wilkinson, his former chief of staff, has been out blasting at the cabal in the White House?
MK: Explain that to me. I mean, a preemptive offensive?
HH: Yes, yes. Going out there and just throwing more dust in the air, and talking about the cabal in the White House, and trying to get a thousand knives unsheathed in ten different directions.
MK: There's so many other explanations for that. This was time for the realists to come out of the woodwork and trash the Iraq war. That's why we had Brent Scowcroft come out in the New Yorker and trash the war. And you know, if you're somewhat cowardly, you would wait until the war was unpopular before you trashed it definitively. So now Scowcroft, to his credit, did write an op-ed before the war started. So he's much less pusillanimous than...
HH: Yes, he's been against it...he's been a realist since 1991. Now Woodward is quoted today by Howard Kurtz. Have you read the Howard Kurtz piece yet?
MK: I haven't, no.
HH: Let me tell you what he told Howard. "I hunkered down. I'm in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn't want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed." You know, that could be a direct quote from Richard Nixon in 1974. It's Woodward is Nixon. And now, Rather and Woodward have both become their prey from thirty years ago. It's just odd.
MK: Well, yeah, except I would do the same thing. And I would venture to say that you would, too. The problem with Nixon is that if you listen to the tapes, he was running an incredibly corrupt, sleazy administration. Woodward isn't doing that.
HH: Well, I don't know. I have to disagree with you about that. You know, I let you off the first time, but let's come back around. Woodward is sitting there aware that Bob Novak is not the source for this, that someone else has put that out there. And he lets Fitzgerald go down...
MK: By Bob Novak, you mean Libby?
HH: Novak's column comes out, and it starts this witch hunt for who leaked to Novak...
MK: Right.
HH: But Woodward knew thirty days before Novak printed his column from a source other than Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, and he sat there and did nothing. I think that's profoundly indifferent to justice.
MK: It is, if Woodward knows that...maybe if Woodward knows that his source is also Novak's source. But I think that Woodward doesn't know that. I don't think Woodward knows who Novak's source is. I think somebody told him something and he didn't do anything with it. And it doesn't affect the prosecution one way or the other.
HH: Oh, but it has to affect the prosecution, otherwise Fitzgerald would not have talked to him today, or on Monday. It has to matter a great deal, or why put him under oath and take his deposition?
MK: I don't know. I have a little bit of evidence that it's relevant to the case, Hugh. And I'm not shouting...I haven't put it on my blog that I have this evidence.
HH: Uh-oh. Let's call Fitzgerald...
MK: Hey, prosecutor. Subpoena me.
HH: I think we should. I think we should get word to him and the transcript of this conversation.
MK: I mean, that's a ten thousand dollar lawyer bill right off the...
HH: Well, that is true, but would you let someone go to jail, or get tried. I mean, it's ruined Libby already.
MK: That would explain why Woodward has been so against the prosecution.
HH: Yes.
MK: And he has had some residual guilt that he let it go forward, so he was trying to speak out against it.
HH: But he wasn't telling the truth as he spoke out, because he wasn't revealing his motive. I mean, I think it deeply tarnishes him.
MK: I think he had both motives. I think he genuinely thinks it's a misguided prosecution, as I assume you do also.
HH: Yes, yes. I think it's...
MK: So why can't he go on national television and say that?
HH: Because he could have ended it. He could have put a knife in it a long time ago. Mickey Kaus, I will read your analysis at Kausfiles.com later tonight. Thank you, Mickey. |
