Zonkie, I wasn't totally surprised - there was a fair bit of speculation of Cheney staff involvement back in October, and Scooter Libby was identified as a suspect.
All this time I had thought Ari Fleischer was the leak. If it came from the VP the question now is will they be able to convince someone to take the fall for him
My recollection is that speculation about Scooter Libby started in early Oct 2003. Justin Raimondo reveals that the story first came from MSNBC:
Cheney Chief-of-Staff Named as Spy-gate Leaker
by Justin Raimondo
October 2, 2003
MSNBC'S Buchanan & Press scored a major scoop on Wednesday, all but unmasking the high government official who "outed" a CIA operative via a July 14 column by Robert Novak. Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who worked with Valerie Plame, the reported agent, all but identified "Scooter" Libby as the government official who outed her – and at least one other in the Vice President's office.
Jim Lobe wrote about it a few weeks later:
Most of the speculation is focused on Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful chief of staff and national security adviser.
...
Wilson ... published an article in the New York Times in early July in which he charged that the White House must have known that those reports were unfounded and fraudulent when Bush cited them in his State of the Union Address last January as evidence that Hussein was building a nuclear weapon. It is widely known that Cheney and Libby, both superhawks on Iraq, displayed a special interest in those reports.
Within a week of the publication of that article, the calls to Novak and the other reporters about Plame's identity and relationship with Wilson were made.
antiwar.com
I'm not aware of any recent rumours that mention Rove being investigated, and all the speculation is around Cheney's guys. I do know that Wilson said that he thought Rove was behind it but then he later backed down on that claim. I think that he was speculating based on the fact that the decision to out him had such major potential political implications, that Rove, being the top political guy, would had been consulted on it. |
