Was it Ari Fleischer?
We can play the guessing game for months, and we probably will: With several sources confirming that Karl Rove was Bob Novak's second source for his Valerie Plame column, which "senior administration official" was the first? There are several attractive candidates -- including Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby -- but at least a little attention is focusing now on former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, either as a leaker himself or as a participant in a subsequent coverup.
The New York Daily News says it has "sources" who say that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is "looking beyond" the question of who leaked Plame's identity to see whether White House aides tried to "cover their tracks" after her name became public. The sources tell the Daily News that Fitzgerald's grand jury is investigating what role, if any, Fleischer may have played in the case.
As Think Progress notes, Fleischer has been mentioned in connection with the case before. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that "people familiar with the inquiry" were saying that Fitzgerald was reviewing Fleischer's testimony, "though it is not clear whether the prosecutor is focusing on him or seeking information about higher-ups." Fleischer refused to comment when Bloomberg contacted him. According to the Los Angeles Times, Fleischer has denied leaking Plame's name before -- and on this point, perhaps it bears noting that Karl Rove used to deny leaking Plame's name, too.
How would Fleischer have known about Plame's identity? Here's how Think Progress connects the dots:
Shortly after Joseph Wilson published his New York Times Op-Ed -- but before Novak's column first appeared -- Fleischer accompanied Bush and then Secretary of State Colin Powell on a trip to Africa. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff tells CNN that Powell took a classified report with him on that trip, and that the report contained information about Plame's job at the CIA.
Federal investigators have questioned Fleischer about the Plame case, the Associated Press reported in February 2004. And as Newsday has reported, Fitzgerald has shown an interest in the activities of the White House press office during the Africa trip. Fitzgerald served a subpoena seeking a transcript of a press briefing Fleischer gave in Africa, one in which he criticized Wilson as a "lower-level official" who had made flawed and incomplete statements. And, as Knight Ridder has reported, Fitzgerald has sought phone records from Air Force One "to determine whether presidential aides used the aircraft's phones to leak" Plame's name.
Is all that enough to convict the president's former spokesman? Not even close. But does it show that Fleischer had an interest in discrediting Joe Wilson and at least potential access to the information he might have used to do so? You bet. Put his name on the list.
-- Tim Grieve
[16:09 EDT, July 15, 2005]
Karl Rove exonerated? Not exactly
Karl Rove has been exonerated!
That might not be the message you took away after learning that Rove not only told Time's Matthew Cooper that Joseph Wilson's wife worked at the CIA but also confirmed the story for Robert Novak as well. Reading the revelation about the Rove-Novak call in today's New York Times, you might have concluded that the evidence of Rove's involvement in leaking Valerie Plame's identity is growing -- that it's more clear than ever before that Rove was lying when he said, "I didn't know her name, I didn't leak her name."
But if that's the way you think, well, then, you're not Ken Mehlman. See, here's what you've got to understand. The latest news establishes that "Karl Rove wasn't the leaker. He was actually the recipient of the information." That's what Mehlman told Fox News this morning.
Let's break this down. Was Rove "the recipient of the information" when he talked with Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003? No, he was "the leaker" then: When Cooper asked Rove about the charges Joe Wilson was making, Rove told Cooper that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Was Rove "the recipient of the information" when he talked with Bob Novak on July 8, 2003? Yes, but he was also "the leaker" then. When Novak told Rove during their telephone call that he'd heard that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA, Rove confirmed the fact for him.
Now, unless Rove was somehow born knowing that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA, he was at some point "the recipient of the information." The Associated Press has a source who says that Rove told the grand jury that he believes he first heard that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA from some other reporter before he talked with Novak. The Washington Post has a source -- maybe the same one -- who tells a similar story.
But this is where things get a little interesting. In the version of the Post's story that went up on its Web site early Friday morning, the Post's source was quoted as saying of Rove, "I don't think that he has a clear recollection" about where he first heard that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. The source said that Rove told investigators "that he believes he may have heard it from a journalist." (The Indianapolis Star picked up the early version of the Post's story, and you can read it here.) But in the version of the story up on the Post's site now, the quote from the source has disappeared -- and with it, any sense that Rove is uncertain about whether he first heard the news from a journalist. In the new version of the story, the Post paraphrases its source as saying that Rove "told investigators that he first learned about the operative from a journalist" but that he does not recall who the journalist was or when he might have talked with him or her. So is Rove sure he actually heard it from a reporter first, or does he just "believe" he "may" have? That seems to us an important distinction, especially since Rove seems to have such a clear memory of his conversation with Novak.
So was Rove "the recipient" or "the leaker"? In the end, it's a false choice. Rove was plainly "the recipient" of information about Plame at some point, even if it's not so clear from whom. But he was just as plainly "the leaker" -- or, at least, "a leaker" -- too.
-- Tim Grieve
[13:29 EDT, July 15, 2005]
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Why didn't Bush tell the truth?
It was conventional wisdom then and remains so today: If Bill Clinton had just told the truth from the beginning -- if he hadn't said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" -- that scandal might have blown over and the nation might have been spared the spectacle of impeachment proceedings.
So why didn't George W. Bush just tell the truth about Karl Rove?
For Clinton, coming clean about Monica Lewinsky would have been both personally humiliating and politically risky. Yes, the scandal might have blown over, but he also might have been driven out of office on the spot. But what was the risk to Bush in telling the truth, from the very beginning, about Rove's involvement in the Valerie Plame leak?
Imagine this scenario. Bob Novak publishes his column on Sept. 14, 2003, and in it he reveals that "Valerie Plame" is a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction." There's an uproar from Wilson and the left and maybe even the CIA about the outing of a CIA agent. But Scott McClellan or Karl Rove or George W. Bush instantly admits Rove's role, wrapping it up in one of the stories the Republicans are spinning now. Yes, Rove confirmed Plame's identity for Novak and even shared it with Matthew Cooper, but he didn't know she was an undercover agent, or she wasn't really an undercover agent, or he didn't really know her name, or he didn't really mean to reveal her identity, or his real purpose was just to set the record straight about Wilson, or it was all just a slip of the tongue or whatever.
Maybe we're crazy, but knowing this administration and the kind of free ride it has gotten from the media until -- well, until this week -- we're guessing that that's about a two-day story.
So why didn't Bush go that route? As an initial matter, it's possible that he simply didn't know the truth back in September 2003. Although Bush said then that he had directed his staff to come forward with any information it had about the leak, maybe Rove didn't do so, hanging McClellan out to tell a lie -- it's "ridiculous" to suggest that Rove was involved, and "the president knows" that he wasn't -- and leaving the president looking either clueless or deceitful.
But even if Bush did know about Rove's involvement in 2003, there was something else that would have kept him from coming clean. No, not something else. Someone else. Novak says he had two sources for his Plame column. Rove was apparently one of them -- the one who merely confirmed what Novak had already heard about Wilson's wife. The other source -- the first source -- was some other "senior administration official."
And that's why, even if they knew the truth about Rove back in September 2003, Bush and McClellan couldn't have come clean then. It's one thing to say Rove goofed or screwed up -- even if, given his track record of leaking to Novak, some percentage of the American public wouldn't buy it. It's another thing to explain how two members of the administration -- one of them Rove, one of them a "senior administration official" -- made that "mistake." That kind of explanation opens the door to questions the White House wouldn't have wanted to answer then and doesn't want to answer now. Were the leaks part of a coordinated effort? A conspiracy? Did Rove learn of Wilson's wife role at the CIA from some other reporter before talking to Novak, as a source tells the Associated Press? If so, where did that reporter learn of Plame's role? Or did Rove learn of Plame's role from the same "senior administration official" who told Novak about it? If so, why was Rove told about Plame's job? Why did the president's top political advisor need to know who was and who wasn't working at the CIA?
Or maybe both Rove and the "senior administration official" learned of Plame's role from someone else. If so, who? Assuming for a moment Dick Cheney wasn't the "senior administration official," was he the one who spread the news about Plame's job to Rove and the other source? Did he know that the story was circulating? Did Bush?
And then, of course, there's this: Who was the "senior administration official," and is he -- and Novak makes it clear that it's a "he" -- so senior that the White House couldn't risk revealing that he had a role in the Plame leak, especially before Bush was reelected? Rove has been before the grand jury three times. Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, has testified. So has Scott McClellan. The prosecutors have interviewed Cheney, and Bush has spoken with them too -- right after retaining a private attorney to advise him in the case.
We're getting ever closer to the truth of what happened in the Plame case. And each step of the way, we're getting a better understanding of why the White House -- the conventional wisdom of the Clinton years notwithstanding -- might have decided that it was worth engaging in a coverup to keep that truth from the American people.
-- Tim Grieve
[09:42 EDT, July 15, 2005]
Rove is fingered as Novak's second source
After several days marked with a lot of White House stonewalling and partisan sniping but little in the way of news, the New York Times' David Johnston and Richard Stevenson have just broken significant new ground on the Karl Rove story.
Based on information from a confidential source who has been "officially briefed" on the matter, the Times says that Rove has told federal investigators that he received a telephone call from columnist Bob Novak on July 8, 2003. In that call, the source tells the Times, Rove "learned from the columnist the name of . . . 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 source says that, upon hearing that information from Novak, Rove said: "I heard that, too."
Six days after that call, on July 14, 2003, Novak published a column in which he identified Wilson's wife as "Valerie Plame . . . an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
The report of the previously undisclosed Rove-Novak call dovetails, more or less, with an account Novak gave in a follow-up column published on Oct. 1, 2003. In that column, Novak said that he first learned that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA from a "senior administration official" who told him in an "offhand revelation" in "a long conversation" that Wilson had been sent to investigate the alleged Iraq-Niger connection by the CIA's counter-proliferation section at the suggestion of one its employees, his wife.
Novak said that the "senior administration official" with whom he spoke was "no partisan gunslinger," which has always seemed to rule out Rove. But Novak said that he got confirmation of the story from "another official" who told him, "Oh, you know about it." And although the Rove and Novak accounts differ slightly -- "I heard that, too" vs. "Oh, you know about it" -- the Times' source says that Rove was indeed that second "official."
Novak declined to discuss the matter with the Times Thursday, and Rove's lawyer would say only that "any pertinent information has been provided to the prosecutor." However, the Washington Post, scrambling to play catch-up, says that "a lawyer involved in the case" who has "firsthand knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors" -- which is to say, we'd think, either Rove's lawyer, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, or a member of one of their teams -- has confirmed the account set forth in the Times.
So, the questions, and there are many. The first is the one asked of another Republican president three decades ago: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" On Sept. 29, 2003, Bush's press secretary insisted that "the president knows" that Rove wasn't involved in leaking Plame's identity. Bush did nothing to correct that statement when he spoke about the Plame leak the next day in Chicago. Instead, the president said that, "if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of." Bush said he had told "our administration, the people in my administration to be fully cooperative" with the investigation that was then just beginning. "I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business."
Did Bush know then that Rove had tipped off one reporter about the identity of Wilson's wife and confirmed it for another? If so, the president's press secretary lied to the American people in September 2003, and the president himself was far less than candid. If Bush didn't learn of Rove's role until later, why did Rove disobey Bush's request to "come forward" in September 2003? Why has the president tolerated insubordination from his closest political advisor? And assuming that Bush knows now of Rove's role, when did he finally learn of it? Was it before or after the president confirmed, on June 10, 2004, his pledge to fire anyone who leaked Plame's name? Before or after the president was interviewed by federal prosecutors on June 24, 2004? Before or after Newsweek revealed over the weekend that Rove was Cooper's source? Before or after the Times posted its source's account of the Rove-Novak call Thursday night?
There are other big questions, among them this: If it's true that Novak used Plame's name in a telephone conversation with Rove on July 8, 2003, then wasn't Rove lying when he told CNN, in the summer of 2004, that he "didn't know her name"? That one may just be a "gotcha," but this one is something more: If Rove was Novak's second source, which "senior administration official" was his first?
-- Tim Grieve
[04:30 EDT, July 15, 2005] |
