Date: July 11, 2005 5:48:35 PM PDT
Subject: Why Karl Rove Must Go
Why Karl Rove must go
There are still plenty of questions about Karl Rove's
involvement in the Valerie Plame case, and we trust
that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will
eventually get to the bottom of them. But given what we
know today, the very best that anyone can say of Karl
Rove is that, on July 11, 2003, he broke the cover of a
CIA analyst in order to discredit criticism of the way
George W. Bush used intelligence in the run-up to the
Iraq war.
That's not partisan hyperbole; incredibly, it is Karl
Rove's defense.
In order to show that Rove and his colleagues in the
White House weren't engaged in a conspiracy to reveal
Plame's identity, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, says
that Rove had another goal in mind when he told Time's
Matthew Cooper that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA
analyst: It was all about politics.
When Cooper called Rove on July 11, 2003, Wilson had
just written an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times in
which he said that his investigation into the
allegation that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake
from Niger had left him with "little choice but to
conclude that some of the intelligence related to
Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to
exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Cooper asked Rove about
the Wilson report at the end of their telephone
conversation. Rove's response? According to Cooper's
e-mail message to his editor, Rove warned Cooper "not
to get too far out" on Wilson's allegations because the
source wasn't credible. Rove said that neither Vice
President Dick Cheney nor CIA Director George Tenet had
assigned Wilson to the Niger investigation. Rather, he
said, the job came from Wilson's own wife, who was,
Rove told Cooper, a CIA analyst working on WMD issues.
So you see, Luskin tells the New York Times, "A fair
reading of the e-mail as well as the context in which
the conversation took place makes it clear that the
information conveyed was not part of an organized
effort to disclose Plame's identity." Rather, Luskin
tells the Washington Post: "What [Rove] was doing was
discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements
that had been made publicly and weren't true."
That defense may keep Karl Rove free from some sort of
criminal conspiracy charge. And Rove's sometimes
careful denials about his involvement -- "I didn't know
her name. I didn't leak her name" -- may keep him out
of prison on a perjury conviction. But none of that can
change the fact that Karl Rove revealed the identity of
a CIA agent in order to discredit criticism of the
president's use of intelligence in the run-up to a war
that has now claimed the lives of at least 1,755
Americans.
It's one thing to orchestrate nasty whispering
campaigns about your political opponents when you're
working as a private political consultant. There's
plenty of evidence that Rove engaged in those kinds of
tactics for Bush back in Texas and again for Bush
during the South Carolina primary in 2000. We might not
like it, but as Bush told John McCain during the 2000
campaign, "It's politics." This is different. Rove
isn't a private political consultant anymore; he's a
federal employee and the president's deputy chief of
staff. And outing a CIA agent isn't just political
hardball, or "fair game" as Rove once told Chris
Matthews. As Bush himself said of the Plame case last
February, "Leaks of classified information are bad
things." How bad? So bad that Bush's press secretary
said back in September 2003 that, "if anyone in this
administration was involved" in the outing of Valerie
Plame, that person would "no longer be in this
administration."
The press secretary isn't saying much today. At today's
White House press briefing, he repeatedly refused to
answer questions about the president's deputy chief of
staff. "There will be a time to talk about this," Scott
McClellan said at one point, "but now is not the time
to talk about it."
He's right -- there will be plenty of time for talking
later. Now is a time for action. Karl Rove traded away
the identity of a CIA agent and, arguably, some portion
of the nation's security in order to discredit one of
the president's critics on the question of war. Thus,
whatever comes of the criminal investigation that keeps
McClellan from answering questions, we know at a
minimum that Rove has breached the trust of his office
and failed to live up to the standards that Bush has
set for his own administration. It is time for Rove to
go. And if he can't see that yet, it is time for the
president to tell him.
-- Tim Grieve
[16:02 EDT, July 11, 2005]
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