<p>Did I say that? Nope…you said “he didn’t call anyone, they called him”, that is pretty thin, don’t you think?</p>
<p>What is pretty thin is the stretching of the potential comments that could go along the line of:</p>
<p>Reporter: what was the reason why Wilson was dispatched by the CIA to Niger? Was VP Cheney behind that as people are saying?
Rove: No, he was not. From what I hear, his wife, who I believe works at the CIA, was behind him being selected.</p>
<p>This would be a perfectly innocuous exchange and would not necessitate Rove even knowing anything about Plame’s previous clandestine assignment. It would also be true, unlike Wilson’s denial that his wife was involved. Yet, from something like this we are hearing “Watergate” cover-ups, charges of being a traitor, charges of dirty tricks for outing an agent as payback to Wilson. That’s what I call pretty thin.</p>
<p>“So Rove’s lawyer says ‘Rove wasn’t trying to push the information into the public realm.’ He just happened to have disclosed information identifying her to Cooper, and apparently to five other reporters, including Robert Novak and Judith Miller.”</p>
<p>Apparently? What about the story that Miller was actually the one who told Rove? With or with out that, this is not what was reported that created so much outrage, that someone from the White House was calling reporters to out Plame. Turns out it was reporters making the calls and Plame was hardly the center of attention in them.</p>
<p>Assuming that matters since her cover was blown in 1994 and she was recalled to Washington (permanently?) in 1997.</p>
<p>Strick,</p>
<p>It sounds to me like Rice and Tenet knew about Plame, but weren’t saying:</p>
<p>RICE: Well, first of all, I didn’t know Joe Wilson was going to Niger. And if you look at Tenet’s statement, it says that counterproliferation experts on their own initiative sent Joe Wilson, so I don’t know … </p>
<p>BLITZER: Who sent him? </p>
<p>RICE: Well, it was certainly not a level that had anything to do with the White House, and I do not believe at a level that had anything to do with the leadership of the CIA. </p>
<p>BLITZER: Supposedly, it came at the request of the vice president. </p>
<p>RICE: No, this is simply not true, and this is something that’s been perpetuated that we simply have to straighten out. </p>
<p>Moreover, if Miller told Rove, who told Miller? Another of her illustrious White House sources? She’s gone to jail to protect a source. Who is it?</p>
<p>I frankly don’t see why it would matter whether Rove is taking calls from reporters and revealing the ID of a covert CIA agent, or placing calls to reporters and revealing the ID of a covert CIA agent. Frankly, I don’t see Rove as a “Woops, I did it again” kind of guy.</p>
<p>Plame’s cover may have been blown to the Russians, but that doesn’t mean it was blown to the entire world, or that the CIA wanted it known to the entire world. Whether her cover was known to the Russians is not relevant to the elements of the crimes specified in Section 421. What is relevant was that the CIA was still taking affirmative measures to conceal Plame’s connection to the agency. (Whether Rove, or anyone else with access to classified information knew she was covert, is relevant, of course. But everything about his behavior, in stressing that the info not be attributed to the White House, and the behavior of the other members of the administration in hinting at the connection but stopping short of revealing it, suggests that Rove knew precisely what he was doing.)</p>
<p>Don’t forget that Novak specificly said that his source was NOT a political gun slinger. Hence, Rove was not likely Novak’s source. It sounds a bit to me that Plame’s cover may have been one of Washington’s worst kept secrets - and hardly worth the huffing and puffing exhibited by Wilson. </p>
<p>Also, as I recall, the wording of Novak’s piece was something like, “Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative. Two high level WH sources have indicated that she may have been responsible for Wilson being sent to Niger.”</p>
<p>If my recollection of the article is correct, then the WH sources may not even have been the ones who outed Plame as a CIA employee.</p>
<p>“It sounds to me like Rice and Tenet knew about Plame”</p>
<p>Yet it sounds to me like Rove didn’t and was just trying to make the case that Wilson’s story misrepresented the facts (as the 9/11 Commission report points out in detail).</p>
<p>I have no idea what Rove knew when. We haven’t heard the whole story yet. For all I know Plame’s identity was common knowledge on the DC cocktail circuit.</p>
<p>That Plame’s cover was blown is relevant in that it supports the contention that she hadn’t been in the field since 1997, which could be decisive in determining whether a crime was committed. It would even trump the question of whether Rove had any way of knowing that the CIA was or wasn’t a making affirmative measure to keep her activities covert.</p>
<p>As to your point that Rove’s attorney was stressing the info shouldn’t be attributed to the White House, well, you could see that a different way, too. The whole point of the outrage over this was that the White House was leaking the information in retaliation for Wilson’s article. Now it’s clear the reporters were calling Rove, not the other way around as alleged. That’s such a fundamental shift that it already changes everything. Or if someone was calling reporters it wasn’t Rove, however much some folks desparately want him to take the fall for this.</p>
<p>The reports on what Rove said in the call with Cooper fit the idea that Rove was repeating what he heard from other reporters, that it was all he knew, as well as the much more sinister motives you seem to attribute them to. You have to do better than that to show intent. The theories based on the conviction that Rove is an evil genius doesn’t carry much weight all by themselves.</p>
<p>Here’s the actual Novak quote:</p>
<p>“Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. ‘I will not answer any question about my wife,’ Wilson told me.”</p>
<p>Strick, when have I called Rove an evil genius? I think he deserves much of the credit for the Bush administration’s reputation for message discipline. I don’t think he was outing Wilson’s wife for purposes of retribution. I think he was leaking to discredit Wilson, and to shield the administration from the implications of having known what was in his report. But that wouldn’t make it any less of a crime to reveal Plame’s identity.</p>
<p>“You have to do better than to show intent.” Of course. To convict someone of a crime, the prosecutor has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was an actus reus (a criminal act) and a mens rea (a criminally culpable mind).</p>
<p>The mens rea element here is the “knowing” part. Did Rove know that Plame was a covert agent? That can be established circumstantially, by looking at all the circumstances under which he made the revelation.</p>
<p>The actus reus consists of other sub-elements. Was Plame a covert agent? (Under the definitions in the statute, this should be easy to establish, or to rule out. It’s clear that the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence connection. Did she serve overseas in the five years before the disclosure? Look at her passport, and ask what she was doing on any trips she took overseas. The statute says “served overseas,” it doesn’t say “was stationed overseas.”)</p>
<p>I don’t know whether there was an actus reus under the espionage statute, and neither do you, Strick. We’re disagreeing about the likelihood of facts not within our knowledge. Someday we’ll know, but we don’t yet.</p>
<p>Rove undoubtedly has a Top Secret clearance but the intelligence community compartmentalizes sensitive information and you only get access to it if you need to know it. Executive decision makers like the President and his advisors need to know intelligence gathered by secret operatives but they rarely if ever need to know the names of those operatives. Typically a source of intelligence might be identified by a code name but only the sources handler and immediate superiors might need to know the sources actual name.</p>
<p>It is highly unlikely that Rove would have known that Valerie Plame was a covert no official cover agent of the CIA. If he did there would be a paper trail that would connect him to that information. My guess is Rove is a person of interest as opposed to a target of the investigation because no such paper trail exists and Fitxgerald wants to know 1) If Rove knew Plame was a NOC. 2) How he came by that information if indeed he had it. 3) Why there was no paper trail.</p>
<p>My guess is Rove knew Plame got Wilson the “mission” but probably did not know either her name or her status other than that she worked for the Agency and was in the position to practice a little nepotism. He probably also knew that a competent reporter could ferret out Plame’s name if pointed in the right direction. What do you think the chances are that Cooper and two dozen other reporters don’t have some connections at the Agency?</p>
<p>Again all of this is going nowhere but have fun dreaming of a new Watergate that consigns the evil forces of conservatism to the ashcan of history if that is what floats your boat,</p>
<p>If Rove read Tenet’s “fall on my sword” statement, he knew what Plame did at the CIA.</p>
<p>“Again all of this is going nowhere but have fun dreaming of a new Watergate that consigns the evil forces of conservatism to the ashcan of history if that is what floats your boat.”</p>
<p>I frankly don’t see George W. as a conservative. What’s conservative about spending like a drunken sailor while cutting taxes? </p>
<p>For that matter, what’s conservative about declaring (as Nixon did) that “If the President does it, it’s not against the law”?</p>
<p>“If Rove read Tenet’s ‘fall on my sword’ statement, he knew what Plame did at the CIA.”</p>
<p>He might have known she was a “counter-proliferation expert”. So what? Nearly half of the CIA reads the reports the other half writes. Generally speaking the real experts aren’t covert and never have been.</p>
<p>Interesting that you would decide to denegrate CIA agents who risk their lives for our country…why do that? Oh yeah, so that Plame’s jpb wouldn’t be important</p>
<p>People miss the point if they think this is simply about a CIA agent. It is about the informants necessary for the security of the United States. The world, for example, is not teeming with Iraqis who speak the language in its native form, understand the culture intimately, and can go undercover to inform a CIA agent, such as Valerie Plame, about ongoing terrorist efforts, planned bombings of London undergrounds, booby traps set against U.S. troops in Fallujah, etc. If their contacts are outed, their lives are at risk. And no one is going to take the job again.</p>
<p>If CIA agents like Plame can be outed, it is like pointing a gun to heads of American soldiers, or innocent civilians, and pulling the trigger. </p>
<p>What I want to know is, “What did he know, and when did he know it?”</p>
<p>I second that, Mini.</p>
<p>Seriously, does anyone who would identify a CIA agent to a report without knowing whether she was a covert agent deserve to have a top secret security clearance?</p>
<p>Rove’s best defense here is that “conviction of the felony requires proof that I acted knowingly, whereas I was only guilty of acting with reckless disregard for the safety of a CIA agent and any field contacts she may have had.”</p>
<p>Hopefully more fact will be coming, but at the very least it seems that Rove was playing fast and loose with our national security in order to protect the administration from political fallout from the false Niger information.</p>
<p>Did we ever find out who forged those memos? Why isn’t the administration asking this question? Why isn’t the press?</p>
<p>I say back off from the “gotcha” attitude. I doubt Rove actually intentionally outed an American agent. He probably <strong>was</strong> guilty of trying to smear a guy who was making inconvenient remarks about his beloved (if nonexistent) WMDs - but the Plame thing was just an accident. And smearing people who say things which make a politician look bad is no crime - heck, it’s basically Rove’s job description. (Remember “A little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”? - one of my all time favorite slimefests.) People are sloppy. I’m no believer in the “He’s so important everything he does must be intentional” school of thought. The righties would have been foaming at the mouth if something like this had happened in the Clinton administration - and they’d have been wrong, too. I say move on.</p>
<p>Kluge, I will go so far as to say “gotcha” is not warranted…based on what’s been revealed so far. Rove may yet walk with nary a squeak.
But I don’t think the last hole cards have yet been flipped on this episode.</p>
<p>Rove is has been doing this kind of stuff for years and years, and everyone always just moves on.</p>
<p>We would expect better behavior from our 4 year olds.</p>
<p>The ethical issue is NOT whether Rove committed a crime. The impact on American security is the same whether the leak was an intentional leak to out her or not. That he intentionally referred to her already goes without question (his lawyer already admits to that.)</p>
<p>Time to circle the wagons…and lie.</p>
<p>What did he know, and when did he know it?</p>
<p>Few people were outraged about the Downing St. Memos. The fact that they lied about the war is “old news” after all. The fact that Rove was the source for the Plame leak won’t faze Bush’s supporters, either. It’s all the same issue.<br>
I still wish someone would start asking “who exactly was the source for the forged docs about uranium sales from Niger?” This is the story that they were trying to cover up, and this still hasn’t been explained.</p>
<p>Aldridge Ames the famous mole and Soviet spy who did in fact turn over information that resulted in the execution of a number of persons (at least nine) who were American assets in the Soviet Union donated $5,000 of his $100,000 bribe money to the Democratic National Committee. Not sure what they spent that blood money on - probably attacking the ethics of Republicans?</p>