Pressure Builds on Bush: Fire the "Turd Blossom"

As the Rove-Plame story heats up, it is important to remember that the central issue here is not simply that Rove and others in the White House have lied, or even that a CIA agent's cover was blown (however serious that may be), but that these lies all began with a deliberate attempt to discredit the genuine intelligence on WMDs that was being gathered by Joe Wilson, and that this was all part of a much broader pattern of deliberate, widespread deception on WMD intelligence. As the Downing Street Memos clearly revealed, the Bush White House decided a very long time ago to manipulate the intelligence to fit a pre-determined plan to attack Iraq.

The pressure on Rove inevitably puts pressure on Bush himself. As Joshua Marshall points out:

We don't know that the president knew about the decision to use Plame's work at CIA against Wilson in advance, though given the high-level working group assembled at the White House to go to war with Wilson, it's reasonable to suspect that he did. But at a minimum the president has known about this as long as the rest of us -- that is, almost exactly two years.

And he -- unlike anyone else in the country -- had the power to call Rove into his office and ask him whether he did this or knew who did?

Whether he knew before or after, he's known for a very long time. And pretty clearly he didn't want Rove held to any account. Indeed, he's gone to great lengths to prevent this from happening. And of course few reporters in DC have cared to press this essential point.

This from Slate:

Rove did not mention Plame by name, but that hardly matters (except possibly in a narrow legalistic sense, and I have serious doubts even about that). Merely saying that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA was enough to blow Valerie Plame's cover.

It's possible, even likely, that Rove didn't know Plame was undercover. But that distinction is relevant only to the question of whether Patrick Fitzgerald should prosecute Rove under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which requires that a covert agent be exposed "intentionally." For a White House official to be so reckless as to reveal, even unknowingly, the identity of an undercover CIA employee is a firing offense. Period. That Rove did so for the purpose of smearing a political enemy makes the whole episode even more distasteful. He's outta there.

And meanwhile there is still plenty of speculation surrounding other aspects of this case. This analysis of Judith Miller's role from Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch suggests Millar may be doing jail time for "protecting her source" so that she can avoid doing jail time for being the source:

Miller never actually wrote a story in the New York Times about Plame being in the CIA. So why has Fitzgerald been so eager to have her testify? The answer may lie in a paragraph buried in the Washington Post, reading as follows: "Sources close to the investigation say there is evidence in some instances that some reporters may have told government officials ­- not the other way around -­ that Wilson was married to Plame, a CIA employee."

We could conjecture that when Fitzgerald interviewed White House political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, one or other or both had said that they learned Plame was married to Wilson and in the CIA from Miller, who ­(again this is surmise)­ might well have learned this from one of her other sources, whether Perle or Chalabi or someone else in the intelligence world...

Blogenlust also thinks Miller may hold the key, then throws in this:

The question I want to know is whether a "special assistant" (David Wurmser) to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control (John Bolton) would be considered part of "my administration"? What exactly does a "special assistant" do?

Elsewhere, the LA Times' Michael Isikoff asks how how did Rove or any other White House insiders actually know that Valerie Plame, or "Wilson's wife", worked at the CIA?

What we do know is there was a classified State Department report that said this, that was taken by Secretary of State Powell with him on the trip to Africa that President Bush was then on, and many senior White House aides were on.

That classified State Department report appears to have been -- or may well have been the source for the information that Rove and others were then dishing out to reporters. And if that's the case, there still may be -- we don't know yet, but there still may be an instance where classified information was provided to reporters.

And in another line of investigation, it seems that Karl Rove's lawyer might have messed up and allowed Cooper to avoid jail time, by saying publicly what Rove himself would not:

"If Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source," [Rove lawyer Robert] Luskin told The Journal, "it's not Karl he's protecting."

Josh Marshall has this analysis:

What seems to have happened is that Luskin availed himself of the opportunity to talk tough and categorically to the Journal at his client's apparent expense. The key of course is the second to last graf that I've excerpted, in which the Times author says Luskin was 'surprised' at what Cooper and his attorney read into his statement to the Journal. He had meant it only as a blanket restatement of their position to date.

Presumably, once Cooper and his attorney took this interpretation with the judge, there was no turning back for Luskin. What could he say?

Marshall is referring to this story from the New York Times, which graphically describes events on the morning Cooper was due at jail:

Mr. Cooper, it turns out, never spoke to his confidential source that day, said Robert D. Luskin, a lawyer for the source, who is now known to be Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser.

The development was actually the product of a frenzied series of phone calls initiated that morning by a lawyer for Mr. Cooper and involving Mr. Luskin and the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald...

What a can of worms!

UPDATE: AP digs up some choice quotes from Scott McLellan:

Sept. 29, 2003

Q: You said this morning, quote, "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved." How does he know that?

A: Well, I've made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place. ... I've said that it's not true. ... And I have spoken with Karl Rove.

Q: It doesn't take much for the president to ask a senior official working for him, to just lay the question out for a few people and end this controversy today.

A: Do you have specific information to bring to our attention? ... Are we supposed to chase down every anonymous report in the newspaper? We'd spend all our time doing that."

Q: When you talked to Mr. Rove, did you discuss, "Did you ever have this information?"

A: I've made it very clear, he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was.

___

Oct. 7, 2003

Q: You have said that you personally went to Scooter Libby (Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff), Karl Rove and Elliott Abrams (National Security Council official) to ask them if they were the leakers. Is that what happened? Why did you do that? And can you describe the conversations you had with them? What was the question you asked?

A: Unfortunately, in Washington, D.C., at a time like this there are a lot of rumors and innuendo. There are unsubstantiated accusations that are made. And that's exactly what happened in the case of these three individuals. They are good individuals. They are important members of our White House team. And that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved. I had no doubt with that in the beginning, but I like to check my information to make sure it's accurate before I report back to you, and that's exactly what I did.

___

Oct. 10, 2003

Q: Earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

A: I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.

Q: So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

A: They assured me that they were not involved in this.

Q: They were not involved in what?

A: The leaking of classified information.

See the following post for today's clam-up.