What Did Karl Rove Say, and When Did He Say It?

Reporter's Notes Hint That Rove, the President's Closest Adviser, May Have Participated in Conspiracy to Commit Federal Crimes, Treason

Those of us in the legal profession know that for almost every crime (say, the crime of "_________"), there is a sister-crime called "conspiracy to commit _________."

We know, also, that almost every conspiracy charge you could imagine carries the same penalty as its "underlying" charge.

That is, America has collectively made the determination that conspiring with someone to do something is just as serious as actually doing it yourself.

An explosive new article from Newsweek begins to make the case that Karl Rove was part of a criminal conspiracy to reveal the name of an undercover CIA agent: not as part of the normal course of government business, or pursuant to any preceding license or agreement, but as political retaliation for damaging comments made by that agent's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, about the Administration. [Wilson had revealed details of another vast criminal conspiracy involving the Bush Administration, arguing vehemently that the White House's repeated claims involving Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger were demonstrably false; shades of Richard Nixon, certainly].

In the article linked to above, a friend of Rove's tells Newsweek--thinking, presumably, he was helping his buddy Karl get out of a major, career-ending and liberty-threatening jam--that (in Newsweek's paraphrase of the remark) "'a fair reading of the e-mail [Time reporter Matthew Cooper wrote after speaking with Rove about Wilson's trip to Niger] makes clear that the information conveyed [by Rove] was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false'...[that is], claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa."

Very interesting indeed, if you know what you're looking for.

So Rove's purpose in speaking to Cooper was to reveal who, in fact, had arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.

Which trip was enormously damaging to Bush.

To continue.

According to Newsweek's description of Cooper's notes of his phone conversation with Rove, "Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by...CIA Director George Tenet...or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, 'it was, Karl Rove said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues, who authorized the trip.'"

Rove went on to issue a "big warning" to Cooper not to exploit the Wilson report to attack the Administration.

So: the point of the phone call was for Rove to let Cooper know that it was not the CIA or Cheney who had authorized Wilson's Administration-embarrassing trip to Africa, but that it was Wilson's wife.

Rove then went on to tell Cooper which agency Wilson's wife worked for.

Now, what do you think the next thing Cooper asked Rove was?

"What's her name?"

Of course that's what he asked, because Cooper had no reason to know that Valerie Plame (Wilson's wife) was at the time an undercover agent, so why wouldn't he ask for her name in order to follow-up on his story? And wouldn't Rove, whose goal was to help--even cajole--Cooper into writing a story which revealed who had actually authorized the Africa trip, have naturally wanted to assist Cooper in tracking that person down?

More simply: given that Cooper ultimately did track down the name of an undercover CIA agent, immediately following a conversation in which Rove was directing him toward that person--reciting her relationship to Wilson, her agency, her sub-division within that agency, her responsibilities within that sub-division--how else do you imagine that that happened? Magic?

So, in order to believe Rove isn't part of a criminal conspiracy, you have to believe that when Cooper ultimately reported Plame's name, the (in Cooper's own words) "double super secret background" conversation that Cooper had with Rove had no direct correlation to Cooper getting that knowledge.

But, of course, that's impossible.

The reason Cooper told his Bureau Chief Michael Duffy, "please don't source this to Rove or even [the] White House" is that he knew Rove had put him in contact with someone at the CIA who could get him the name of Wilson's wife. As Newsweek writes in categorizing Cooper's notes, Cooper "suggested another reporter check with the CIA" to get the name.

This explains, of course, why Rove has always chosen his words so carefully regarding the Plame matter, because he (fortunately for the interests of justice) only imperfectly understands the notion of a "conspiracy." As Newsweek writes,

Rove's words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak. Rove has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. But last week, his lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed to Newsweek that Rove did--and that Rove was the secret source who, at the request of both Cooper's lawyer and the prosecutor, gave Cooper permission to testify [before the grand jury investigating the Plame leak].

Conspiracies require that the participants thereto engage in a "substantial step" in furtherance of the conspiracy. In most states, a formal agreement between co-conspirators is not necessary, just a demonstrated interest by all participants that the object of the conspiracy be met. Here, the object of the conspiracy was, presumably, the felonious revelation of an undercover CIA agent's name. Was Rove telling Cooper that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and telling him which agency she worked for, and telling him--one credibly could believe, reading Cooper's notes--who to contact to get the name, a "substantial step" in having that name be feloniously revealed?

You bet it was.

Oh, and did I mention that, 72 hours later, when columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame's name publicly (the first to do so), he didn't cite the CIA as the source: he cited the White House?

So, are we to believe that Rove, who controls the political arm of the White House, and who wanted to direct Cooper toward Wilson's wife for political reasons, had nothing whatsoever to do with one of his subordinates feloniously revealing the name of that self-same wife/undercover CIA agent?

It is to laugh.

No surprise, then, that Rove told MSNBC several days after the leak that Wilson's wife "was fair game."

Why in the world should we forget, now that it is manifestly clear that it is not fair game to violate federal law, that Rove's attitude toward that particular issue when speaking with Cooper in 2003 was anything other than what he said it was at the time: "fair game"?

You bet it was fair game for Karl Rove.

And all the evidence points toward it being very fair game in his eyes.

Indeed, does anyone now doubt that the Cooper/Rove conversation was the "but for" cause of Cooper getting Plame's name from the CIA (or, as Novak did, from the White House itself): as in, without Rove's aid, would Cooper have known Wilson's wife worked for the CIA? Or which agency? Or that she had planned the Africa trip? Or (as I speculate here) which person at the CIA to talk to in order to get her name? [One must assume that Cooper was given some guidance in this regard; does anyone think he merely called the CIA's main telephone number and asked for the name of an undercover agent?].

The prosecutor pursuing the investigation of the Valerie Plame Affair, Patrick Fitzgerald, undoubtedly knows--if he knows anything at all--that it is immaterial whether Rove actually told Cooper that Wilson's wife was an undercover agent, or told him her name.

The mere fact that Rove knew she worked for the CIA, and which agency she worked for, and the fact that she had orchestrated the Africa trip, is ample enough evidence for Fitzgerald to do the elementary-school mathematics involved in the equation: if Plame was undercover, and Rove knew of her existence, he had to have had a security clearance to get that information, which would have informed him (coming full circle now) that Plame was undercover.

It's not rocket science.

What it is, however, is looking very much like a criminal conspiracy to commit a treasonous felony.

And it's looking like one of the authors of that conspiracy was just one step removed from the President of the United States, and was (and is), in fact, the President's closest confidante.

So Richard Nixon illegally recorded his enemies, so what?

Marking your enemies' wives for death by outing their secret identity while they're in the field is exponentially more reprehensible, shameful, prosecutable, and yes, if traced to the top, impeachable.

This is the biggest story of the Bush Administration--after, you know, the fact that they lied the nation into war--and every day it isn't covered by the mainstream media is another day that that media becomes, at once and finally, irrelevant to American life.