Jul 15 2005
Lots of Leaking Going On
At the Fitzgerald investigation. This appears to be leaks from the Rove side (who is allowed to discuss his testimony, regardless of the special prosecutors requests to not to discuss the case for now).
After mentioning a CIA operative to a reporter, Bush confidant Karl Rove alerted the president’s No. 2 security adviser about the interview and said he tried to steer the journalist away from allegations the operative’s husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.
The July 11, 2003, e-mail between Rove and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is the first showing an intelligence official knew Rove had talked to Matthew Cooper just days before the Time magazine reporter wrote an article identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA officer.
“I didn’t take the bait,” Rove wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press, recounting how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations.
The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove testified to a grand jury about it last year.
Earlier in the week before the e-mail, Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written a newspaper opinion piece accusing the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence, including a “highly doubtful” report that Iraq bought nuclear materials from Niger.
“Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he’s got a welfare reform story coming,” Rove wrote in the e-mail to Hadley.
“When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn’t this damaging? Hasn’t the president been hurt? I didn’t take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn’t get Time far out in front on this.”
Frederick Jones, a spokesman for Hadley, now Bush’s national security adviser, said he could not comment due to the continuing criminal investigation. Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said his client answered all the questions prosecutors asked during three grand jury appearances, never invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or the president’s executive privilege guaranteeing confidential advice from aides.
The MSM needs to learn a lesson here (and here). If they keep coming out with ineundo, lies and outright contradictions the WH camp will continue to knock them off their feet with leaks of factual testimony and evidence.
A true lesson on how to smack down an out of control press.
AJ: In a summer where the shark attacks are not too frequent and the missing damsel wasn’t sleeping with a congressman, is it too far out to suggest that this whole mess is by, for and about the media needing a good scandal? Since this administration seems unlikely to oblige with bimbos or real estate scams, the media is trying to do it for them. Too bad for them it’s turning out to be such a dud–but that should not blind us to who lit the match and now is fanning the flames.
So if Judy Miller turns out to be in jail protecting HERSELF as the source for the leak, does that mean the blame for Plame falls mainly on the dame?
Sorry. That’s been going through my head for two days.
Egads, man – I hope you are now relieved of that nasty rhyme!
I agree, it was a scandal driven by the media and some liberal, rogue elements in the CIA and it is backfiring big time.
And it is back firing because Bush and Co. do not capitulate, they weather the storms until the storm peters out and the people behind the storm have trashed their reputations.
Not all elephants are male.
I made that point to a colleague (all of my colleagues are liberals) yesterday who told me it looked like Bush was “opening the car door and pushing Rove into a snowbank.” I replied that he wasn’t giving some big public statement of support because he didn’t think one was needed–i.e. what we have is business as usual. He replied “that’s not they way the press is portraying it” as if this was a conclusive argument. I know I should be used to this same-old-song-and-dance, but this time, as there is really no “there” there, that it’s more than just being driven by the media–they do a lot of driving–it was actually created by their actions. This to me reeks of the CBS memogate making of the news, and if it’s becoming endemic rather than episodic, it’s a real problem.
My apologies, you are right. In fact I find a lot of pachyderm references on the net to be from the fairer side of the sexual divide.
I think Bush and Co. have been doing that the do best. Giving the liberals and MSM rope and then letting them get the backlash they deserve when all their wild and silly theories fall apart.
The liberals better understand that quiet on the part of the Bush admininstration usually means the left is in the trap already.