I said below (only half jokingly) that I thought Rove and the Whitehouse let the Democrats go nuts accusing him, knowing that the administration could yank the rug out from under them at any given moment.
I think I was on to something:
Rove E-Mailed Security Official About Talk
WASHINGTON (AP) – 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.”
What the Democrats fail to understand, much less accept, is that the reason Rove has that big ‘ol potato head is that he is smarter than all of them combined. (Let’s review how do his campaigns keep turning out?) He knew all along he was not the leaker…. Rove didn’t take the bait but the Dems sure did.
You need further proof?
Rove, Bush’s closest adviser, turned over the e-mail as soon as prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into who leaked Plame’s covert work for the CIA.
He played his cards a year ago. Remember this — we only learned this stuff in the last 24 hours. Rove (by definition) has known it all along. Rove was on the receiving end of the leak and he got it 2nd hand at that! In their zeal to kill Rove, the Democrats are left chasing their tail. They have no idea how Novak got the information they only landed on Rove out of hatred. Next, like OJ, they’ll be vowing to catch the “real leaker.”
One of the questions the liberals keep asking is; “Why if Rove was so innocent why didn’t the Whitehouse clear his name earlier?”
I can tell you why… Because out of control liberals are just so fun to watch.
Oops! Major error from post (July 18, 2005 03:18 AM)
To me exposing Wilson for his erroneous “whistleblowing” was a lesser transgression than was the subsequent “retribution”.
To rephrase, Wilson’s “crime” was worse than Rove’s, and we’ve not yet established that any crime has been committed by anyone. Such as that is, we get to play moral relativity instead.
If these people after Rove are genuine and really just want to see justice done, I want to see them going after the leakers who are under a gag order right now. But, I repeat myself.
Rove can wriggle away with legalistic evasions if he wants. We (on the Left) are probably better off having him in the White House posing with George at every opportunity, because linking the Rove to Bush in the public mind is like linking the word “privatization” to “Social Security”. You can save his pasty skin, but from this point on, he’s a detriment to your guy in the big white house. He’s a reminder about all the tall tales about WMDs that have given us the current quagmire in Iraq.
This is not the story of what Rove told Cooper when, it’s the story of the White House plan to smear a man, Joe Wilson, who wouldn’t go along with their fixing of the intelligence (i.e., it’s just another chapter in the story of the Downing Street Memo).
RE: True Blue Liberal’s post (July 18, 2005 04:24 PM)
You can save his pasty skin…
Ahh, the truth comes out. You don’t like his tan.
But looking beyond the superficial, this is a story of a man smearing an administration for some as yet uncertain reason. Wilson’s attempt at undermining his government has been disclosed and that certainly has caused some consternation on his part. Wilson has done the book tour and the TV rounds to misdirect his own complicity in dubious action. It’s only a matter of time until the movie comes out. Anyone sensing Fahrenhype 9/12?
Hi, AD – yessss, it’s time for the fun to begin!
I’ve made a few new posts in our cybertag conversation, and ended off there with ditty – “A Ship of Fools” 🙂 (Years ago, I read the most hilarious book by a writer called Simmel, and right in the middle of cliff-hanger events, he’d break out into recipes, of all things! Describing mouthwatering gourmet meals.. and then back to the story again. With me, it happens at the end – seem to break out into spontaneous rhyming.
Oeee, your suggestion of movie titles – what fun!
“Titanic II”
“The Unstoppable Monster Called Disaster”
“Triple Cross III”
“Fatal Distraction”
“The Spy Who Used to Love Me”
“Kicked Out of Africa”
“Les Liaisons Dangereuses Duh”
🙂