Press Batters McClellan on Rove/Plame Link

E&P ^ | 07/11/05 | E&P Staff

[Pikamax]

Press Batters McClellan on Rove/Plame Link

By E&P Staff

Published: July 11, 2005 3:30 PM ET

NEW YORK At numerous press briefings last week, not a single reporter asked White House Press Secretary about emerging allegations that top presidential aide Karl Rove was a source, or the source, for Time magazine's Matthew Cooper in the Valerie Plame case. On Sunday, Newsweek revealed a Cooper e-mail from July 2003 that showed that Rove indeed had talked to him about Plame and her CIA employment, although he apparently did not mention that she worked under cover.

This development apparently freed the journalists to hit McClellan hard at this afternoon's briefing. Here is a partial rush transcript. ***

Q: Scott, can I ask you this: Did Karl Rove commit a crime?

MCCLELLAN: Again, David, this is a question relating to a ongoing investigation, and you have my response related to the investigation. And I don't think you should read anything into it other than: We're going to continue not to comment on it while it's ongoing.

Q: Do you stand by your statement from the fall of 2003, when you were asked specifically about Karl and Elliot Abrams and Scooter Libby, and you said, "I've gone to each of those gentlemen, and they have told me they are not involved in this"?

MCCLELLAN: And if you will recall, I said that, as part of helping the investigators move forward on the investigation, we're not going to get into commenting on it. That was something I stated back near that time as well.

Q: Scott, this is ridiculous. The notion that you're going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you've decided not to talk. You've got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?

MCCLELLAN: I'm well aware, like you, of what was previously said. And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the investigation...

Q: (inaudible) when it's appropriate and when it's inappropriate?

MCCLELLAN: If you'll let me finish.

Q: No, you're not finishing. You're not saying anything. You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson's wife. So don't you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn't he?

MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it.

Q: Do you think people will accept that, what you're saying today?

MCCLELLAN: Again, I've responded to the question.

QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott... because after the investigation began -- after the criminal investigation was under way -- you said, October 10th, 2003, "I spoke with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this," from that podium. That's after the criminal investigation began.

Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation?

MCCLELLAN: No, that's not a correct characterization. And I think you are well aware of that.

We know each other very well. And it was after that period that the investigators had requested that we not get into commenting on an ongoing criminal investigation.

And we want to be helpful so that they can get to the bottom of this. Because no one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States.

I am well aware of what was said previously. I remember well what was said previously. And at some point I look forward to talking about it. But until the investigation is complete, I'm just not going to do that.

Q: So you're now saying that after you cleared Rove and the others from that podium, then the prosecutors asked you not to speak anymore and since then you haven't.

MCCLELLAN: Again, you're continuing to ask questions relating to an ongoing criminal investigation and I'm just not going to respond to them.

Q: When did they ask you to stop commenting on it, Scott? Can you pin down a date?

MCCLELLAN: Back in that time period.

Q: Well, then the president commented on it nine months later. So was he not following the White House plan?

MCCLELLAN: I appreciate your questions. You can keep asking them, but you have my response.

Q: Well, we are going to keep asking them. When did the president learn that Karl Rove had had a conversation with a news reporter about the involvement of Joseph Wilson's wife in the decision to send him to Africa?

MCCLELLAN: I've responded to the questions.

Q: When did the president learn that Karl Rove had been...

MCCLELLAN: I've responded to your questions.

Q: After the investigation is completed, will you then be consistent with your word and the president's word that anybody who was involved will be let go?

MCCLELLAN: Again, after the investigation is complete, I will be glad to talk about it at that point.

Q: Can you walk us through why, given the fact that Rove's lawyer has spoken publicly about this, it is inconsistent with the investigation, that it compromises the investigation to talk about the involvement of Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff, here?

MCCLELLAN: Well, those overseeing the investigation expressed a preference to us that we not get into commenting on the investigation while it's ongoing. And that was what they requested of the White House. And so I think in order to be helpful to that investigation, we are following their direction.

Q: Scott, there's a difference between commenting on an investigation and taking an action...

MCCLELLAN: (inaudible)...

Q: Does the president continue to have confidence in Mr. Rove?

MCCLELLAN: Again, these are all questions coming up in the context of an ongoing criminal investigation. And you've heard my response on this.

Q: So you're not going to respond as to whether or not the president has confidence in his deputy chief of staff?

MCCLELLAN: You're asking this question in the context of an ongoing investigation, and I would not read anything into it other then I'm simply going to comment on an ongoing investigation.

Q: Has there been any change, or is there a plan for Mr. Rove's portfolio to be altered in any way?

MCCLELLAN: Again, you have my response to these questions.

[Let's Roll]

Mrs. Wilson wasn't an undercover agent and everyone knew she worked for the CIA anyway ... but Rove should be suspended, better yet drawn and quartered?

Because it's not the nature of the reality but the seriousness of progressive delusion we're dealing with here?

[surely_you_jest]

McClellan is a lightweight. And he is reminding me more and more of Ronnie Ziegler during the Watergate era. As in he is utterly ineffective.

Time for him to go.

[negril]

Wouldn't it be great to see Rush substitute for McClellan at the daily White House press briefing? I can just hear him talking to the whiners like a bunch of toddlers at preschool. Although I'm sure preschool toddlers are much better behaved than the W.H. press corps.

[VeniVidiVici]

Good to see the press if finally pressing Sandy Burger on his espionage crimes.

/s

[sandydipper]

Hey - just out the truth. How refreshing would that be?

[steve8714]

grandstanding a$$holery is not sedition. This lightweight doesn't rise to the level of sedition.

[princess leah]

I could hear Rush now: I'll give a response AFTER one of your newspapers does a front page cover story on why Sandy Berger stole National Archive papers! I agree that McCLellan is NOT the man to tackle the rabid MSM gangsters! Send in a real PR man!

[eddie willers]

Good to see the press if finally pressing Sandy Burger on his espionage crimes.

Or.....

"What about Juanita Broaddrick?"

"SHUT UP!"



















"ok"

[balch3]

The MSM is running down President Bush at every opportunity, forcing key advisors like Rove to waste time dealing with ridiculous accusations, and overall hindering the war effort. That may not be something you can get a sedition conviction for, but we all know what it is. Shut down the press office. Cooperate ONLY with trusted conservative, or at least unbiased, reporters (if there are any). The rest get the standard White House press releases, and if they don't like it, they can lump it.

[rushmom]

McClellan is the worst press secretary I have ever seen.

[Mr. K]

I disagree- its a tough job against the enemy (the liberal media whor... I mean reporters)

I would have given one of them a pounding long ago as an example to the others...

[untrained skeptic]

"He should simply state he's not taking any more questions on that topic. If the next question is about that, he should end the press conference."

Why bother. His method was less combative and produced the same results.

I would suggest that reporters that continue to interrupt and can't ask questions with dignity have their press passes revoked.

Does anyone really believe that these reporters were going to jail to protect Rove?

These reporters obviously had another source that they are protecting, and they asked Rove some follow-up question, and now they are trying to make it look like Rove is the source.

This issue is kind of beside the point anyway. It never had any traction with the public in the first place. It was a raised to the level of a scandal by the press to try and embarrass the Bush administration, and that effort backfired.

Now they're trying to get their smear campaign back on track. They'll get to continue to make unsupported allegations while the investigation is ongoing, and then when the truth comes out and they find out that Rove did nothing wrong, they'll claim there was a cover-up regardless of the facts.

The facts don't matter to them, however the majority of the public simply isn't buying it. The mainstream media has lost their credibility.

The investigation is winding down, and we'll have the whole truth soon enough. Of course these rabid "journalists" won't apologize for their behavior after the fact, they'll just go back to trying to concoct the next fabricated scandal.

So far it looks like the only person breaking the law were reporters who were impeding a federal investigation, and claiming they have special privileges that the rest of us don't have.

That's just not playing that well with the public, but they just don't understand that.

[OESY]

Some Of The Worst “Reporting” I Have Seen – And That’s Saying A Lot


Betsy Newmark has done a great job of rounding up the latest on the Wilson/Plame/Rove front and providing relevant quotes and links. Read her entire post, including her excellent commentary.

This story is fast gaining the distinction of being one of the most sloppily reported of any I can recall – at least when it comes to television coverage. Over and over again, I see high profile journalists fail to report the facts of this story, but rather pass on to their viewers false assumptions and conclusions that are not supported by fact.

Very few television news stories or cable news reports on the Plame matter include the very important fact that Novak’s original report (and now it appears Matt Cooper’s notes of his discussion with Karl Rove) stated the mention of Plame’s identity in the context of an explanation for how someone as inexperienced in investigation as Joe Wilson could have possibly been assigned the Africa mission. Nor do they mention that Plame’s employment at the CIA was not exactly as top secret as Wilson portrays it, but there were at least a few on the Washington social scene that were aware of it. Nor do they include the various lies that Joe Wilson was caught in during the course of the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. There is also no mention made of the extreme strangeness of someone supposedly upset that attention was called to them, appearing in photo shoots in at least one national magazine.

Practically every “report” (and I use the word very loosely) I have seen states the motive for leaking Plame’s identity as retribution. I have seen it stated point blank, on more than one occassion, that whoever “outed” Plame did so to ruin her career in order to “get back” at Joe Wilson for his criticism of the President. It is also frequently reported as fact that the person that leaked Plame’s identity committed a crime in doing so. (Maybe more MSM journalists should read this at Power Line.)

I don’t know whether or not those reporting this story on network and cable news channels are just sloppy and ignorant of the facts, or if they are partisan and intentionally misleading their viewers. Whichever it is, they should be ashamed of such shoddy journalism.

UPDATE: Mercifully, Mark Coffey reads Arianna’s blog so that we don’t have to.

UPDATE (11:30 a.m.): I wish I had seen John Hawkins’ excellent post on Plame/Rove before I wrote mine. He takes the reader through the thought processes that he has gone through while trying to form an opinion about what should be done to anyone in the Bush administration that leaked Plame’s identity. Much of what he goes through is the way the story has been framed and presented by the media and how that influenced his opinion and how much of it has now been found to be incorrect. He is so right about how this story would be being treated if it were a Democratic administration and how Republicans are often so hard on their own, even for minor offenses, while Democrats often stonewall and defend their own, even for major offenses.

Even though it will be a bit like banging our heads against a wall, I believe that it is important to keep reciting the facts of the Plame matter that Hawkins did at Right Wing News, and that I do above, and that other blogs, such as Power Line and Betsy’s Page, are doing. I firmly believe that the more the public knows of the complete set of facts in this matter, the worse Joe Wilson, and the media look. At some point, the public is going to tire of the “out to get Bush, all of the time” focus of the MSM.

Update: Betsy Newmark links and quotes some additional facts that support some of the statements I made above. I am serious, I can’t decide whether those in the MSM just don’t know this stuff or if they are being deliberately misleading. If they don’t know, they really should be reading more blogs.

-- Lorie Byrd, polipundit.com/index.php?p=8879

[pepperhead]

The investigation is winding down, and we'll have the whole truth soon enough.

Yeah it will be interesting to see what the truth is here. You know if your going to sleep with whores it might be a smart idea to wear protection. And if your going to speak to a media whore it might be a smart idea to have some tape recorder protection. Since Bush hasn't pushed Rove from the train yet I wonder if he had just that.

[OESY]

Lorie Byrd is so very right. The Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame story has been one of the worst stories reported by the MSM. They never point out that Wilson was proven a liar by a bipartisan Senate report. Red State reminds us of this Washington Post article from a year ago.
The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

So he lied about what he found in Niger in order to discredit the President as we prepared for war. Nice.

And he lied about his wife's role in getting him the mission to Niger.
The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.

The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.

Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

And sin of sins, he lied to the Washington Post.
The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said.

Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq."

According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.

It would be nice if the Washington Post reminded us of these facts some more and if the cable talking heads would remember this while they're preparing to barbecue Karl Rove.

However, the Washington Post today has a story about Rove's role and talks about the Niger yellowcake story and doesn't mention anything from its story last year saying that there were indications that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger and Wilson himself had reported that to the CIA. Far be it from Washington Post reporters to do any research in their own newspaper.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has a terrific summary of all the lies, questions, and myths about this story.

-- Betsy, betsyspage.blogspot.com/

[OESY]

Debunking 8 Anti-War Myths About The Conflict In Iraq,

[cbkaty]

GOP congressmen and senators are mostly in hiding when they should be on the capitol steps. Need I go on?

It is my heartfelt belief that democrats would defend Jeffrey Dahmer had he been a democrat that simply killed & ate Republicans.

[nopardons]

bttt

[Bommer]

Mcclellen is a wimp. Heres How I would have told them off:

Q: Bommer, can I ask you this: Did Karl Rove commit a crime?

BOMMER: Is he in jail? I think its one of your lying liberal colleges thats in jail. Sit down you punk!

Q: Do you stand by your statement from the fall of 2003, when you were asked specifically about Karl and Elliot Abrams and Scooter Libby, and you said, "I've gone to each of those gentlemen, and they have told me they are not involved in this"?

BOMMER: Didn't I tell you to sit your ass down? SIT DOWN!

Q: Bommer, this is ridiculous. The notion that you're going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you've decided not to talk. You've got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?

BOMMER: I'm talking, LOUDLY! Now sit your flying DNC Monkey ass down before you get a size 11 up your journalistic integrity!

Q: (inaudible) when it's appropriate and when it's inappropriate?

BOMMER: When I say it is! Don't like it? Move to another country and ask another Press Secretary if he give a crap what you think! Now I'm finished

Q: No, you're not finishing. You're not saying anything. You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson's wife. So don't you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn't he?

BOMMER: You know you didn't give a crap when Clinton gave North Korea Nuclear reactors. You didn't care that he was selling our country out to the Chinese. You didn't care when he was the only president prosecuted for Sexual Harassment and Rape! Didn't you owe the American people the truth? Who the hell are you, you punk hack! I don't take my orders from Howard Dean like you because your too damn stupid to think up original questions. Now for the last time, sit down or I'll beat your with my shoe like Khrushchev at the UN!

Q: Do you think people will accept that, what you're saying today?

BOMMER: People have. You idiots in the press are the ones in denial!

QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Bommer... because after the investigation began -- after the criminal investigation was under way -- you said, October 10th, 2003, "I spoke with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those individuals assured me they were not involved in this," from that podium. That's after the criminal investigation began.

Now that Rove has essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation?

BOMMER: Wheres the indictment? Why is he still walking the streets if he's such a criminal? And BTW where was your sanctity for the law when Clinton was pissing all over the Constitution and breaking laws? Oh thats right! He's a liberal so its OK. Rove mentioned it was Wilsons wife. Didn't mention her by name. You idiots are desperate!

Q: So you're now saying that after you cleared Rove and the others from that podium, then the prosecutors asked you not to speak anymore and since then you haven't.

BOMMER: THATS IT! (sounds of shoe heel caving in a reporters skull)

[daler]

Remember the Clinton strategy that worked so effectively in dealing with their 2,147 "scandals?"

"That's old news and has been throughly covered before...I don't have anything more to say than what's already been said...obviously this is merely a political attack on Mr. Rove, and I'm not going to comment any further...blah blah blah..."

Of course, what works for the Clintons when it comes to the MSM never works for Republicans.