Posted on 07/27/2005 10:00:49 AM PDT by NathanBookman
"Anyone in the Bush administration who knowingly outed an undercover CIA agent should be hunted down and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. In fact, I'd favor . . . stringing up the culprit from one of those huge trees along the Washington Mall."
Almost two years later, I still feel this way, and if that anyone includes Karl Rove — well, "The Architect" of Bush's re-election will have designed his own scaffold. But nothing we've seen so far suggests Rove did anything wrong — wrong as in illegal, or even unethical.
Maybe Rove was part of some crafty Team Bush conspiracy to "out" Joe Wilson's CIA undercover wife. Maybe Rove's little chat with Time reporter Matt Cooper was a seemingly innocent piece of a malevolent, multipronged plan to punish Wilson for disputing the Bush White House on Iraq. Maybe the fact that Rove talked to Robert Novak before the columnist named Valerie Plame, as the media reported Friday, was, too. Maybe.
We'll know if, or how, Rove's words to Cooper or Novak fit into any grand scheme when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report or makes his case. But right now — after Newsweek's report on the e-mail Cooper wrote after talking to Rove, after media reports on Rove's possible conversation with Novak — Rove has nothing to apologize for.
In Cooper's case, Rove was simply warning a reporter away from a bum story: Wilson's implication that Vice President Dick Cheney was behind his Niger trip and then ignored his findings. Rove told Cooper that "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report."
Rove didn't initiate the call; Cooper called him on welfare reform. The Wilson issue came up at the end of a two-minute conversation. Also, says Rove's lawyer, it was Cooper who broached the topic. Rove never uttered the name Valerie Plame, but here's Cooper's account of what he did say: "It was, KR said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues who authorized the trip."
Let's assume Rove talked to Novak before Novak "outed" Plame. Again, Novak called Rove on another topic. Rove wasn't leaking a story. Nor was he the one who uttered Plame's name. The left calls Rove "Bush's Brain." Apparently he's "Cooper's Brain" and "Novak's Brain," too.
If he's this cunning, he ought to be working for the CIA, not the president.
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The only covers she was under were her bed sheets.
She was as under cover as my pet cat.
;)
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