"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
"We must remember the high standards that come with high office," he said. "This begins careful adherence with the rules. I expect every member of this administration to stay well within the boundaries [that] define legal and ethical conduct.
"No one in the White House should be afraid to confront the people they work for over ethical concerns, and no one should hesitate to confront me as well."
On Sept. 30, 2003, Mr. Bush said he was eager to find out if there had been "a leak" from his administration about Mrs. Wilson. "I want to know who it is," he said. "And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of."
Just one day earlier, Mr. McClellan had stated a more categorical standard. "The president has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people in his administration," Mr. McClellan said. "He's made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."
"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration. I don't know all the facts; I want to know all the facts."
Your new standard is not consistent with your obligations to enforce Executive Order 12958, which governs the protection of national security secrets. The executive order states: "Officers and employees of the United States Government ... shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently ... disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified."3 Under the executive order, the available sanctions include "reprimand, suspension without pay, removal, termination of classification authority, loss or denial of access to classified information, or other sanctions."4
Under the executive order, you may not wait until criminal intent and liability are proved by a prosecutor. Instead, you have an affirmative obligation to take "appropriate and prompt corrective action."5 And the standards of proof are much different. A criminal violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is investigating, requires a finding that Mr. Rove "intentionally disclose[d]" the identity of a covert agent.6 In contrast, the administrative sanctions under Executive Order 12958 can be imposed without a finding of intent. Under the express terms of the executive order, you are required to impose administrative sanctions – such as removal of office or termination of security clearance – if Mr. Rove or other officials acted "negligently" in disclosing or confirming information about Ms. Wilson's identity.7
In the matter of Valerie Plame, it's entirely possible that Rove isn't the culprit, and is guilty of nothing more than talking about her to a reporter when, two years ago, the White House said that he had not. That doesn't mean he did so knowingly, or knew Plame was undercover, two aspects of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- a law that is extremely difficult to prosecute.
It could well be that Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, is being entirely truthful when he says that Rove testified voluntarily before the federal grand jury, never invoked the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, and has been assured by prosecutors that Rove is not a focus of the investigation into who leaked Plame's name.
In their zeal to nail Rove, liberals and progressives may be missing the real story here. Rove says he first learned about Plame's status from reporters. If so, somebody had to tell those reporters.
A clue as to who comes from who the reporters are. Matthew Cooper, Time correspondent, says he talked with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, after he talked with Rove. Libby has also claimed in the past not to have talked with reporters about Plame.
The leak originally hit print with Robert Novak, a columnist tight with Bush's neocon crowd. But the most intriguing figure is Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter previously most notorious as the credulous scribe who reprinted, on page one, mountains of pre-war lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, lies often sourced to Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi.
Chalabi was a favored protégé of the neocon war hawks who pushed the Bush White House into war, a cabal led by Cheney himself. Miller was their favored mouthpiece.
It's no stretch of the imagination to picture a situation in which the neocons were alarmed by the nerve former Ambassador Joseph Wilson struck with his revelations that the Bush team knew that accusations Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger were not only false, but based on crude forgeries. Their preferred response was to go after the messenger -- to discredit Joseph Wilson, just as this administration has attacked Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and various other high-profile critics of administration policy.
Karl Rove is not the only figure in the Bush administration who plays nasty. But these men are not stupid. They would not have leaked such an explosive secret about Plame, one that endangered CIA agents and compromised national security, without some level of deniability. One reason it's hard to imagine Rove as the culprit is that he's simply too smart to blurt out something like this.
Those people wanting Karl Rove's head probably aren't going to get it. There are too many doubts about his guilt, and he is too indispensable to George Bush, for Bush to fire him.
But that doesn't mean heads aren't going to roll somewhere. By all accounts, the investigation of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expanding rapidly. It is probably, at this point, encompassing far more than the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
In all likelihood, this is about more than Karl Rove, more than simply getting back at Joseph Wilson for his criticisms of the administration. This is about taking on members of the Bush administration who were and are so committed to war, so committed to empire, that compromising national security is less important than maintaining the political momentum necessary to launch an illegal invasion.