Rove was the source of the Plame leak... so it appears

C.I.A. Leak Case Recalls Texas Incident in '92 Race

C.I.A. Leak Case Recalls Texas Incident in '92 Race
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - These hot months here will be remembered as the summer of the leak, a time when the political class obsessed on a central question: did Karl Rove, President Bush's powerful adviser, commit a crime when he spoke about a C.I.A. officer with the columnist Robert D. Novak?

Whatever a federal grand jury investigating the case decides, a small political subgroup is experiencing the odd sensation that this leak has sprung before. In 1992 in an incident well known in Texas, Mr. Rove was fired from the state campaign to re-elect the first President Bush on suspicions that Mr. Rove had leaked damaging information to Mr. Novak about Robert Mosbacher Jr., the campaign manager and the son of a former commerce secretary.

Since then, Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove was the source, even as Mr. Mosbacher, who no longer talks on the record about the incident, has never changed his original assertion that Mr. Rove was the culprit.

"It's history," Mr. Mosbacher said last week in a brief telephone interview. "I commented on it at the time, and I have nothing to add."

But the episode, part of the bad-boy lore of Mr. Rove, is a telling chapter in the 20-year friendship between the presidential adviser and the columnist. The story of that relationship, a bond of mutual self-interest of a kind that is long familiar in Washington, does not answer the question of who might have leaked the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, to reporters, potentially a crime.

But it does give a clue to Mr. Rove's frequent and complimentary mentions over the years in Mr. Novak's column, and to the importance of Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak to each other's ambitions.

"They've known each for a long time, but they are not close friends," said a person who knows both men and who asked not to be named because of the investigation into a conversation by Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove in July 2003 about Ms. Wilson, part of a case that has put a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, in jail for refusing to testify to the grand jury.

The two men share a love of history and policy, as well as reputations as aggressive partisans and hotheads.

People who have been officially briefed on the case have said Mr. Rove was the second of two senior administration officials cited by Mr. Novak in his column of July 14, 2003, that identified Ms. Wilson by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and said she was a C.I.A. operative.

The larger question has been whether Mr. Rove might have been using the columnist to confirm Ms. Plame's identity to punish or undermine her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had accused the Bush administration of leading the nation to war with Iraq on false pretenses.

Mr. Novak, who stalked out of a live program on CNN on Thursday after uttering a profanity on the air, declined to be interviewed for this article.

The anchor of the program, "Inside Politics," Ed Henry, has said he was preparing later in the broadcast to ask Mr. Novak about his role in the leak case.

Mr. Rove also declined to be interviewed.

But Mr. Novak, through his office manager, Kathleen Connolly, provided the information about his first encounter with Mr. Rove. Mr. Novak, by his recollection, met Mr. Rove in Texas in the mid-80's, when Mr. Novak turned up to write columns about the state's shifting out of Democrats' hands into those of Republicans.

In those years, Mr. Rove regularly had dinner with Mr. Novak when the columnist went to Austin. Mr. Rove, in his mid-30's, was a rising political operator who in 1981 founded his direct-mail consulting firm, Karl Rove & Company. Gov. William P. Clements, a Republican, was one of his first clients.

Mr. Novak, in his mid-50's, was big political game for Mr. Rove. He was the other half, with Rowland Evans Jr., of a much read and increasingly conservative column that was syndicated by The Chicago Sun-Times and published weekly in The Washington Post. Evans and Novak, as it was called - Mr. Evans retired in 1993 -closely chronicled the Reagan era, and it would have been a sign of Mr. Rove's arrival on the national scene for Mr. Novak to mention him in print.

Still, a computer search of Mr. Novak's columns shows that Mr. Rove's name did not appear under his byline until 1992, when Mr. Novak wrote the words that got Mr. Rove into such trouble.

"A secret meeting of worried Republican power brokers in Dallas last Sunday reflected the reality that George Bush is in serious trouble in trying to carry his adopted state," the column began.

The column said that the campaign run by Mr. Mosbacher was a "bust" and that he had been stripped of his authority at the "secret meeting" by Senator Phil Gramm, the top Republican in the state.

Also at the meeting, Mr. Novak reported, was "political consultant Karl Rove, who had been shoved aside by Mosbacher."

Specifically, Mr. Mosbacher told The Houston Chronicle in 2003 that he had given a competitor of Mr. Rove the bulk of a $1 million contract for direct mail work in the campaign.

"I thought another firm was better," Mr. Mosbacher told The Chronicle. "I had $1 million for direct mail. I gave Rove a contract for $250,000 and $750,000 to the other firm."

The other firm belonged to Mr. Rove's chief competitor, John Weaver, and Mr. Rove was so angry, Texas Republicans say, that he retaliated by leaking the information about Mr. Mosbacher to Mr. Novak.

Mr. Mosbacher fired Mr. Rove. As a result, Mr. Weaver, who later faced off against Mr. Rove as the political director of Senator John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000, walked away with Mr. Rove's $250,000, too.

"That's about the only time that a Novak column benefited me," Mr. Weaver said this week in a telephone interview.

Mr. Rove again turned up in Mr. Novak's columns in 1999, when Gov. George W. Bush was running for president. Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's national campaign strategist, was quoted briefly on the record in at least three columns, even though Mr. Novak has said on CNN, "I can't tell you anything I ever talked to Karl Rove about, because I don't think I ever talked to him about any subject, even the time of day, on the record."

Whether Mr. Novak forgot about the 1999 mentions is unclear. What is clear is that Mr. Rove has made frequent appearances in Mr. Novak's column in a positive light, often in paragraphs that imparted information about the inner workings of Mr. Bush's operation, feeding perceptions here that Mr. Rove is one of the columnist's most important anonymous sources.

In April 2000, under the headline "Bush Thriving Without Insiders," Mr. Novak wrote of the fears of the Republican old guard about the triumvirate of "rookies" in Austin - led by Mr. Rove - who were running Mr. Bush's "supposedly fading" presidential campaign.

"Actually," Mr. Novak wrote, "the Austin triumvirate has managed the most effective Republican campaign since Dwight D. Eisenhower's in 1952."

Last December, Mr. Novak wrote that the "retention of John Snow as secretary of the treasury was viewed in the capital's inner circles as a defeat for presidential adviser Karl Rove, who wanted a high-profile manager of President Bush's second-term economic program."

Although Mr. Novak did not directly debunk that view, he did suggest a different turn of events when he wrote that two Wall Street executives had said no to the position and that it was "decided at the White House to relieve Snow from his uncertainty and keep him in office."

These days, friends of the two men say they have not seen Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak at dinner together and note that there is little the two would have to celebrate. But in June 2003, The Chicago Sun-Times gave a party for Mr. Novak at the Army and Navy Club here to salute 40 years of his columns.

The biggest political celebrity guest, to no one's surprise, was Mr. Rove.

Hey, there's another thread discussing a federal criminal case (Enticement of a Minor) where law enforcement was convinced there was a crime, and the DOJ pursued the matter through grand jury, indictment, and trial, even getting a conviction. Well, it turns out it there wasn't a crime since it appears the "minor" in question was an adult law enforcement officer, and not a minor at all.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1496473#1496473

You would have thought that law enforcement would have determined whether the law enforcement officer was a minor before they turned over their case to the prosecutors.

So then, you suggest that Rove and Libby may walk based upon a technicality (i.e., in the other case, that the individual solicited was not in fact a minor)? That is, after all, the cause which resulted in Mr. Helder's acquital. Were that so, would you say with regard to Mssrs. Rove and Libby what you said in regard to Mr Helder: "Judges are bound to follow the law -- even poorly drafted law -- regardless of their personal feelings about the subject matter."?

I ask because it would clarify whether or not you consider the law protecting the identity of agents of Central Intelligence were a poorly drafted law.

You are so bad, Set.

That's not bad . . . you do me an injustice . . . i worded, or attempted to word, the question very carefully so as not to ambush Tico with it.

If the facts are indeed as they are reported to be, Rove et al. may "walk," but not "based upon a technicality."

As I said previously in this thread:

Link

It's not a "technicality" that the "victim" of that other crime was not, in fact, a minor, which is an essential element of the crime. Same is true if Plame is not a "covert agent."

And yes, I think what I said about judges being bound to follow the law is true for EVERY case.

I do think the IIPA is a poorly drafted law if it was intended to cover persons who do not fit its definition of "covert agent."

Fair enough. I would disagree completely with the assessment that the law were poorly drafted if it were intended to cover persons who do not fit its definition of "covert agent," as that is a matter of no little nit-picking in this thread, and one which ultimately must be at the discretion of Central Intelligence. By which i mean to say, if Central Intelligence were comfortable that the use of the term "covert agents" meets their need, the law is properly drafted--but were Central Intelligence to assert that the term were intended to cover employees such as Miss Plame-Wilson, and the law failed of affording her the appropriate protection, then the law were poorly drafted.

I completely disagree. If it was intended that the IIPA cover persons who do not fit the definition of "covert agent" as that term is defined in the IIPA, then the IIPA is obviously poorly drafted. I do not see how it could be argued otherwise. This not a situation where the discretion of the CIA is ultimately deferred to.

I disagree with your last statement. I have no knowledge of the history of the drafting of the law, so i make no claim in that regard. However, such legislation is commonly drafted at the behest of and with consultation by the agency involved. The obvious intent of the law is to protect the employees of Central Intelligence. So i would consider that if the definitions within the text of the statute failed to provide the protection that Central Intelligence wants for its employees, the text of the statute were poorly drafted. What knowledge i do have of the history of the relations of Central Intelligence with Congress--and Central Intelligence was formed precisely because the Office of Special Services had not been subject to congressional review--is that Congress has always sought to comply with the wishes of Central Intelligence insofar as there is no question of domestic impropriety on the part of that agency. I rather suspect that a review of the history of the drafting of this legislation would reveal that Congress and Central Intelligence worked closely together to produce the statute.

Here ya go

Good going, Set. Hoisted on the petard.

Good going, Set. Hoisted on the petard.

I don't understand how you can disagree with my last statement, when it appears you have come around and now agree with my first. I think it's likely you misunderstood what I meant in my last statement. My last statement asserts that, "this is not a situation where the discretion of the CIA is ultimately deferred to." By that, I do not mean that the CIA was not consulted at the time of the drafting of the IIPA. I sure as hell hope Congress had CIA input when this legislation was passed ... there is no doubt in my mind that they did. I have written laws, and I am familiar with the process involved. However, the fact that the CIA was involved and consulted at the time this legislation was drafted does not mean that the definition "covert agent" includes Valerie Plame. According to Victoria Toensing, who was chief counsel to the Senate intelligence committee at the time the law was enacted: "We made it exceedingly difficult to violate."

What I did mean by that last statement was that in the analysis of the situation as it stands now, it is not up to the CIA to proclaim Plame a "covert agent" or not, in its discretion. The IIPA does not define a "covert agent" as "whatever the CIA thinks should be included," and even if it did, it would not be constitutional. A criminal law that is subject to the discretion of a governmental agency would be unconstitutionally vague. A law is unconstitutionally vague if persons of ordinary intelligence cannot interpret it to adequately inform them of the proscribed conduct. In other words, the law must clearly define what conduct is not permitted ... if that person has to guess whether their conduct is proscribed or not, the law is vague. When you are talking about criminal laws, as opposed to civil, American courts tolerate less vagueness. In this case this means that the IIPA must clearly state what is meant by the term "covert agent," since that is a term of art. Ultimately, if it reaches that level, a trier of fact -- a jury -- must decide whether Valerie Plame was a covert agent, based on the facts and the IIPA. So it isn't up to the CIA, and that is what I meant by my last statement.

Are you sure you know what that means?

Yup.

OMFG! Tico is still droning on.

Keep moving, Chrissee. Nothing to see here.

so how long have you two been married, anyway ?