There’s this:
LINK#1
LINK#2
And of course the fact that Rove is as shady as they come. The right-wing response on blogs has been…’if he didn’t know she was undercover at the time, it’s not a crime’…’liberal media, liberal media, liberal media’…’Time only released the information because they wanted to take down Bush’
I’m sure there will be much more spin to come, but let’s not forget that these are the same folks who brought you – ‘if we’d stayed a few more years we’d have won the Vietnam War’, ‘Churchill was a God, but FDR was dogshit’, ‘Saddam had something to do with 9/11′ – I could go on, but know full well that the Limbaughs, Hannitys and others of their babbling fraternity o’ information won’t let facts get in the way. So it’s time for the televangelists to get cracking on the ‘liberals=satan’ sermons before this information starts to get around.
“Satan will carom off of the bodies of those who are truly faithfull, then curse the name of your Lord in frustration. That’s right, he gets ANGry when he can’t get in and start infecting you with the right lies at the right time, as he does with the liberals. They’ll say, ‘we’ve got facts!’ Not God’s facts! Not MY facts, or YOUR facts! We know who’s facts they’ve got, don’t we?”
Pingback: Mark in Mexico
Perhaps not yet, but he can always say later on that new information obtained forced him to change direction. The objective is to determine who leaked the story, and with Novak seemingly less of a part of the investigation than these two reporters who hadn’t written anything…on a high level it would appear that strings were being pulled. Let’s say it turns out that Rove lied under oath.
Prosecutors don’t like that…not unless it’s a cop doing it in a drug trial w/ a minority defendant.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8445696/site/newsweek/
Seems to be a few more reasons for them to take Newsweek down a peg when they did. Perhaps the Koran story was allowed to blow through the Pentagon review process so easily becuase they wanted to stem this tide…ironically for Rove doing the same thing that the magazine was slammed for…putting the troops at risk.
This one is juicy…you can tell there’s been something the White House has wanted to hide since day one with this story. More to come…
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/3/115153/1109
I agree about the use of the word ‘knowingly’. My question would be, ‘what’s your point?’ That outing a CIA agent is alright as long as you didn’t ‘knowingly’ blow an ongoing investigation???
If this turns out to be true, it will be official Bush is a lame duck. Having his chief of staff indicted would be the end of his agenda, coupled with the Cunningham scandal and Delay’s problems and the repubs will be on the defensive for at least a few years.
One thing that will be interesting is how this effects the supreme court nomnations.
I don’t see it having much of an impact, but you’re right about Bush being a lame duck if it comes out that his people went this far to suppress information about WMD.
Bolton’s role in the administration, kind of a bully, slaming down any information they didn’t want out…his confirmation is sure to become that much more difficult, because this goes straight to the heart of why the Senate needs to see those intercepts they’ve asked for now, for at least a month now.
The administration has a lot to hide. I think that much is clear.
My last post probably had a little wishful thinking in it.
Have a great 4th and thx for a great web site.
Cunningham scandal
What is the Cunningham scndal? Was Ritchie hanging out with the Fonz again?
The end of happy days
Taken from talkingpointsmemo.com:
“With so much DOJ heat coming down on Duke Cunningham you’d almost think he was a Democrat.
Late word has it that twenty federal agents raided Duke’s
place in Rancho Santa Fe this afternoon. Just so you can keep track, that’s the place he bought with Mitch Wade’s cash, not the place he sold Wade. And that comes on the heels of the raids earlier in the day at MZM headquarters and down at the Yacht Club on the Duke Stir.
One other point to note: In each of these raids, on hand have been personnel from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service.
As you’d expect from the title, those are the DOD’s cops, specifically, the investigative arm of the Pentagon Inspector General’s office. They’re not there because some backbencher like Duke got paid too much for his house. Almost certainly, they’re there because of military contracting fraud, or the suspicion thereof.
And tell me this isn’t related to the Pentagon decision earlier this week to halt all new work for MZM, Inc. Just a new interpretation of some obscure contracting, right?
Nice article Chris. I posted something briefly about it on MA as well:
http://modernamerica.blogspot.com/2005/07/elephant-wars-turd-blossom-strikes.html
“With so much DOJ heat coming down on Duke Cunningham you’d almost think he was a Democrat.
When you said he took bribes and is corrupt I thought he was a democrat too.
I’m starting to think that without the Rove piece being broke on McLaughlin’s program, we’d never have heard about it. Consider for a moment why two journalists were facing jail time, while Novak came out without a scratch on him.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and it’s becoming obvious to me that the fix was in since day one. These two journalists were taking the fall for what’s hopefully going to come out in the next few weeks.
Let’s hope it’s still not ‘fixable’ – because what happened here was as shitty as it gets. The whole concept of ‘fixed’ intelligence is a black eye for America.
While I don’t always agree with Mr. Rall, in this piece, he makes a good point. Calling Plame ‘fair game’ as Rove did a couple years ago is an indication of how all of us are seen by the administration as mere pawns, who’s futures are as arbitrarily negotiable as facts. The details of Plame’s role in the CIA, as well as her seemingly bright future, really should have mattered more to Rove than the upper hand in a temporary political beef.
They ruined her career. And for what? What did she do to deserve such a thing. Better yet, what right did Rove have to destroy her?
Rall’s editorial:
I, nor you, have to consider Rove worse than Osama Bin Laden – – – this is the type of over-reaching I generally dislike about Rall’s opinions, but the points he makes in this article in terms of what Rove actually did is entirely apt.
Is Rove worse than Osama? NO!!!! But that’s not the point I wanted to make in posting this. I hate when my work is snipped and crossposted, so I’m going with the second commandment here…the golden rule if you will, by posting his editorial in it’s entirety.
Rove is only worse than Osama in a patriotic sense, in that he did wrong by the organization he represents by selling out one of his own.
Those very same people who want Newsweek to go out of business for the Koran story should consider how hypocritical it would be to look the other way with Rove.
One of my friends has a saying: “I love my country, it’s my government I fear.”
There’s good reason to fear the government right now chris – – – they’re not all that kind.
Rove’s lawyer acknowledges he was Time reporter’s source
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050710/pl_afp/usjusticemediarove_050710203623;_ylt=Ajb5DrqZl3BUTdgL2ywJOXNZJ_wA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
Alright – so it’s settled. He lied about it several times under oath, and the leaking of this information caused a CIA counter-terrorism effort to fold and cost the life of one person that we know of. The cover of agents across the world who worked under this shell CIA company was blown all at once, with all of them jeopardized…of course, without the luxury of being able to call on the embassy for help.
This man is pond scum, and this ‘game’ of politics he’s been so celebrated for manipulating over the years…who’s proud of this guy now?
I wonder how the right wing spin machine will appraoch this. They will probably attack the source.
A reader answers my question at TPMCAFE.com:
By AltHippo
From: Top Reader Blogs
I suspect we’ll all be looking into this Washingtpon Post article in more detail tomorrow.
For now, I’ll quote the lede:
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame’s role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove’s lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.
The conventional wisdom is that Rove would put up a defense saying that he didn’t know Valerie Plame was a covert agent for the CIA.
This is completely different. Rove’s lawyer is saying that he didn’t refer to her by name.
I’m not one to parse the judicial codes here, but I don’t think anyone is going to see a difference between “Valerie Plame” and “Joe Wilson’s wife, and here’s a phone book if you can’t connect the dots.”
Meet Roves attorney:
From talkingpoinstmemo.com
“One case that jumps out at you is his representation of Stephen A. Saccoccia.
Saccoccia and his wife Donna were eventually convicted of laundering more than a hundred million dollars for various Colombian drug kingpins. Stephen is currently serving a 660 year sentence. Their racket was laundering drug money through companies which traded in precious metals.
Saccoccia was convicted in 1993. And Luskin took up his case on appeal.
Eventually the Feds got the idea that the money Saccoccia had paid Luskin and his other attorneys for their services was itself part of the $137 million in drug money he was ordered to forfeit. Now, on the face of it this seems a bit unfair since under our system everyone is entitled to good representation and how was Luskin to know it was tainted money.
Well, the prosecutors thought he should have gotten some inkling when Saccoccia started paying Luskin’s attorney’s fees in gold bars.
Yep, you heard that right. Luskin got paid more than $500,000 of his attorney’s fees in gold bars from his client who was trying to appeal his conviction on charges that he laundered drug money through precious metals dealers. Who woulda thought that was drug money? ”
I wonder if Rove has to pay with gold bars as swell.
Excellent point!
Is an attorney bad because of who they represent? I don’t get this point of this, should the lawyer not have been paid or does Rove not deserve to have a lawyer?