Terry Neal penned an illuminating
piece on Rove's PR goons and their relationship to journalists, appearing on the washingtonpost.com site. More on the flip side.
Neal highlights one of the more vocal PR goons who've come to bat for Karl Rove, Victoria Toensing. Her vehement denial of Rove's wrongdoing and emphasis on guilty until proven innocent is proven to be hypocritcal when Neal points on Toensing's call for the head of Clinton during impeachment proceedings.
The Republican response also includes condemning Democrats who have called for Rove's head, which seems fair, given that in this country a person is innocent until proven guilty. But White House proxies go one step further in exonerating him and demonizing anyone, including journalists, who would even dare to ask questions or aggressively pursue this issue.
I got a taste of this when I interviewed Republican operative Victoria Toensing, an attorney in private practice in Washington and a popular conservative pundit. Toensing has taken a leading role in the PR strategy to defend Rove. In my interview with her, she suggested it was an outrage to even speculate as to whether Rove may have committed a crime.
Toensing characterized this as the type of piling on that's so typical of Washington, something she deplores. When I asked why she thought special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was investigating the case so aggressively, Toensing interrupted my questioning, incorrectly inferring I said that I believed Rove was the subject of the investigation.
"Stop, stop, don't do that to somebody's reputation!" she said. "He's not a target. Let me tell you how strongly I feel. I am a criminal defense attorney. I feel I have to keep clearing people's names... For someone to go around and recklessly accuse somebody of committing a crime is one of the biggest mortal sins in town. I don't like it when people do that in this town... Karl Rove's status is a witness."
But Toensing has a point. Character assassination is a sport in this town; it's a bipartisan sport, practiced by both sides equally. Certainly Rove has political enemies. But that doesn't mean that he is free-and-clear and that journalists should stop investigating what could be a serious and criminal abuse of power.
Back in 1998, Toensing, a former Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, wasn't eager to give President Clinton the benefit of the doubt. She appeared on cable talk shows to denounce Clinton just days after the Drudge Report and The Washington Post broke the Monica Lewinsky story.
...
Toensing assumed Clinton was guilty based on reports of Clinton's deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment civil case. She turned out, of course, to be right. But her position at the time was not the typical criminal defense attorney posture.
Neal sums up by saying something which, if followed by Republicans, could prove very smart.
There's a difference between the principle of innocent until proven guilty and premature exoneration.
None of us know whether Rove will be indicted, though everything points to this being the likely outcome. Withholding information about speaking with Matt Cooper, coupled with Cooper's testimony and e-mail, has brought about a serious credibility problem in the WH. If I were a Republican, I wouldn't get too close. This is a true scandal. A scandal which has gone beyond the day-to-day partisan mudslinging to the nature of politics and their influence in comprimising the safety of every American.