Last night at work, I saw an article by
Greg Sargent which is a watered down explanation of what Murray Waas wrote,
Insulating Bush. It was towards the end of my shift, I was getting ready to pack up, go home, and I just couldn't bring myself to sit at my job for any longer than was neccesary. I went home and went to bed.
I woke up this morning, turned on the PC, and started making the rounds. I see Atrios is linking to an article I read late last night before going home from work, and say to myself, maybe I should take another look at this.
So I did. And I have some questions I want to throw out. No breaking news, no revelations, but I feel with these two articles shedding more light on the subject, it'd be interesting to fire up the old discussions again perhaps.
From Sargent's
piece:
...That's where matters stand now. Now let's try to fit these pieces together.
The thing about the Plame investigation that never quite seemed to make sense was this: Why would Libby or Rove deliberately mislead the grand jury, risking perjury charges when it wasn't clear the leak was a crime?
Thanks to Waas, for the first time, we may now know for a fact that Rove and other Bush advisers viewed the truth about the run-up to war as something that could destroy his re-election prospects. It is entirely plausible that Bush advisers calculated that if it came out that they'd outed Plame, Congress would have been forced by the resulting firestorm to run a far more aggressive investigation of Bush's pre-war deceptions - and possibly uncover the smoking gun Waas reports on, among other things. Remember, Libby and Rove testified in early 2004, during the heat of a presidential campaign which Rove himself had apparently concluded was at risk if existing hard evidence of Bush's deceptions surfaced.
So it seems plausible that Libby and Rove sought to minimize the chance of the aggressive congressional oversight that might have resulted if it became known that they'd outed Plame. In short, misleading the grand jury about Plame may simply have been a key piece of a broader effort to get past the election before the truth about the run-up to the war surfaced to sink his campaign.
That interpretation is consistent with what was going on at the time. The Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Bush ally Pat Roberts, was investigating pre-war intelligence -- and as would subsequently be learned, managed to sidestep the central question of how the White House used that information to build the case for war, a maneuver that made it clear that Roberts was trying to postpone that line of inquiry until after the election. What's more, the White House was throughout refusing to release presidential daily briefs that may have revealed what Bush knew and when...
Remember that question...
Why would Libby or Rove deliberately mislead the grand jury, risking perjury charges when it wasn't clear the leak was a crime?
Remember the wingers when this story broke? There were blogswarms everywhere about wheher Rove was the leaker, if Libby had been directed to leak classified intelligence by Cheney himself. And all the while, the wingers were ferociously defending the actions of the administration as legal, saying Plame wasn't covert, she didn't have protected status, that Joe Wilson leaked her in his editorial.
Just back in October, this idea of a broader conspiracy was being visualized.
There are signs that prosecutors now are looking into contacts between administration officials and journalists that took place much earlier than previously thought. Earlier conversations are potentially significant, because that suggests the special prosecutor leading the investigation is exploring whether there was an effort within the administration at an early stage to develop and disseminate confidential information to the press that could undercut former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Central Intelligence Agency official Valerie Plame.
Turns out, disseminating confidential information likely occured. To lead the fox in the other direction long enough for the hen to get past the 2004 election.
But further back, in July '05, that State Dept. memo came out that made clear - info [agent's identity] 'shouldn't be shared'
...News that the memo was marked for its sensitivity emerged as President Bush yesterday appeared to backtrack from his 2004 pledge to fire any member of his staff involved in the leaking of the CIA agent's name. In a news conference yesterday that followed disclosures that his top strategist, Karl Rove, had discussed Ms. Wilson's CIA employment with two reporters, Mr. Bush adopted a different formulation, specifying criminality as the standard for firing...
Note that this was when Bush moved the goalposts in terms of firing a leaker.
If Waas is correct, that the White House was insulating Bush to carry him past 2004, why didn't Bush just let Rove go afterwards as an added effort to make this all go away? Not that it neccessarily would have, but it might have reduced some of the heat, Fitzgerald might have been less keen had the President let his right-hand man go, and the American people might have calmed down about the whole matter.
Did Bush not let Rove go at Rove's directive? Is Rove overconfident that nobody is going to figure out what really happened? Or is he just certain that in the end, he'll either be pardoned, or the amount of time it will likely take to get to the bottom of this will extend past 2008, at which point Rove will disappear?
What gets me is that they were past the election, in the bag for four more years, and could probably drag this out until 2008, issue pardons, and everybody goes home.
Why did Bush hold onto Rove? Is it they're simply that chummy? Personally, if I were the President, and my closest advisor possibly botched the job, I'd want him to fix it, and then get as far away from me as possible. But that's not really what happened. Bush moved the goalpost, and everyone got smug and cocky confident.
Vanity, which is how I see this whole thing in retrospect, will get you in the end.
What do you think?