Howard Fineman has always had good, but often deliberately whitewashing insight into Karl Rove. But his latest is, I think, an excellent explanation of how Rove's war on Joe Wilson came about:
. . . .[I]n the gun sight of Rove, was a bird in flight. Until then, Wilson had been obscured from view, peddling his story and his doubts--but not his own name--to selected reporters, officials and Hill staffers. The resulting stories had attracted the administration's attention. In May [The NYTimes' reporting dates this memo as June 10, UNLESS there is another memo!], the State Department's intelligence unit had prepared a secret memorandum about the provenance of Wilson's journey and its classified results . . . But then Wilson went public. Some prominent administration officials scurried for cover. Traveling in Africa, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had long harbored doubts, disowned the "sixteen words" about Niger that had ended up in Bush's prewar State of the Union speech. So did CIA Director George Tenet . . . But Cheney--who tended never to give an inch on any topic--held firm. And so, therefore, did Rove, who sometimes referred to the vice president as "Leadership." Rove took foreign-policy cues from the pro-war coterie that surrounded the vice president, and was personally and operationally close to Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby.
Soon enough, Rove had drawn a bead on Wilson . . .
In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness, good and bad, Bush versus Saddam.
Indeed, this sounds all too right and familiar. But how did Rove carry out his war?
. . . You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in public. But in fact everything is political--and everyone is fair game.
Including covert CIA operatives apparently. But hubris can lead to grievous errors:
It's unlikely that any White House officials considered that they were doing anything illegal in going after Joe Wilson. Indeed, the line between national security and politics had long since been all but erased by the Bush administration.
The highlighted sentence explains the Bush Administration as no other. There is no ethic, law, decency or national interest that trumps the political fortunes and powers of the GOP in Rove World. Indeed, in that sense, this is the most corrupt Administration since Nixon. Unfortunately, unlike the Nixon Administration, it appears that there is and was not one competent official involved in GOVERNING rather than politics in the Bush Administration. This combination of incompetence and lack of respect for law, ethic, truth and decency has proven a disastrous combination, leading to the worst administration in American history. And I say this without hyperbole.
So, now that we know Rove was willing to do anything, what did he do to Wilson? Fineman's answer on the flip.
Fineman's take on Rove's actions against Wilson:
How do you publicly counter a guy like [Wilson]? As "senior adviser," Rove would be involved in finding out. Technically, Rove was in charge of politics, not "communications." But, as he saw it, the two were one and the same--and he used his heavyweight status to push the message machine run by his Texas protegé and friend, Dan Bartlett. Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was sent out to trash the Wilson op-ed. "Zero, nada, nothing new here," he said. Then, on a long Bush trip to Africa, Fleischer and Bartlett prompted clusters of reporters to look into the bureaucratic origins of the Wilson trip. How did the spin doctors know to cast that lure? One possible explanation: some aides may have read the State Department intel memo, which Powell had brought with him aboard Air Force One.
Here is a critical fact - Bartlett and Fleischer were pushing reporters onto discovering who Plame was and what her rolewas regarding Wilson's trip. Here we have a conspiracy to out Valerie Plame. There is no otherway to describe this.
What does this mean? It means that if ANY of the conspirators knew that Plame was a covert operative, any means Libby, Rove, Bartlett, Fleischer, any one involved - if any knew, then their knowledge is imputed to EVERYONE involved in the conspiracy.
This is truly a critical fact and one that it is clear that Fitzgerald is vigorously pursuing.
More Fineman:
Back in Washington, busying himself mainly with the task of sketching the outlines of Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, Rove--patient bird hunter that he is--waited in the duck blind of his West Wing office. His first chance to take a shot arrived on Wednesday, July 9, when he spoke to a journalist with whom he had done business since the 1970s--Bob Novak. . . What did Rove make of the story, which Novak had gotten from what he later called a person who was "no partisan gunslinger," that Wilson had been sent to Niger at the behest of his wife, Valerie Plame? Rove's reply is in dispute. According to a later column written by Novak, Rove said, "Oh, you know about it." Rove's version, made public by a source close to him, is less solid: "I heard that, too." Whatever the exact words were, they were good enough to give Novak the confirmation he thought he needed. Citing two senior administration officials, he wrote a piece--with Wilson's wife's name--for release nationwide the next Monday.
This story is familiar, but it merits a stop. Who was Novak's primary source - the "no partisan gunslinger"? Rice? Hadley? This is also a critical question.
More Fineman:
Rove's next and last shot came in a brief, end-of-the-week call from Matt Cooper of Time magazine. As NEWSWEEK has reported, Cooper later wrote an e-mail to his bureau chief, saying that Rove had tried to wave him off the Wilson story--and mentioned Wilson's wife in the process: "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues who authorized the trip," Cooper's e-mail read. Cooper would write about the matter online the following week, after the Novak article appeared. (Rove did not initially discuss the conversation with Cooper in his first interview with the FBI, a source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because of the ongoing investigation, told NEWSWEEK. But Rove later testified about it, the source said.
The last intriguing bit of this article - Rove DID NOT mention this discussion with Cooper the first time he spoke to the FBI? Did he withhold it? Did he lie to the FBI?
So many intriguing questions. But this much is for sure - Rove may finally have done something he can not lie his way through - he is in serious trouble.