So Bush said at the time that we'll "probably never find out who leaked" Valerie Plame's name to the press. Scott McClellan (White House Press Spokesman) said Rove and Libby we're "not involved in this." Turns out that they were
$@%!ing lying. (As if we all didn't know this already.)
WASHINGTON - An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.
"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."
Yet, he claimed he didn't know who did it at the time.
Bush has nevertheless remained doggedly loyal to Rove, who friends and even political adversaries acknowledge is the architect of the President's rise from baseball owner to leader of the free world.
As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald nears a decision, perhaps as early as today, on whether to issue indictments in his two-year probe, Bush has already circled the wagons around Rove, whose departure would be a grievous blow to an already shell-shocked White House staff and a President in deep political trouble.
Asked if he believed indictments were forthcoming, a key Bush official said he did not know, then added: "I'm very concerned it could go very, very badly."
"Karl is fighting for his life," the official added, "but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The President knows that and appreciates that."
You see, outing a covert CIA operative who was involved in the search for WMD, the entire rationale for the Iraq war you may recall, is OK as long as it helps Bush and is not done "clumsily." I feel safer already.
Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.
Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.
But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.
Bush apparently was OK with the character assassination of a critic - and outing his wife - as long as it wasn't done in a "clumsy" manner.
A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.
If the "reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect," that means that Bush and the entire White House staff have been lying to the press for two years about this case. Big surprise.
"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.
Heh. "Bush-league."
None of these sources offered additional specifics of what Bush and Rove discussed in conversations beginning shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched into the leak of CIA agent Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.
A White House spokesman declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of Fitzgerald's investigation.
Want the punch line? This story comes from the New York Daily News. The New York Daily News is owned by Rupert Murdoch, also owner of Fox News Channel.