Mark Weisbrot (CommonDreams): Rove Scandal Could Stick

[Jack Rabbit]

From Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services via CommonDreams.org
Dated Friday July 22

Rove Scandal Could Stick
By Mark Weisbrot

The Bush Administration has ploughed through so many scandals that it is easy to cynically dismiss the current controversy over White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove as just another inside-the-beltway, partisan tussle that will soon be as forgotten as all those Bush Administration officials with ties to Enron. Or the Harken Energy Corporation and Halliburton scandals (to which the President and Vice President were personally linked). The 9/11 intelligence failures, the missing weapons of mass destruction, Abu Ghraib - nothing sticks to these guys. So why should this scandal be any different?

Most importantly, this one has a federal special prosecutor (Patrick Fitzgerald) working on it. And Fitzgerald seems serious -- he probably wouldn't have sent a New York Times reporter to jail for refusing to testify, if he were about to announce that nobody broke the law.

The investigation stems from a leak to the press that Valerie Wilson, the wife of former National Security Council Senior Director for African Affairs Joseph Wilson, was a C.I.A. operative. Wilson angered the Bush Administration two years ago by telling the press and then the public that -- on the basis of his fact-finding mission to Niger -- the Administration's claim that Saddam Hussein "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was false.

We now know that the White House's emphatic public denials over the last two years that Karl Rove had anything to do with the leak were false. Time magazine's reporter Matt Cooper has stated that it was from Mr. Rove that he first learned that Valerie Wilson worked for the C.I.A. Cooper has also stated that I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, confirmed Ms. Plame's identity. And Rove also confirmed her identity to columnist Robert Novak, who was the first to write about her in July 2003, identifying her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame.

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