Time: Contingency plan (Rove's plan to resign if indicted)

[highplainsdem]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1118313,00.html


Contingency plan
By VIVECA NOVAK AND MIKE ALLEN

Posted Sunday, Oct. 16, 2005

Karl rove has a plan, as always. Even before testifying last week for the fourth time before a grand jury probing the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, Bush senior adviser Rove and others at the White House had concluded that if indicted he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking told TIME.

Resignation is the much more likely scenario, they say. The same would apply to I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the Vice President's chief of staff, who also faces a possible indictment. A former White House official says Rove's break with Bush would have to be clean—no "giving advice from the sidelines"—for the sake of the Administration.

Severing his ties would allow Rove—who as deputy chief of staff runs a vast swath of the West Wing—to fight aggressively "any bull___ charges," says a source close to Rove, like allegations that he was part of a broad conspiracy to discredit Plame's husband Joseph Wilson. Rove's defense: whatever he did fell far short of that.

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald appears to be seriously weighing a perjury charge for Rove's failure to tell grand jurors that he talked to TIME correspondent Matthew Cooper about Plame, according to a person close to Rove. Rove corrected himself in a later grand jury session. If charged with perjury, he will maintain he simply didn't recall the conversation with Cooper and told Fitzgerald as soon as he did.

<snip>

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. do you trust Rove

not to coach Bush from the sidelines?

[Octafish]

2. Treason ain't 'Bullshit'

Plame was a NOC and Brewster Jennings a global sting to catch WMD proliferators working out of the former Soviet republics. Exposing her to get at her old man Wilson damaged the national security of the United States. That's treason.

[abluelady]

3. How do you enforce Rove not still being the brain?

[ToolTex]

5. Hang him. That's the penalty for treason.

No sideline advice after that. Well, with Bush you can't tell. He might keep talking with Karl on a regular basis.

[abluelady]

7. You mean the devil talks to him as well as god? lol

[Hailtothechimp]

4. If Bush were any kind of leader, he'd have fired Rove already.

The fact that someone even SUSPECTED of activities that can be considered treasonous is still going to work in the WH each day is sickening. Not surprising, but sickening just the same.

[Zeke]

6. ROPE BURNS

Hang KKKarl from a sour apple tree.