Rove-Plame: The Word from Aspen

[brettdale]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Rove-Plame: The Word from Aspen

How is it that the second most powerful man in America is about to take a fall and the mainstream media are largely taking a pass? Chatter about the Rove story has come to dominate the downtime at the Aspen Institute’s five-day Ideas Festival. One such discussion took place just after David Gergen had finished a conversation with Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life. A cluster of high-powered media insiders quickly switched over to “The Gossip-Driven Reality.” The well-informed suppositions were flying faster than the peloton at the Tour de France.

According to them, the key to whether this story has real legs -- and whether it will spell the end of Rove -- is determining intent. And a key to that is whether there was a meeting at the White House where Rove and Scooter Libby discussed what to do with the information they had gotten from the State Department about Valerie Plame. If it can be proven that such a meeting occurred, then Rove will be in deep trouble -- especially if it is established that Rove made three phone calls leaking the info about Plame and her CIA gig… one to Matt Cooper, one to Walter Pincus, and one to Robert Novak. Other than intent, the other big legal question raised was: will Rove be able to get away with claiming he did not know Plame was an undercover agent?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

[Fiona]

1. Sounds good to me...

the only disagreement is that I don't believe Rove will argue he didn't know Plame was an agent. I think he'll pretend that EVERYBODY knew Plame was agent.

If you read FreeRepublic, you'd think everybody there personally knew that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, as if it was a common topic of discussion at their possum-roasts 5 years ago.

[FairGame]

2. This was a comment after O'Donnells blog. One more good theory.

Hey my friends. Just lean back & let it work. K. Rove may not have been the source for the Plame leak; he may have told Cooper & Miller who the source to Novak was--get the difference. So Cooper & Miller aren't protecting Rove. Worse yet, Novak had 2 sources, he said, and Rove is clever enough to have given Miller & Cooper the wrong names; i.e., a set up. Fitzgerald knows the sources, so he may be trying to get ironclad corroboration for a trial, get a perjury rap on false (misleading) testimony before his jurors, or a CONSPIRACY rap--which would be one big, tasty enchilada. Think & imagine: what if Cheney is the source, or Rove & Cheney, or Rice & Cheney; you need to examine the permutations, just like a chess game. O'Donnell is the only media dog in this hunt because the R-TV trained chimps are too dumb to hold a pair of ideas in their mind at the same time. A real writer can follow multiple plot lines, simultaniously. So can some prosecutors.

Posted by: walt at July 6, 2005 12:33 AM

[JDPriestly]

5. Yes. If Rove were the target, he would have been

treated differently I think. And, he could have taken the Fifth. Unless he became the target only recently.

[Carla in Ca]

6. Per The Left Coaster it may be Bolton.

It would explain why *ush didn't do a recess appointment.

<http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/004808.php>


From the article:



Has the special prosecutor talked with John Bolton? Why isn’t it just as plausible that the information on Plame’s day job was actually gleaned by Bolton and his staff (both of dubious Niger yellowcake fame), and then laundered through reporters, like the already-corrupted Miller, to Rove and then on to the network of media participants in Plame’s smearing? It gives Rove a degree of separation from doing it himself and allows the “didn’t knowingly� expose her identity line of argument to work a little.

It should be noted that as of late, Miller has turned her guns to where else, the UN, where a little UN-bashing right now would help the Bush Administration in it’s lagging case that John Bolton is the right guy at the right time. In fact, Miller requested the UN assignment and has been doing the bidding of the Bolton and Cheney wing by producing a string of anti-UN pieces since that assignment. So there is an apparent connection and similar worldview between Miller and Bolton.

MORE...

[dave123williams]

3. Who cares if it's a story? I want that treasonous prick jailed.

I have family that works in the CIA. Politics has NOTHING to do with this...if Rove outed one of our Country's intelligence assets for nothing more than petty politics, he should get ass-raped in Leavenworth.

[reality based]

4. Anyone who thinks Rove, Cheney and * weren't involved in the

outing of Plame up to their eyeballs doesn't understand how the current White House operates. This was another aspect of the "fixing" of facts and intelligence to give fig leaf cover to the Iraq adventure, which itself was designed to enhance *'s political future. You don't need a smoking gun, just reason.

[leveymg]

7. This is nonsense. The crime was structured (planned) to shield Rove

and Scooter (and/or Cheney) from direct culpability under the Covert Agent Indentities Protection Act (CAIPA). Mens rea is shown by the way the conspiracy was planned to protect the primary government sources. That's basic criminal case law.

Judy Miller, a non-US official who can't be prosecuted under CAIPA, was the bearer of some of the information about Plame's CIA undercover identity. The careful planning of the crime, particularly the effort to compartmentalize so as to avoid the consequences of the law, establishes the criminal intent of the planners. You don't have to put Rove and Scooter together into a room somewhere to see the fruits of their criminal conspiracy.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, have you reached a verdict?