New! Rove DIDN'T leak to Novak in 1992!

[grasswire]

Robert Novak December 5, 2002

Low political intrigue

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The capital's political languor between midterm elections and convening the new Congress was interrupted Monday by accounts in major newspapers of a news-making magazine article. A former adviser to President Bush was accusing him and his White House of a policy-free obsession with politics. This was low political intrigue, in which I declined to participate as a very minor figure. The article in Esquire's January edition by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind is actually about Karl Rove, Bush's powerful political adviser. But what made it newsworthy were highly critical direct quotes attributed to University of Pennsylvania Professor John DiIulio, who briefly advised Bush in the early months of his administration. DiIulio's subsequent written statement backing away from the quotes hardly mitigated the impact.
(snip)

Unfortunately, I did not escape Suskind's article, which includes these sentences: "Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fund-raising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted." I was called by no fact-checker, who would have learned of multiple errors.

Suskind has confused former Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher Sr., Bush's 1992 chief fund-raiser, with his son Rob, who headed the Bush campaign in Texas (Victory '92). Criticism of the younger Mosbacher, a frequent unsuccessful candidate in Texas, was not "planted" with me by Rove but was passed to me by a Bush aide whom I interviewed. Rove was indeed fired by Mosbacher from Victory '92 but continued as a national Bush-for-president operative.

Three mistakes in two sentences lend credence to claims by White House aides that they were misrepresented in Suskind's July article and to DiIulio's statement on Monday. "Several quotes and anecdotes concerning me or attributed to me in the article are not from" his long memo responding to Suskind's questions, he said, specifically denying the juicier anecdotes.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20021205.shtml

[grasswire]

1. the twists and turns....

.....what a story!