That Rove Thing Again

One of the double-edged swords of a summer scandal is the fact that it usually happens in slow news cycles. The news isn't slow because nothing is going on in the world--we can all see plenty of newsworthy events happening every day--but because, what with vacations and all, nobody much is paying attention. So we get coverage of world and national events, but nobody's reading and nobody's curious, so nothing new captures the public's imagination and nobody demands much follow up. The good side of the sword for a scandal is that the country is far from riveted on every new announcement. The bad side is that nobody's focusing on anything else, either, so the media can place its attention where it wants. In this case, now that there's blood in the water that seems to be spreading daily, what the media wants to watch is the Karl Rove scandal.

There aren't many new developments each day--this being summer and all--so we get a lot of rehashes, summaries, and analyses. We've had a fair bit of each over the last couple of days. One new item on Friday was a hearing Democrats held on the matter, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman and Senator Byron Dorgan. Former CIA operative Larry Johnson, a registered Repub who trained with Valerie Plame and has become quite outspoken on her behalf, testified on the damage that outing her has done. He said that, although he knew Plame in the agency, he didn't even know her full name until he read it in Novak's column. Read his prepared testimony in full.

In the Washington Post online on Friday, Dan Froomkin summarized recent reporting on the grand jury investigation.

Bloomberg and the New York Times move the ball forward today, courtesy of what appear to be a growing number of leakers.

And here, culled from those and other reports, are what would seem to be some of the harder-to-reconcile contradictions in the case, which started out as an investigation into who leaked a CIA agent's identity -- but which now could be turning into another testament to the Washington maxim that the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

· White House chief political strategist Karl Rove reportedly told the grand jury that he first learned of Valerie Plame's identity from columnist Robert Novak -- but Novak's version of the story is that Rove already knew about her when the two spoke.

· Rove didn't mention his conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper to investigators at first and then said it was primarily about welfare reform. But Cooper has testified that the topic of welfare reform didn't came up.

· Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby apparently told prosecutors he first heard about Plame from NBC's Tim Russert, but Russert has testified that he neither offered nor received information about Plame in his conversation with Libby.

· And former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer apparently told prosecutors that he never saw a classified State Department memo that disclosed Plame's identity, but another former official reportedly saw him perusing it on Air Force One.

The New York Times put together a nifty little timeline for the whole affair.

Over at Daily Kos, Hunter has a summary of where we stand on all these new developments now, complete with links to some of the stories cited be Froomkin.

And in an attempt to show how current events reflect back on aspects of the case that we've probably all forgotten (if we were ever aware of them in the first place), Frank Rich speculates in Sunday's NYTimes on why W passed over his pal Alberto for a spot on the highest court in the land:

When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months.

Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs.

The first: for half a year White House hands made the fatal mistake of thinking they could get away with trashing the Wilsons scot-free.

. . .

The second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

To quote New Fast Automatic Daffodils (who were talking about something else entirely): "It just grows, it just grows."