Farhad Manjoo (Salon): Smelling like a Rove

[Jack Rabbit]

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Dated Tuesday July 12

Smelling like a Rove
The Bush administration said it would fire anyone involved in outing Valerie Plame. Even Karl Rove?
By Farhad Manjoo

Karl Rove, George W. Bush's chief political strategist, has not been having an especially happy second term. His boss's political fortunes are in the dumps, and nothing Rove plans -- the Terri Schiavo fight, or the Social Security whistle-stop tour, or the president's recent prime-time speech, offering more non-answers on Iraq -- has righted Bush's sinking ship. Now Rove himself has the law breathing down his neck.

The law in this case is Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department a year and a half ago, to determine who leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent to Robert Novak, the conservative syndicated columnist. The undercover operative is Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who questioned the veracity of Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa. In the summer of 2003, Wilson wrote an Op-Ed column for the New York Times, revealing that in 2002 he'd been sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate the uranium claim -- and found nothing.

The leak to Novak of Plame's identity looked like an attempt by the White House to punish Wilson for speaking out, and Wilson has accused Rove of being involved in the effort to reveal Plame's identity. In the fall of 2003, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the matter. Since then, Fitzgerald has been quietly assembling his case. But the public has only begun to get some hint of investigation's status in the past few months, as Fitzgerald has pressed two Washington journalists -- Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times -- to testify about their conversations with White House sources regarding Wilson's claims. Miller was sent to jail last week when she refused to speak.

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