The Daily Breeze
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
More Rove-related details emerge
The White House is stonewalling over the certainty that Karl Rove was the source of stories that outed Valerie Plame as a CIA covert agent. Here are the facts.
By Martin Schram
(snip)
We begin with one thing we know for sure: Journalists consider it a solemn duty to discover when politicians are lying and tell the news to the people.
And yet at least one journalist from Time knew firsthand that the Bush White House had repeatedly lied to the American public since 2003 by denying that Rove had any role in outing Plame. Yet Time withheld that news from the public while printing White House denials that Rove had any role. Cooper knew because Rove was his source. Cooper wrote an e-mail to his boss, Time Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy (which Newsweek printed this week): "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ... "
(snip)
Throughout the 2004 presidential campaign, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald probed, Bush spokesmen denied and Time's journalists kept mum. Much to the discomfort of most in our journalistic craft, Time's grounds are supported by journalists who say they cannot break a promise to a source, even when they later lie about it to protect their political assets. But journalists contacted by Rove and others needed to respond to the White House lies by pressing their sources again to tell the truth and by urging Bush in every single press conference to summon his officials one by one, in the presence of Fitzgerald, and have them either lie to his face or tell the truth at last.
Meanwhile, consider Fitzgerald and his motives for pushing so hard to get Time's memos and testimony and jailing The New York Times' Judith Miller for refusing to testify about her contacts even though she never wrote a story. Lawyers in the case have suggested that Novak has cooperated with Fitzgerald and his source (or sources) have, too. It is only a federal crime for someone to know that a CIA agent's identity is a government secret and to then reveal it. Most likely, Novak and his source or sources have said they never knew Plame was a covert agent. So, if Fitzgerald is probing further, it must be to determine whether Novak's source or sources told other journalists Plame was a covert agent. That would be two crimes: outing a covert agent and lying to a federal investigator.
(snip)
Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is martin.schram@gmail.com.
Find this article at:
http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1689077.html