Attack on Rove Continues, Absent of Evidence

Well, we have run a complete news cycle since my last post and there have been hundreds of articles written about Valerie Plame’s ‘exposure’ as a CIA bureaucrat. Let’s examine what we have learned…nothing, in regards to the case at hand. The real news here is that the main stream media is running off of a cliff with the Democratic Party in tow.

The main story revolves around three journalists, Robert Novak, Judy Miller and Matthew Cooper. Let’s take a look at each:

Robert Novak exposed Plame as a ‘Agency operative’ back in July of 2003.

Mission to Niger

And here is the offending line:

‘Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.’

Now, if one of those two ‘senior administration officials’ is Karl Rove, then perhaps the media and their allies in the Democratic Party have a point. The question would then be; ‘was Plame a covert operative?’ which I submit she was not. But we have not yet gotten to that point. I suspect that Novak is cooperating with federal prosecutors as he is the one journalist out of this group that has not been threatened with hard time. In time we may learn who those two officials are, and if one of them is Rove, we are half way home to liberal euphoria. In the mean time, there is nothing new here.

The Second journalist of note is Judy Miller. Miller works for the New York Times, which also happens to be the publication which published Joe Wilson’s hatchet piece during the run up to the 2004 presidential election. No one has a clue what Ms. Miller knows, and she’s not telling. The poor woman wasn’t even allowed to publish her article, and the Times isn’t going to go to bat for her. I am very curious where she got her information on Plame, and would not be surprised if her source is somehow embarrassing to the Times. If Miller decides to serve out her term, we may never know.

One other side note to the Miller episode is that it was the New York Times which vehemently called for a federal investigation into these leaks during the 2004 campaign season. Now that one of their own has been sucked into it, they do not have the spine to come clean on their own complicity in the affair. It’s fine when the evil Republicans are on the hot seat, but the same standard does not apply to reporters as they hide behind what they consider to be the total immunity of the press to engage in sordid activities.

Finally, there is Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine. Rove sent Cooper an email back in 2003 which identified the approval for the trip to Niger as Wilson’s wife, and also identified her as a person who "apparently works" for the CIA. As I stated yesterday, there is nothing classified about outing someone as a CIA employee. Rove was actually trying to keep Cooper from making a fool of himself, as Cooper was about to write that Dick Cheney had authorized the Wilson trip to Niger, just as Wilson insinuated in his New York Times hit piece, in which he stated:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report.

The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

What I Didn't Find in Africa

Never did he mention that ‘agency officials’ was actually referring to his own wife.

So, the only way that the current MSM/DNC sponsored conspiracy theory can hold any water is if Karl Rove is somehow connected to the Novak source, which actually names Valerie Plame, or if it is proven that Rove was trying to out her as an undercover operative. Those connections have not been made in any publications that I have read, even the major papers that are going out of their way to damage the President. In addition, if Miller has some information that was obtained by less than honorable means, and that information came from Rove, I suppose he would be in hot water there too. Neither one of these possibilities is likely as Rove has given blanket approval to any journalist to give him up as their source. Someone else is likely to go down should Novak or Miller’s sources be given up, and I am as anxious to see who that is as the most rabid Democratic hacks.

Lost in all of the accusation throwing is the fact that a mid-level pencil pusher analyst arranged to have her husband sent to Niger to do a hack job on a sitting president during his re-election campaign. In addition, that husband lied multiple times in an attempt to discredit the administration's assertion on an Iraq/Niger connection, which later turned out to be true. Read the below linked article from last summer if you want to know the real scandal.

Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission (Account Required)

‘The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.’

The interesting part of this whole debacle is watching the media and the Democrats blather on the topic. It reminds me of those commercials with the Crash Test Dummies. They all have stupid grins on their faces just before they are flung into a concrete barrier at high speed. John Kerry has, of course, called for Rove’s resignation, which is normal as he has, at one time or another, called on just about everyone to resign.

The media made the connection between Rove and Novak’s name dropper before it existed, and now they have dug in too deep. The badgering that Scott McClellan suffered yesterday is a good indication that they are now desperate to make that connection. There is going to be a lot of egg on a lot of people's faces, and I intend to enjoy every second of it. I suggest that if the media and the Democrats really want to know the what constitutes a security violation, they should ask Sandy Berger.

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