Posted by M. Wright | Filed in: Uncategorized
On Sunday, Tim Russert pressed RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman on the Karl Rove / Joe Wilson / Valerie Plame affair — are Republicans being hypocritical?
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Mehlman, if this happened in the Clinton White House, John Podesta or Leon Panetta or someone was accused of doing this, what would the Republican National Committee be saying today about the Clinton White House?
Wait, back up a second.
Q. What is Rove accused of doing?
A. That would be: leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent to members of the press.
Q. Did he do that?
A. No.
Q. How do you figure?
A. 1. Plame apparently wasn’t an undercover agent, 2. Rove didn’t leak her name, 3. Rove learned the information from members of the press, not the other way around.
A better question, for Russert to answer, would be this:
Mr. Russert, if this happened in the Clinton White House, John Podesta or Leon Panetta or someone was accused of putting our nation’s security at risk, how would the press be treating him, and would it be anything like the media’s treatment of Rove? Better yet, what if he was not only accused, but also found guilty?
Would the press put that someone’s face on the cover of TIME magazine?
Well, it just so happens that we know the answer to that question, from an example that unfolded just a few months ago.
When Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, pleaded guilty to taking classified, top secret intelligence documents from the National Archives, and destroying those documents, the story was buried.
Berger did not make it to the cover of TIME magazine, and the few stories that were written about his guilty plea didn’t even make the front page at CNN, or the New York Times, or the LA Times, or CBS News, and on it went.
In fact, it seems even the links to several of those buried, hidden stories have now been destroyed: CNN and NY Times, for example.
So please excuse us if we refuse to hear a sermon on double-standards from Tim Russert, who couldn’t find time on the program to discuss his own role in the Wilson ordeal.
UPDATE: Here’s something to flush down the toilet. I guess we can’t accuse Newsweek of originality:
July 18th, 2005 at 9:21 am
You’re comparing the disclosure of classified information by people currently holding positions of power to the mishandling of photocopies by a retired advisor? I think maybe you left your intelligence meter set to ‘double supersecret background’.
July 18th, 2005 at 9:45 am
If by “mishandling of photocopies” you mean sneaking several different versions of top-secret intelligence documents with unique hand-written notes out of a secure viewing area and destroying them with scissors… and if by “retired advisor” you mean Clinton’s top national security official who still had access to our nation’s most guarded information… then yes, that’s what I’m doing.
July 18th, 2005 at 10:09 am
Hellbent. Nice try. There is a ridiculous double standard here - no question.
However, the latest answer from the Dems on Plame’s status is that she was a NOC - under non-official cover, apparently a status that is routine for non-covert agents that may or may not be brought back out into the field.
IMO, Rove will not resign and GW will never ask him to leave, and this story will actually backfire on the Dems. Why? Because the American public does not care - and moderate/fence sitters - who Democrats should be furiously courting, will just not move to one side or the other on such a tedious subject.
The diversion here from other issues, esp Iraq, where I think the Dems may have had some traction recently, will waste a lot of time and effort on their part, and will have nil effect on the Repubs. (IMO of course).
Its actually Rovian in its devious simplicity.
July 18th, 2005 at 10:48 am
National Archive officials concluded “no original materials are missing,” and the Wall Street Journal found no substantiation for the kind of charges you apparently still believe a year-and-a-half later. You claim Berger “still had access to our nation’s most guarded information.” That’s funny. I’m sure Dick Cheney keeps ol’ Sandy appraised of everything he does.
Paul, “non-official cover” means the person is being presented as an employee of a private firm (Brewster Jennings, who spied on Aramco and other Middle Eastern oil and energy interests, in Plame’s case). This is in contrast to the more common scenario where the spy is presented as a government official, a diplomat, for example.
July 18th, 2005 at 10:52 am
If there was no substantiation to the charges against Berger, why did he plead guilty, what did he plead guilty to, and why is he now awaiting sentencing?
July 18th, 2005 at 11:30 am
The NOC reference was made by a Democrat Rep on the intelligence sub committee to Brit Hume over the weekend. I can’t remember her name. She was answering Hume’s question about Plame’s actual job, and trying to deflect critics of the investigation that are saying that Plame had no official “spy” role when she was outed.
By the way, my understanding is that Plame’s identity was fairly well known before any of the Rove/Novak conversations, in Wash press circles. Considering Joe Wilson’s penchant for talking, I’m not real surprised.
July 18th, 2005 at 11:47 am
He pleaded guilty to taking and destroying three copies of classified documents. The originals are unharmed, and no one (the 9/11 Commission, for example) was deprived of access to those documents because of his actions. Berger turned over his handwritten notes as part of his full cooperation with the investigation.
So you are comparing inconsequential document mishandling by a former official who is fully cooperating with a leak of classified information by an official in power who the White House repeatedly denied had any involvement and whose actions compromised the career of at least one agent, and possibly the firm she used as cover and other agents working under the same cover. The cases are not comparable.
July 18th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
You’re correct that the cases are not comparable, in that sense:
Rove is cooperating with an ongoing investigation, and according to what we know now, he indirectly referred to someone who was not a covert operative at the time, but may have been in the distant past, and if so the “outing” would appear to have been both unintentional and not criminal. It isn’t a settled matter — and it is far from certain if any of Rove’s actions violated any law.
Berger, on the other hand, intentionally did something he knew was illegal with national security information he knew was classified, was charged with a crime, and pled guilty. It is a settled matter — Berger broke the law.
July 18th, 2005 at 1:31 pm
These stories probably cancel each other out, and it looks as if there was no real harm done in either case. (anyone claiming that Plame is damaged did not see the cover of Vanity Fair that she put herself on after the news broke. Not something you’d see in a le Carre novel).
However, this does not change the fact that the Dems are expending lots of energy on an issue that will probably not get them anywhere.
When all of this is over, even with the media’s help, Rove still comes across looking better than Joe Wilson. The Dems essentially abandoned the guy until very recently because he is such a ridiculous opportunist.
My advice would be to step back, let the story play out, and get back to hammering Rumsfeld and Bush on Iraq.
But they won’t thank goodness.
July 19th, 2005 at 2:11 am
Is anyone shocked that there is a Liberal double standard at work here? Look at Ted Kennedy gets up and says that Bush lied to the country to go to war in Iraq. Ted Kennedy! He who let a woman drown while thinking up a good lie. Who was booted from Harvard for cheating on exams. It is the way they operate.
July 20th, 2005 at 10:06 am
Actually, paul, the Plame story is about Iraq. It’s about how Bush was willing to bully the intelligence community and even weaken our intelligence infrastructure in order to preserve the lies used to lead us to war. We already know they forced analysts to rewrite reports until they conformed with the party line and that they trusted the judgment of Ahmad Chalabi more than the American intelligence community. The Plame case illustrates how little regard Bush had for intelligence or truth when he was starting the war in Iraq.
New reports indicate that Rove did not disclose his conversation with Matt Cooper to FBI agents early in the Plame investigation, so you can scratch “cooperating with investigators” off the shrinking list of similarities between Rove and Berger.