Murray Waas, in The American Prospect, moves the Plame Game ball forward a bit with a closer look at Karl Rove’s testimony to the FBI last fall. There aren’t any major breakthrough details, but it’s a helpful review and it confirms several widespread beliefs.
President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel’s investigation of the matter.
But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Moreover, Rove not only admitted that he was going after Wilson for daring to criticize the administration, he also acknowledged that he was part of a team committed to doing so.
Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.
So, in short, Rove and others were actively trying to smear Wilson, but Rove nevertheless insists he wasn’t Novak’s original source and that his political efforts to undermine Wilson began after Novak’s infamous column identified undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame.
Like I said, nothing earth-shattering, but a helpful review from Waas nevertheless.