To follow up on the last item on Plame-related program activities, perhaps the most interesting revelation of the weekend was Murray Waas’ investigative report explaining that the president did ask Rove if he engaged in an effort to disclose Plame’s identity. Apparently, despite fairly obvious evidence that he did, Rove denied it.
Senior aide Karl Rove denied to President Bush that he engaged in an effort to disclose the identity of a covert CIA operative to discredit her husband’s criticism of Iraq policy, say people familiar with Rove’s statements in a criminal investigation.
Rove’s brief discussion with Bush has been a mystery for two years because the White House publicly referred to it but refuses to say anything about it.
Beginning two years ago, the White House flatly denied that Rove had been involved in unlawfully leaking the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
The White House denials collapsed in July amid the disclosure of Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper’s conversations in July 2003 about Wilson’s wife with Rove and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
Bush asked Rove in the fall of 2003 to assure him he was not involved in an effort to divulge Plame’s identity and punish Wilson, and the longtime confidant assured the president so, people familiar with Rove’s account say.
So, two years ago, when Scott McClellan said the president personally knows that Rove wasn’t involved with the leak, this is probably what he was referring to.
This revelation is interesting on any number of levels. First, on the surface, it would appear that the president’s right hand man, the “architect” of Bush’s entire political operation, lied to the president to his face about a likely crime. What’s more, Bush doesn’t seem to care.
How do I know? Rove told Bush two years ago that he wasn’t involved in the leak. Unless the president has literally no idea what’s going on in the world, Bush learned (like the rest of us) in July that Rove was Matt Cooper’s source, which obviously meant Rove was involved. Did Bush fire his old friend? Demote him? Exclude him from his inner circle? None of the above. The president apparently puts the same emphasis on honesty that he does on competency.
Second, there’s the small matter of whether the denial itself was a crime.
As a constitutional matter, the president of the United States is ultimately responsible for executing federal law. In this sense, Rove didn’t just lie to his boss, he misled the government’s top law enforcement official about an alleged crime that was (and is) under investigation. This, in and of itself, is legally problematic.
“The president is the top law enforcement official of the executive branch,” said Rory Little, a professor of law at the University of California and a former federal prosecutor and associate attorney general in the Clinton administration. “It is a crime to make a false statement to a federal agent. If the president was asking in that capacity, and the statement was purposely false, then you might have a violation of law.”
But Little pointed out another possibility. If Bush had asked Rove about Plame in an informal manner-speaking to his adviser as a longtime friend rather than in his official capacity as president-the obstacles to bringing a criminal case under false-statement statutes would be higher, making such a case unlikely.
But Randall Eliason, a former chief of the public corruption section for the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and currently an adjunct law professor at American University, said that if Rove purposely misled the president, the FBI, or the White House press secretary, a reasonable prosecutor might construe such acts as “overt acts in furtherance of a criminal plan.”
Added Gillers: “Misleading the president, other officials of the executive branch, or even the FBI might not, in and of themselves, constitute criminal acts. But a prosecutor investigating other crimes-such as obstruction of justice or perjury-might use evidence of any such deception to establish criminal intent. And a lack of candor might also negate a claim of good faith or inadvertent error in providing misleading information to prosecutors.”
Third, doesn’t this revelation suggest that Bush has himself been lying to the public about his interest in the scandal? The president has claimed, over and over again, that he’s under strict orders not to talk to his staff about the investigation. The truth, it now appears, is that he already has.