Some of you have emailed me, asking where the Rove/Plame story disappeared to. We had a few weeks in which the proverbial blood was in the water, but then August rolled around. Hopes that a slow news period would offer journalists a chance to really sink their teeth into the scandal turned out to be backwards. We’ve haven’t heard much from the major dailies the past couple of weeks.
At a certain level, I’m sympathetic to news outlets. Reporters can’t keep writing the same stories over and over again, and if there haven’t been developments, journalists can’t very well write re-cap articles every day, just to keep a story alive. Patrick Fitzgerald is running a pretty tight ship, leaks have been sparse, and there just hasn’t been much to report.
Well, that last part is only partially true. There are a few angles to this story that deserve some ink, but for reasons I don’t quite understand, haven’t been picked up. I’m thinking in particular of Standard Form 312. I predicted a month ago that this could become a major “nuisance for the Bush gang.” It hasn’t happened at all.
To refresh your memory, anyone who works for a presidential administration and needs clearance to receive classified materials has to sign something called Standard Form 312, which is a nondisclosure agreement for federal officials. Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, for example, signed SF312 in 2001. Part of the document includes a key passage, relevant to the Plame scandal.
Information remains classified until it has been officially declassified. Its disclosure in a public source does not declassify the information. Of course, merely quoting the public source in the abstract is not a second unauthorized disclosure. However, before disseminating the information elsewhere or confirming the accuracy of what appears in the public source, the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified. If it has not, further dissemination of the information or confirmation of its accuracy is also an unauthorized disclosure.
So, even if we accept Rove’s story at face value — he learned Plame’s identity from a reporter he no longer remembers, and merely confirmed it — it’s still a serious problem. Rove wasn’t supposed to do this and had a legal obligation to check on the classification status of the information. He didn’t. As a result, it seems fairly obvious that Rove violated the disclosure agreement.
Since then, there have been two main problems. One, the White House has ignored necessary follow-up; and two, reporters have ignored this facet of the story.
On the first point, Rove’s apparent violation of SF312 should, at a minimum, lead to the White House pulling his security clearance. Helen Thomas has nagged Scott McClellan about this on a couple of occasions, but he’s blown her off.
Which leads us to the second point, which is complete disinterest in the story from reporters covering the scandal. As Media Matters recently noted, the Washington Post and USA Today haven’t mentioned the nondisclosure agreement at all, and the New York Times has only made passing reference to this facet of the story. Google News helps prove the point.
I know the media doesn’t like complicated stories that require a lot of explanation, but this one’s easy. Rove was required to check before confirming classified information; according to his own account of the scandal, he didn’t. The White House hasn’t pulled his security clearance, and Dems on the Hill are pushing the Bush gang for some kind of internal follow-up. See? It’s simple. No reason not to write something about it.
A U.S. News article recently quoted a WH senior adviser saying, “There is no new news. Rove is cool as a cucumber.” There is some new news, though; it’s just being overlooked.