Rove’s not-quite-dodged bullet — Part I

October 31, 2005

Patrick Fitzgerald may have warned us all not to read “tea leaves,” but the political world wants to know whether Karl Rove is in the clear, and can move forward knowing that an indictment is a long shot, or whether Rove remains in legal jeopardy.

The media gave mixed signals, based on thin sourcing, all weekend. The WaPo, meanwhile, reports today that Republicans are “express[ing] relief” over Rove’s success thus far, but their relief may be misplaced.

[T]wo legal sources intimately familiar with Fitzgerald’s tactics in this inquiry said they believe Rove remains in significant danger. They described Fitzgerald as being relentlessly thorough but also conservative throughout this prosecution — and his willingness to consider Rove’s eleventh-hour pleading of a memory lapse is merely a sign of Fitzgerald’s caution. […]

Another warning sign for Rove was in the phrasing of Friday’s indictment of Libby. Fitzgerald referred to Rove in those charging papers as a senior White House official and dubbed him “Official A.” In prosecutorial parlance, this kind of awkward pseudonym is often used for individuals who have not been indicted in a case but still face a significant chance of being charged. No other official in the investigation carries such an identifier.

If the Bush gang is celebrating Rove’s non-indictment, it’s premature. For that matter, Lawrence O’Donnell notes that, as far as the politics is concerned, the fact that this sword of Damocles is hanging over Rove’s head is hardly good news for the White House.

‘The White House dodged a bullet’ is the single stupidest bit of nonstop echo punditry we’ve heard this weekend. Karl Rove not getting indicted presents the White House with a worse problem than an indictment would have. The problem being — Rove is going to go to work Monday morning at the White House with TV cameras following his every move and with 47% of the public believing he did something wrong, according to today’s Washington Post poll.

Stay tuned.

Along those same lines is Frank Rich’s column yesterday, which began:

TO believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you’d have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took “responsibility” for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, would name “the White House horrors.”

  • Much as I respect Lawrence O’Donnell’s knowledge of Washington, I am afraid he s only right if the TV cameras and the media do indeed continue to follow Rove’s every move. Too often the media has demonstrated an ability to focus on only one subject at a time. Unless Fitzgerald actually indicts Rove, the media will just move on to another subject, such as this morning’s Supreme Court nomination.

    The media will probably also enclessly echo the Bush & Co. talking points that there was no underlying crime since Fitzgerald did not indict anyone on outing Plame. This of course ignores Fitzgerald’s own comments that he could not get to the bottom of that potential crime because his investigation was obstructed and lied to. Hence the Libby indictment.

    Another media wide talking point is the claim that ALL presidents run into problems in their second term, with the unspoken subtext that this “truism” somehow diminishes the Plame affair. However, even if second term problems were routine it does not lessen the gravity of the Plame outing. Further, the “truism”, as with many “truisms” isn’t really true! The Plame scandal started in Bush’s first term and was just another example of this administration’s arrogance and normal procedure of stomping on anyone who dared disagree with them. One of the reason’s they have a second term is because their cover-up succeeded in keeping any of this from coming out before the election last year. In the same way, the Watergate scandal was not really a “second term” problem, but rather dealt with actions in Nixon’s first term which they managed to keep hidden until he was into a second term.

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