Since Friday afternoon’s revelations that Karl Rove may very well have been of the White House staffers who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to reporters, Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, has been working the phones furiously, insisting that his client has done absolutely nothing wrong. Some of Luskin’s denials have been surprisingly categorical, which gives them the ring of reliability, but there’s still plenty of room for skepticism. In fact, some of Luskin’s arguments are already a bit questionable.<\/p>\n
* Luskin told the LA Times<\/a>, “The folks in Fitzgerald’s office have asked us not to talk about what Karl has had to say” — Really? Because that doesn’t sound quite right. As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell noted<\/a>, “Prosecutors have absolutely no control over what witnesses say when they leave the grand jury room. Rove can tell us word-for-word what he said to the grand jury and would if he thought it would help him.”<\/p>\n * Luskin said Rove had been assured by prosecutors that he is not a target of the investigation — That may or may not be true, but it hardly seems significant. I’ve never worked in the criminal justice system, but it doesn’t seem like a stretch to me that maybe, just maybe, prosecutors wouldn’t actually tell a target that he’s a target.<\/p>\n * Luskin told the LAT<\/a>, “It is certainly my understanding that Karl has testified absolutely truthfully about all his conversations about everybody that he has been asked about during that week” — The interesting thing about that quote is the first five words. It’s Luskin’s “understanding” that Rove is the salt of the earth, but Luskin wasn’t actually in the room when Rove testified before the grand jury. Luskin, in other words, doesn’t actually know anything beyond what Rove has told him.<\/p>\n * Luskin told Newsweek<\/a> that Rove “never knowingly disclosed classified information.” — That’s not a terribly persuasive defense. The law makes it a crime to deliberately reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent, as Plame was, but Luskin’s comment to Newsweek emphasizes “knowingly.” It might make it tough to prosecute Rove on an Intelligence Identities Protection Act violation, but if they’re pursuing a perjury charge, this defense won’t help.<\/p>\n * On a related note, Luskin has told reporters Rove never “identified<\/a>” Plame. But as Digby noted<\/a> in an excellent post, even this is open to some interpretation. “Did he not identify her by name? Or did he not identify her as a CIA operative? In other words, did Karl Rove call up Matt Cooper and say, ‘Joe Wilson’s wife is a CIA operative and she got him the job,’ which technically means that he didn’t “identify” her, but he sure put old Matt on the trail.”<\/p>\n Some points to consider as this controversy continues to unfold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since Friday afternoon’s revelations that Karl Rove may very well have been of the White House staffers who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to reporters, Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, has been working the phones furiously, insisting that his client has done absolutely nothing wrong. Some of Luskin’s denials have been surprisingly categorical, which gives them the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}