I was reviewing some old stories about the Plame scandal and came across a quote from The Guardian’s Julian Borger from September 2003.<\/p>\n
“Several of the journalists are saying privately, ‘Yes it was Karl Rove who I talked to.’ Now, the thing is that the journalists are not going to name Karl Rove publicly because you don’t name your sources, and to do so would discredit them as journalists. So the White House is safe for the time being, but Karl Rove’s name is very much out there.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Interestingly enough, at the time, Borger characterized this as an open secret that the media establishment knew, but wouldn’t report. Journalists, talking amongst themselves, apparently had no qualms about discussing Rove’s leaks because they all received the same calls from him.<\/p>\n
Some of the recent media reports, such as this one<\/a> in the LA Times over the weekend, literally ask, “Was it Karl Rove, after all?” Of course it was Rove. These reporters are feigning surprise at a revelation they knew two years ago. It’s like telling a friend to pretend to be stunned at his surprise birthday party after he’s already heard about it.<\/p>\n
Let’s not forget that Novak received the leak about Plame from two White House sources, but the Washington Post reported<\/a> way back in September 2003 that WH officials involved with the leak contacted “at least six<\/a>” other DC journalists with the information before Novak’s column ran. Time’s Matt Cooper was apparently one of them, but there are still several others, many of whom probably work at top-tier media outlets, who’ve known all along about the leakers’ identities but have helped keep them secret.<\/p>\n
In fact, if some of the leakees wanted to become the leakers, we could have learned a lot more about this scandal a long time ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was reviewing some old stories about the Plame scandal and came across a quote from The Guardian’s Julian Borger from September 2003. “Several of the journalists are saying privately, ‘Yes it was Karl Rove who I talked to.’ Now, the thing is that the journalists are not going to name Karl Rove publicly because […]<\/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-4660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4660","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=4660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}