He rose using tactics his foes are turning against him. But never bet against Karl Rove.
Howard Fineman
has always had good, but often deliberately whitewashing insight into
Karl Rove. But his latest is, I think, an excellent explanation of how
Rove's war on Joe Wilson came about:
Wilson had been obscured from view, peddling his story and his
doubts--but not his own name--to selected reporters, officials and Hill
staffers. The resulting stories had attracted the administration's attention. In May [The NYTimes' reporting dates this memo as June 10, UNLESS there is another memo!],
the State Department's intelligence unit had prepared a secret
memorandum about the provenance of Wilson's journey and its classified
results . . . But then Wilson went public.
Soon enough, Rove had drawn a bead on Wilson . . .
In the World According to Karl Rove, you take the offensive, and stay
there. You create a narrative that glosses over complex, mitigating
facts to divide the world into friends and enemies, light and darkness,
good and bad, Bush versus Saddam.
. . . You use the jujitsu of media flow to flip the energy of your
enemies against them. The Boss never discusses political mechanics in
public. But in fact everything is political--and everyone is fair game.
MR. PODESTA:
...they want us to be talking about Wilson. If you listen to what Mr.
Mehlman just did this morning, it's just more of the same: attack,
attack, attack. That's what got him in trouble two years ago. They
tried to smear Mr. Wilson. They tried to as one anonymous source, again
in the White House, said, it was about revenge back in 2003. And now
they're trying to change the subject, attack Democrats, attack their
critics. But the facts are that Mr. Rove said he wasn't involved.
Clearly, the one thing we know at the end of this week was that that
was a lie. McClellan's credibility is in shreds. I think Mr. Rove's
credibility is in shreds. He holds a senior-level national
security position, Tim. You know, they kind of make him out to be just
a political guy. He's the deputy chief of staff in charge of
coordinating the National Security Council, the Homeland Security
Council. He doesn't belong in the White House at this point.
MR. RUSSERT: He has, as you know, a security clearance. Do you believe he has violated that?
MR. PODESTA:
I think that you read the applicable paragraph, from both the Executive
Order 12958 and from this and from the briefings that he got, which is
that he had an affirmative obligation not to just repeat reporters what
information that he learned from reporters and, by the way, today we
learned from another source, probably Mr. Luskin, that he's not quite
sure whether he learned it first from another source or perhaps another
aide, and obviously the independent counsel, special prosecutor, is
looking at other people Ari Fleisher, Stephen Hadley and others and
Lewis Libby. So maybe he learned it from an aide, maybe he
learned it from reporters, but wherever he learned it, he shouldn't
have repeated it without affirmatively knowing that that information
had been declassified, and he couldn't have possibly known that.
In
that position, Rove is responsible for chairing meetings of the
Principals and Deputies Committees, which bring together high-level
representatives from various intelligence, law enforcement, and
homeland security agencies for regular and ad hoc briefings. Rove has
access to “all source intelligence,� meaning he has a Top
Secret/Special Background Investigation (SBI) clearance with access to
numerous compartments and special access programs (SAPs): Special
Intelligence (SI), COMINT, Byeman, ECI, Endseal, Gamma, H, Talent Keyhole (TK), Pearl, and VRK (Very Restricted Knowledge).
This means that Rove can access signals intelligence (SIGINT) information, including trancripts of domestic FBI wiretaps, human intelligence reports, reports on "black bag" and other "sneak and peek" operations, and internal CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, and Homeland Security documents.
Oh
yeah. Rove's exactly the person we want with access to all that,
because we know how he always puts the interests of our country above
partisan politics. NOT!
How do you say, ROVE BIN LYIN!
And let's not forget this little nugget;
On Oct. 28, Talon News, a news company tied to a group called GOP USA,
posted on the Internet an interview with Wilson in which the Talon News
questioner asks: An internal government memo prepared by U.S.
intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife,
a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons
issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do
you dispute that?
So a few questions. Who requested that
the memo be written? Who actually wrote it? Why does it contain
the inaccuracies the CIA
claims it does? Who were the administration officials who continued to
circulate the classified document to conservative news outlets even
after Plame's identity was initially revealed? And how did it get into the hands of Jeff Gannon?
Well, yes. That is a very, very good question. How did
this classified memo get into the hands of a male prostitute? Jeff Gannon, after basking in the spotlight about having access to this
secret memo, said later that he learned about it in the Wall Street
Journal. We know
Gannon testified before the grand jury; I wonder if he was truthful.
Omg
this just keeps getting better. No GOP outrage that Gannon was a gay
whore tied to outing a CIA agent, but godforbid he should ever try to
marry another gay!
