If the rumours swirling round the blogosphere are correct, Karl Rove’s last minute submission of an email exchange with Adam Levine to Fitzgerald is designed to “prove” (I take it his 4 trips to the GJ didn’t suffice to convince them fully) that he did not lie about talking to Cooper about Plame, but instead is just a busy guy with a not so good memory for pesky little things like talking about a covert agent working on WMD’s, after her husband had smacked down the 16 words in the SOTU a few days before in the NY Times.
Believable? Perhaps. I once heard of a guy who found a four-leaf clover, so anything is possible I suppose.
Back to July 11th and the email exchange with Levine…
From Isikoff:
One small item was a July 11, 2003, e-mail Rove sent to former press aide Adam Levine saying Levine could come up to his office to discuss a personnel issue. The e-mail was at 11:17 a.m., minutes after Rove had gotten off the phone with Matt Cooper –the same conversation (in which White House critic Joe Wilson’s wife’s work for the CIA was discussed) that Rove originally failed to disclose to the grand jury. Levine, with whom Rove often discussed his talks with reporters, did immediately go up to see Rove. But as Levine told the FBI last week, Rove never said anything about Cooper. The Levine talk was arguably helpful to one of Luskin’s arguments: that, as a senior White House official, Rove dealt with a wide range of matters and might not remember every conversation he has had with journalists.
Where to start on this nice bit of spin from the Rove playbook, disseminated to the masses via your favorite insider and mine, Isikoff…
How about with this salient little fact… Rove wasn’t too busy or forgetful to send off an email to Stephen Hadley before he left early for a family vacation to let him know he spoke to Cooper…
“Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he’s got a welfare reform story coming,” Rove wrote Hadley, who has since risen to the top job of national security adviser.
“When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn’t this damaging? Hasn’t the president been hurt? I didn’t take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn’t get Time far out in front on this.”
Now Rove & company have tried to prove that this email to Hadley shows that Rove was not leaking, he was doing damage control on the upcoming Novak article and trying to minimize how many reporters were going to cover the issue. Poor Rove, he just wants to talk about welfare reform and the mean journalist starts bringing up Niger…
Well, that’s one way to look at it of course.
But you could also read it this way ~ Hey Hadley… Cooper called and started hammering me on our illegal case for war… I didn’t take the bait and stuck to our talking points about Wilson instead… have Scooter call him tomorrow to confirm that Wilson sucks. (Libby did indeed call Cooper the next day)
{Update} GMA , via firedoglake, is reporting that Matt Cooper confirmed this morning that Scooter told him on the 12th Plame was covert after first hearing about her from Rove (see below for why all this matters in the context of Rove)
This also makes sense considering what else happened on July 11, 2003 in relation to Niger… Tenet fell on his sword, probably because of the leaks coming out of the CIA which were putting the blame right back at Bush’s door… so much so that both Rice & Powell had to do damage control.
So yes, it is entirely possible that Rove had a lot on his mind when he talked to Levine. Unfortunately for his story, you don’t typically forget things that are in direct relation to the thing that’s keeping you up at night… you typically forget the unimportant stuff… like, you know, welfare reform.
Then of course, there’s this little problem for Karl… Matt Cooper didn’t quite remember things the same way…
He called Rove, not to talk about welfare reform (wow, Bush’s Brain must need some time off if he can’t remember what he talked about even minutes after a conversation… maybe he isn’t lying and just needs to resign for health reasons… can’t have someone that forgetful advising the President can we?), but to talk about the Niger admission by the White House and, yup, about Wilson:
…But at the same time, I was interested in an ancillary question about why government officials, publicly and privately, seemed to be disparaging Wilson. It struck me, as I told the grand jury, as odd and unnecessary, especially after their saying the President’s address should not have included the 16-word claim about Saddam and African uranium.
I told the grand jurors that I was curious about Wilson when I called Karl Rove on Friday, July 11. Rove was an obvious call for any White House correspondent, let alone someone trying to prove himself at a new beat. As I told the grand jury–which seemed very interested in my prior dealings with Rove–I don’t think we had spoken more than a handful of times before that. I recalled that when I got the White House job a couple of weeks earlier, I left a message for him trying to introduce myself and announce my new posting.
As I told the grand jury–and we went over this in microscopic, excruciating detail, which may someday prove relevant–I recall calling Rove from my office at TIME magazine through the White House switchboard and being transferred to his office. I believe a woman answered the phone and said words to the effect that Rove wasn’t there or was busy before going on vacation. But then, I recall, she said something like, “Hang on,” and I was transferred to him. I recall saying something like, “I’m writing about Wilson,” before he interjected. “Don’t get too far out on Wilson,” he told me. I started taking notes on my computer, and while an e-mail I sent moments after the call has been leaked, my notes have not been.
…. In fact, I told the grand jury, Rove told me the conversation was on “deep background.” I explained to the grand jury that I take the term to mean that I can use the material but not quote it, and that I must keep the identity of my source confidential.
Rove went on to say that Wilson had not been sent to Niger by the director of the CIA and, I believe from my subsequent e-mails–although it’s not in my notes–that Rove added that Dick Cheney didn’t send him either. Indeed, the next day the Vice President’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, told me Cheney had not been responsible for Wilson’s mission.
Much of my grand jury session revolved around my notes and my e-mails. (Those e-mails and notes were given to the special counsel when Time Inc., over my objections, complied with a court order.) …. The notes, and my subsequent e-mails, go on to indicate that Rove told me material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson’s mission and his findings.
As for Wilson’s wife, I told the grand jury I was certain that Rove never used her name and that, indeed, I did not learn her name until the following week, when I either saw it in Robert Novak’s column or Googled her, I can’t recall which. Rove did, however, clearly indicate that she worked at the “agency”…. Rove added that she worked on “WMD” (the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction) issues and that she was responsible for sending Wilson. This was the first time I had heard anything about Wilson’s wife.
Rove never once indicated to me that she had any kind of covert status. I told the grand jury something else about my conversation with Rove. Although it’s not reflected in my notes or subsequent e-mails, I have a distinct memory of Rove ending the call by saying, “I’ve already said too much.” This could have meant he was worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else. I don’t know, but that sign-off has been in my memory for two years.
….
A surprising line of questioning had to do with, of all things, welfare reform. The prosecutor asked if I had ever called Mr. Rove about the topic of welfare reform. Just the day before my grand jury testimony Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, had told journalists that when I telephoned Rove that July, it was about welfare reform and that I suddenly switched topics to the Wilson matter. After my grand jury appearance, I did go back and review my e-mails from that week, and it seems as if I was, at the beginning of the week, hoping to publish an article in TIME on lessons of the 1996 welfare-reform law, but the article got put aside, as often happens when news overtakes story plans. My welfare-reform story ran as a short item two months later, and I was asked about it extensively. To me this suggested that Rove may have testified that we had talked about welfare reform, and indeed earlier in the week, I may have left a message with his office asking if I could talk to him about welfare reform. But I can’t find any record of talking about it with him on July 11, and I don’t recall doing so.
So back to Adam Levine… is this really Rove’s excuse for perjury and obstruction? That he didn’t tell a press aide so therefore he just has a bad memory? I highly doubt that is what gave Fitzgerald “pause”. Something else is going on.
Wish I knew what it was… but what I do know, to paraphrase our friend Fitz, is that those talking points won’t fly Karl.
Oh, and one last thing about the leak of Plame’s name… and why it is not crucial that she was identified as “Valerie Plame” or “Valerie Wilson” vs. “Joe Wilson’s wife” for the purposes of disseminating classified info and putting a NOC at risk…
From Cooper’s recounting of his GJ testimony:
I did not learn her name until the following week, when I either saw it in Robert Novak’s column or Googled her, I can’t recall which.
The damage was done when “Wilson’s wife” & “CIA” were used in the same sentence to a reporter. People can Google, as Matt points out… It’s not as if she lives in an underground bunker with Cheney or anything. And if he can Google and find her, so can anybody who might have a more sinister reason for doing so… ummm, like, terrorists or something.
crossposted @ Jaded Reality