Re: President/Dean Wormer

pudge on 2005-07-13T22:36:06

Many people think it is essentially fact that Karl Rove broke the law. Well, it's not. Not even close.

Most importantly, there's no evidence that Rove knew Plame was undercover (if indeed she was: that still is not publicly known, though it seems likely, else why investigate it?). The Cooper e-mail says only that Rove identified Wilson's wife as working for the CIA on WMD, not that she was undercover. There's simply no reason to think Rove certainly knew she was undercover.

There's also the possibility that Rove didn't even tell Cooper until he knew Novak had the information and was going to have it published. So in this possible scenario, Rove didn't know she was undercover, and told Cooper only that information which was already essentially in the public domain (that is, it certainly would be in the public domain by the time Cooper's story ran).

There is certainly a lot more to this story than any of us know. The Island of Conclusions may look good from afar, but it is less attractive once you get there.

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Rove and Plame

kjones4 on 2005-07-14T03:41:00

While I can't say whether Rove broke any laws, clearly something happened that has spurred a serious federal investigation. I was only an enlisted man in Army Intelligence between '84 and '92, but there were serious penalties for revealing anything classified. In fact, I think part of the problem here is that much of the information that would shed light on what laws have been broken could in itself be classified. From my experience, it would be beyond belief that laws weren't broken in revealing Plame as a CIA employee working on WMD without prior approval from the CIA. Maybe because of her status at the time this information was revealed that specific laws such as the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act" were not violated. But I consider it highly probable that other laws were broken. It'll be interesting to see if we ever get any good public information as to what happened and who did it.

Re:Rove and Plame

pudge on 2005-07-14T05:00:53

No doubt something happened ... else why spend 20+ months on a grand jury investigation? And maybe even Rove was intimately and criminally involved. I only know that the facts as we now know them don't support the claim that Rove did anything seriously wrong, let alone committed a crime.

I certainly want to know what happened, and want whoever broke the law to be punished.