1 Boring Old Man

What was he innocent of, Karl Rove?

I suppose they all were innocent of outing an Undercover Agent, the real charge. They said, I presume, that they didn’t know she was under cover, and there was no way to prove that wasn’t true [she certainly doesn’t seem to have been under any cover to them].

Karl Rove apparently told the F.B.I. about his conversation with Robert Novak in which he confirmed Valerie Plame’s identity.  While we would question the nature of that conversation, thinking that the two of them cleaned it up, I guess there was nothing to take our suspicions out of the range of speculation. Maybe that doesn’t matter in the end anyway.

So all that was left was the possibility that Karl Rove’s leaving out his conversation with Matthew Cooper in his earlier testimony to the F.B.I. and the Grand Jury was a lie. When he voluntarily came back, stating he’d remembered it, there was apparently no way to prove that he wasn’t telling the truth.

Scooter Libby, on the other hand, told some whoppers, and left out some big things. So there was a pattern of lies, some provable, others only suggested, but likely because of the pattern. Lying to a Grand Jury, if provable, is against the law.

I suppose, so long as Cheney was straight with the Grand Jury, he’s free and clear. His notes on Wilson’s article simply say he knew his wife was an Agent. All he has to say is that he didn’t know she was an undercover agent. Even if they had a witness that swore he said, "Out her!" it wouldn’t matter. He would have had to say, "Out Valerie Plame, that C.I.A. Undercover Agent!"

So it is a tragedy, just like I was saying below, except the flaw is in us. We thought if Patrick Fitzgerald could show that the Vice President and his henchmen pulled a huge dirty trick like this, on purpose, their government would collapse and away they would go. Our tragic character flaw was a naive belief that "the truth will make us free." We lived for the law we wanted to exist, not the law that does. This dirty trick is against the law only if they knew what they were doing, and that can’t be proved. It may even be true that they didn’t know. They may have just bumbled. No big surprise – they’ve bumbled everything else. They can lie to us all they want to. In this case, lying to the people isn’t against the law.