1 Boring Old Man

Packed and ready with time on my hands. So, emptywheel is still at it. She’s on the Tatel Opinion about whether Judith Miller and Matt Cooper have Privilege that was just released. In her last piece, she points to Novak telling the Grand Jury:

According to Novak, when he “brought up” Wilson’s wife, “Mr. Rove … promised to seek declassification of portions of a CIA report regarding the Niger trip, which Rove said “wasn’t an impressive piece of work or a very definitive piece of work”

Tatel appears to believe this is statement supports an argument for perjury; so either Rove testified he said no such thing, or there is a discrepancy about what was said. But consider another really important aspect of this. On July 8 and 9, when Rove is reported to have had this conversation, this report was still classified (as Novak’s column makes clear). Yet, Novak says, Rove discussed it and–from the content of Novak’s column–someone gave him details of it. This issue is all the more interesting as it would mark Rove as having seen the classified report from the CIA, even while he claimed not to know about Plame.

Wilson made an oral report in Langley that an Iraqi uranium purchase was "highly unlikely," though he also mentioned in passing that a 1988 Iraqi delegation> tried to establish commercial contacts. CIA officials did not regard Wilson’s intelligence as definitive, being based primarily on what the Niger officials told him and probably would have claimed under any circumstances. The CIA report of Wilson’s briefing remains classified.

In either case, either Rove leaked details of the report even as he told Novak the report was still classified, or someone–Libby–leaked Novak those details after the Rove conversation.

But what’s the point of all of this. There’s increasing inneundo that Patrick Fitzgerald thought that Rove and maybe Novak lied too, obstructed justice too, and that he was pursuing avenues to try to prove it. I, of course, can’t be trusted to evaluate anything since I would convict Rove at this point on looks alone. But to my totally biased eyes, there’s perjury here. Rove is saying "I heard that too" to imply some benign alibi they cooked up [heard about Plame from Reporters]. But what he really told Novak was that he knew about Wilson’s report, and then he leaked what it said. I think that’s against the law. But Fitzgerald didn’t indict Rove, so there’s something unclear about all of this to me.

emptywheel doesn’t think the Plame case is over and I don’t think the Plame case is over [or, we agree, because the case isn’t over]. Somewhere in the chain of information, somebody who knew Valerie Plame was undercover told somebody else about her. That is simply a fact. Somewhere, somebody gave the coordinated go-ahead to leak her identity to the Press. That’s also a fact. So this is an open case. Scooter Libby may go to jail for not telling us the answer, but that doesn’t negate the question.

So long…