21/6/06:K.ROVE SLIPPED AWAY FROM INDICTMENT





[That political animal seems to have slipped away from
the indictment. How disappointing!! -- U Ne Oo.]

[NYTr] The Cocktail That Saved Rove's Ass

nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com

Wed Jun 21 14:08:48 EDT 2006


The Huffington Post via Alternet - Jun 21, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/37894/

The Cocktail That Saved Rove's Ass

By Arianna Huffington

It's been a week since Patrick Fitzgerald decided that he couldn't
make the case against Karl Rove, and I'm amazed that more hasn't been
made of the role Viveca Novak played in Rove's narrow escape from
indictment. She was his human stay-out-of-jail-free card.

For those of you who don't remember this blip on the Plamegate radar,
Novak was the Time magazine reporter who, over drinks with her old pal
attorney Robert Luskin in the summer or early fall of 2004 at
Washington's Café Deluxe, let it slip that his client Rove had been
one of the sources who'd leaked the lowdown on Valerie Plame to Matt
Cooper.

By the time Novak spilled the beans to Luskin, Rove had already
appeared before the grand jury once and had told federal investigators
he had no recollection of talking to Cooper. Novak's unconscionable
blabbing about a colleague's source led Luskin to thank her and to do
an email search which turned up a document noting that Cooper and Rove
had indeed spoken. As the Wall Street Journal put it earlier this
week:

But the issue of whether Mr. Rove genuinely forgot this conversation
or purposely lied wasn't settled. A key sticking point for the
prosecutor was how Mr. Luskin could have known that his client was a
source for Mr. Cooper if Mr. Rove hadn't told him. Had Mr. Rove lied
about not remembering the conversation?

Then, last October, Mr. Luskin's media relationships and his rapport
with Mr. Fitzgerald bore fruit. During a pair of meetings with the
prosecutor just before he was set to seek indictments, Mr. Luskin
explained that he heard from Viveca Novak, who then worked at Time
magazine, over drinks at a Washington bistro one night that chatter
around her newsroom indicated Mr. Cooper considered Mr. Rove a source
for information about Ms. Plame.

Mr. Fitzgerald then took testimony from her and had Mr. Rove return to
the grand jury room to discuss this new information. Perjury cases are
notoriously difficult to win because a prosecutor has to prove that a
person willfully made false statements under oath. In this matter,
legal experts say Mr. Luskin's discovery of the Hadley email and
revelation of his discussion with Ms. Novak may have created enough
reasonable doubt.

After loosening her lips to Luskin, Novak zipped them shut, saying
nothing to her editors at Time while continuing to cover the Plamegate
story. Making matters worse, in the fall of 2005 she appeared before
Fitzgerald and still did not tell her editors at Time and still
continued to cover the case. Eventually she acknowledged to her
editors and Time's readers that she had played a key role in Rove's
defense. Earlier this year, she quietly took a buyout at Time and now
works for the Annenberg Center assessing, of all things, the honesty
of campaign ads.

The sad truth is that Novak's perfidy did more to stymie the
indictment of Karl Rove than anything else, and while it would be nice
to believe that Rove may yet face criminal justice for his actions,
it's unlikely that he will.

But even if he's never charged, Rove still confirmed the identity of a
covert CIA operative to Bob Novak who then published it. He leaked it
to Matt Cooper who, unlike either Novak, tried to expose what the Bush
White House was up to. Rove then lied about being the source of the
leak for a year, in the process hanging Scott McClellan out to dry by
letting him tell the press and the American public that Rove had
assured him he had no involvement with the leak.

And, even if you believe Rove's improbable tale that his conversation
with Cooper had somehow slipped his mind, he was reminded of it by
Viveca Novak via Luskin by the spring of 2004 and could easily have
ended Cooper and Time's prolonged fight to protect him as a source and
told the president that he had been one of the leakers (saving his
boss from the embarrassment of vowing to fire anyone involved, then
pulling back on that pledge once it became clear that that would mean
cutting loose his beloved Turd Blossom).

But Rove kept his mouth shut, preferring swift boating and rousing the
country to the threat of gay marriage. For all these reasons, Rove
should not be allowed to remain a part of the administration and Bush
should not be allowed to keep him on without shame.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute.

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