Jason Leopold's May 7 Article on Karl Rove's Legal Trouble

Jason Leopold wrote an article last Sunday (May 7) describing several aspects of Karl Rove's legal problems. If Mr. Leopold has nailed some of the issues correctly, it appears that Karl Rove over the last three years has simply managed to dig himself a deeper hole. Here's the beginning of Jason Leopold's article as it appeared in Truthout (bold emphasis mine):

Hundreds of pages of emails and memos "discovered" by the White House in February and turned over to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald show that Karl Rove played a much larger role in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case than he had previously disclosed to a grand jury and FBI investigators.

In February, TruthOut was the first to report the existence of the 250 pages of emails from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Office of the President that were written in mid-2003.

Some of the emails and memos were written by Rove, and are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting he lied to the grand jury and the FBI and may have obstructed justice during the course of the investigation. It was following their disclosure that Fitzgerald advised Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, several weeks ago that he intends to indict Rove for perjury and lying to investigators. The lingering question, sources close to the case said, is whether Fitzgerald will add obstruction of justice to the list of charges that he has already drafted against Rove.

The special problem that Karl Rove has is that he has been claiming that he forgot about his role in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and specifically a conversation he had with Matt Cooper of Time magazine. Some of this will take time to sort out but I assume that Karl Rove's initial testimony was that he was not involved in discussing Valerie Plame Wilson with others until she was outed by Robert Novak's famous article. Later he changed his testimony when confronted with evidence of his conversation with Matt Cooper. And now he has been confronted with further evidence of his involvement. Let's go deep into Leopold's article for these two paragraphs:

While some news accounts over the past 10 days have reported that Rove's fifth appearance before the grand jury two weeks ago was to clear up testimony as to why he failed to disclose his conversation with Cooper and the email he sent to Hadley afterward, according to sources the bulk of Rove's testimony centered on why he had not disclosed the emails and memos and the larger role he played in the campaign to smear Wilson's reputation.

Rove's answer to those questions was succinct and consistent with answers he gave to similar questions during previous testimonies over the past two years: he said he forgot and at the time had turned his attention to more important White House matters such as Bush's re-election campaign, sources knowledgeable about his testimony said.

Whatever one thinks of Rove and his politics, he is considered by many to be one of the most brilliant political minds of his generation. Forgetting always seemed an improbable defense since, in the early summer of 2003, the lack of WMDs in Iraq had led to a growing number of accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to justify a war; the controversy was correctly perceived by the White House as a potential public relations disaster and even a legal threat to Bush's presidency (and a certain measure of desperation may have led this to be one of the earliest occassions when a serious political situation was handled clumsily, in this case by the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson). The reality is that when a White House adviser is in the middle of such a huge controversy, the adrenaline does wonders for helping to remember things clearly.

Let's go back to the Leopold article and look at a series of points he make:

News reports over the past two years about Rove's legal troubles have centered on the fact that Rove allegedly failed to disclose to Fitzgerald and the grand jury a conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper in July 2003 about Plame Wilson and her husband, Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson, and an email Rove sent to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley about his conversation with Cooper.

While that issue continues to be a central focus in the case against Rove, what has not been previously reported is the fact that there are dozens of other memos and emails Rove sent to White House officials in June 2003, including former Chief of Staff Andrew Card, in which Rove suggests the White House launch a full scale public relations effort to attack Joseph Wilson for speaking out against the administration.

(snip)

According to sources close to the case, the emails also contained suggestions by Rove, and by senior officials in Vice President Dick Cheney's office and at the National Security Council, on how the White House should respond to what it believed were increasingly destructive comments Wilson had been making about the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence.

(snip)

The hard evidence Fitzgerald secured early on told a far different story about how Rove learned Plame Wilson was employed by the CIA than the narrative Rove gave during his two appearances before the grand jury in February 2004, sources close to the case said.

Rove admitted to FBI investigators and testified twice before a grand jury that he distributed damaging information about Plame Wilson and her husband to the Republican National Committee, outside political consultants and the media but did so only after Plame Wilson's name and employment status was published, according to attorneys who are familiar with Rove's testimony.

But the newly discovered emails and memos show that Rove was involved in a campaign to discredit Wilson and his wife more than a month before her name was published in a newspaper column.

It is likely that Rove has been playing a defense that assumed damaging memos and e-mails would never surface. He appears then to have a problem. His indictment will mean a small step in holding the Bush Administration accountable and that will not be a sad day in America. It will be a step in recovering our democracy. If Rove is indicted, it's possible we could see other indictments.