Democrats urge Bush to fire Rove in leak scandal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House faced mounting Democratic calls for President Bush to sideline or fire his top political aide Karl Rove on Monday over his involvement in a CIA leak scandal.

After publicly defending Rove two years ago, the White House responded to the barrage by saying it would not comment at the request of the prosecutors investigating who leaked the identify of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

"The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration. I trust they will follow through on this pledge," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said.

Other Democrats urged Bush to sideline Rove by suspending his access to classified information and said the deputy White House chief of staff should "clear the air" by answering questions from Congress. Another lawmaker said the intentional disclosure of a covert agent's identity amounted to an "act of treason."

The attacks were prompted by reports that Rove was one of the secret sources who spoke to Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper about Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. The Washington Post on Monday quoted Rove's lawyer as saying that his client did not mention Plame by name.

Plame's name was leaked, her diplomat husband said, because of his criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war. Rove's lawyer was not immediately available to comment.

"The president should immediately suspend Karl Rove's security clearances and shut him down by shutting him out of classified meetings or discussions," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat.

"It is time for the President to keep his word. Karl Rove should be fired and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," said Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York. Several other Democrats have also called on Rove to explain his role or resign.

Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and the ranking minority member of the House Government Reform Committee, called for a congressional hearing to hear testimony from Rove, who is widely seen as the architect of Bush's election victories.

"The recent disclosures about Mr. Rove's actions have such serious implications that we can no longer responsibly ignore them. The intentional disclosure of a covert CIA agent's identity would be an act of treason," Waxman said.

Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, wrote the White House asking Rove to "tell Americans what he knew, when he knew it, and who he may have told about Valerie Plame's identity in order to clear the air once and for all."

A U.S. federal judge had ordered Cooper, along with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, to testify in the case and reveal their sources. Cooper avoided a jail sentence last week by agreeing to testify. Miller refused to testify and was jailed.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who was inundated with questions about Rove at his daily news briefing, declined to comment when asked whether Bush continued to have confidence in Rove. "You're asking this question in the context of an ongoing investigation, and I would not read anything into it," McClellan said of his refusal to comment.

McClellan also refused to say whether Rove's job could be changed, or whether Bush stood by his pledge to fire anybody found responsible for the leak.

"I think we all want to see the prosecutors get to the bottom of this matter, the president wants to see the prosecutors get to the bottom of this matter," McClellan said.

A grand jury investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, a Justice Department prosecutor, is seeking to determine who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's name to the media in 2003 and whether any laws were violated.

McClellan would not address what critics said were contradictory statements issued in the past by the White House and now by Rove's lawyer.

"I am well aware of what was said previously. I remember well what was said previously, and at some point, I look forward to talking about it. But until the investigation is complete, I'm just not going to do that," McClellan said.

In September and October 2003, McClellan rejected as "ridiculous" any suggestion that Rove was involved in the Plame leak.

When asked at an Oct. 10, 2003, briefing whether Rove and two other White House aides had ever told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA, McClellan said: "I spoke with those individuals... and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this... the leaking of classified information."

Secrets of the Scandal
By Nicholas D. Kristof
October 11, 2003

Like any good spy story, the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson is far more complex than it seems on the surface.

I know Mrs. Wilson, but I knew nothing about her C.I.A. career and hadn't realized she's "a hell of a shot with an AK-47," as a classmate at the C.I.A. training "farm," Jim Marcinkowski, recalls. I'll be more careful around her, for she also turns out to be skilled in throwing hand grenades and to have lived abroad and run covert operations in some of the world's messier spots. (Mrs. Wilson was not a source for this column or any other that I've written about the intelligence community.)

Those operations remain secret, but there are several crucial facts that can be made public without putting anyone at risk — and together, they leave everybody looking bad. The C.I.A. is now conducting a damage assessment, which will determine what networks and operations it will have to close down. But my sense is that Democrats exaggerate the damage to Mrs. Wilson's career and to her personal security, while Republicans vastly play down the enormity of the security breach and the danger to the assets she worked with.

And now a few pertinent facts:

First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons.

Second, as Mrs. Wilson rose in the agency, she was already in transition away from undercover work to management, and to liaison roles with other intelligence agencies. So this year, even before she was outed, she was moving away from "noc" — which means non-official cover, like pretending to be a business executive. After passing as an energy analyst for Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company, she was switching to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having "C.I.A." stamped on her forehead.

Third, Mrs. Wilson's intelligence connections became known a bit in Washington as she rose in the C.I.A. and moved to State Department cover, but her job remained a closely held secret. Even her classmates in the C.I.A.'s career training program mostly knew her only as Valerie P. That way, if one spook defected, the damage would be limited.

All in all, I think the Democrats are engaging in hyperbole when they describe the White House as having put Mrs. Wilson's life in danger and destroyed her career; her days skulking along the back alleys of cities like Beirut and Algiers were already mostly over.

Moreover, the Democrats cheapen the debate with calls, at the very beginning of the process, for a special counsel to investigate the White House. Hillary Rodham Clinton knows better than anyone how destructive and distracting a special counsel investigation can be, interfering with the basic task of governing, and it's sad to see her display the same pusillanimous partisanship that Republicans showed just a few years ago.

If Democrats have politicized the scandal and exaggerated it, Republicans have inexcusably tried to whitewash it. The leak risked the security of all operatives who had used Brewster-Jennings as cover, as well as of all assets ever seen with Mrs. Wilson. Unwitting sources will now realize that they were supplying the C.I.A. with information, and even real agents may fear exposure and vanish.

C.I.A. veterans are seething, and rightly so, at the betrayal by their own government. Larry Johnson, who entered the agency at the same time as Mrs. Wilson, is a Republican who voted for President Bush — and he's so enraged that he compares the administration leaker to the spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

"Here's a woman who put her life on the line," Mr. Johnson said. "But unlike a Navy seal or a marine, she didn't have a gun to fight back. All she had to protect her was her cover."

We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it.

This scandal leaves everybody stinking

Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it.

This has been my position all along--reporters learn all kinds of information but they're the ones who get it into print. The buck stops at the reporter. Or should. If not, where does it end--with the person who gave the source the information in the first place? The person who gave HIM/HER the info that trickled down to the source?

No, because all of those people knew that info and there were no problems. When did it become a problem? When the reporter wrote about it.

This, of course, is the angle the MSM will not admit. They'd rather cry "Stop us before we report again!"

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