WHITE HOUSE MEMO
For Bush, Effect of
Investigation
of C.I.A. Leak Case
Is Uncertain
By RICHARD W.
STEVENSON, NYTimes on the Web, July 24, 2005
WASHINGTON, July 23 -- His
former secretary of state, most of his closest aides and a parade of other
senior officials have testified to a grand jury. His political strategist
has emerged as a central figure in the case, as has his vice president's chief
of staff. His spokesman has taken a pounding for making public statements
about the matter that now appear not to be accurate.
For all that, it is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a
C.I.A. operative's identity will mean for President Bush. So far the
disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted
any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has
suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president.
Yet Mr. Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be
able to evade indefinitely.
For starters, did Mr. Bush know in the fall of 2003, when he was telling the
public that no one wanted to get to the bottom of the case more than he did,
that Mr. Rove, his longtime strategist and senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby
Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had touched on the C.I.A.
officer's identity in conversations with journalists before the officer's name
became public? If not, when did they tell him, and what would the delay
say in particular about his relationship with Mr. Rove, whose career and Mr.
Bush's have been intertwined for decades?
Then there is the broader issue of whether Mr. Bush was aware of any effort by
his aides to use the C.I.A. officer's identity to undermine the standing of her
husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of
twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.
For the last several weeks, Mr. Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, have
declined to address the leak in any substantive way, citing the continuing
federal criminal investigation.
But Democrats increasingly see an opportunity to raise questions about Mr.
Bush's credibility, and to reopen a debate about whether the White House leveled
with the nation about the urgency of going to war with Iraq. And even some
Republicans say Mr. Bush cannot assume that he will escape from the
investigation politically unscathed.
"Until all the facts come out, no one is really going to know who the fickle
finger of fate points at," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster.
The case centers on how the name of a C.I.A. operative came to be appear two
years ago in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who identified her by her
maiden name, Valerie Plame. The operative, who is more usually known as
Valerie Wilson, is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had
publicly accused the administration eight days before Mr. Novak's column of
twisting some of the intelligence used to justify going to war with Iraq.
Under some conditions, the disclosure of a covert intelligence agent's name can
be a federal crime.
The special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has kept a tight
curtain of secrecy around his investigation. But he spent more than an
hour in the Oval Office on June 24, 2004, interviewing Mr. Bush about the case.
Mr. Bush was not under oath, but he had his personal lawyer for the case, James
E. Sharp, with him.
Neither the White House nor the Justice Department has said what Mr. Bush was
asked about, but prosecutors do not lightly seek to put questions directly to
any president, suggesting that there was some information that Mr. Fitzgerald
felt he could get only from Mr. Bush.
Allan J. Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University in
Washington, said the lesson of recent history, for example in the Iran-contra
case under President Ronald Reagan, is that presidents tend to know more than it
might first appear about what is going on within the White House.
"My presumption in presidential politics is that the president always knows,"
Mr. Lichtman said. "But there are degrees of knowing. Reagan said,
keep the contras together body and soul. Did he know exactly what Oliver
North was doing? No, it doesn't mean he knew what every subordinate is
doing."
Although it is possible that other officials will turn out to have played
leading roles in the leak case, the subordinates whose actions would appear to
be of most interest to Mr. Bush right now are Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby, who as Mr.
Cheney's chief of staff had particular reason to protect the vice president.
According to accounts by various people involved in the case, Mr. Rove spoke in
the days after Mr. Wilson went public with his criticism in July 2003 to both of
the first two reporters to disclose that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A.,
Mr. Novak and Matthew Cooper of Time. Mr. Cooper has said he also spoke
about the case with Mr. Libby.
By September 2003, as a criminal investigation was getting under way, Mr.
McClellan was telling reporters that Mr. Rove had nothing to do with the leak,
saying he had checked with Mr. Rove about the topic.
Around the same time, the president was saying he had no idea who might have
been responsible. Asked by a reporter on Oct. 6, 2003, whether the leak
was retaliation for Mr. Wilson's criticism, Mr. Bush replied: "I don't
know who leaked the information, for starters. So it's hard for me to
answer that question until I find out the truth."
Asked the next day if he was confident that the leakers would be found, Mr.
Bush, alluding to the "two senior administration officials" cited by Mr. Novak
as his sources, replied: "I don't know if we're going to find out the
senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and
there's a lot of senior officials. I don't have any idea. I'd like
to. I want to know the truth."
Republicans said the relationship between Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove was so deep and
complex that it was hard to imagine the president cutting ties with him barring
an indictment.
"Can you survive being involved in something you probably shouldn't have been
involved in where you didn't break any laws?" Mr. Fabrizio said. "Well,
you probably can, especially if you are Karl."
Mr. Fabrizio said that even if Mr. Rove left the White House, he would continue
to consult with Mr. Bush "unless they put him in a tunnel."
Mr. McClellan and other White House officials have repeatedly declined to answer
when asked if Mr. Rove or Mr. Libby had told the president by October 2003 that
they had alluded to Ms. Wilson's identity months earlier in their conversations
with the journalists.
But Mr. Bush's political opponents say the president is in a box. In their
view, either Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby kept the president in the dark about their
actions, making them appear evasive at a time when Mr. Bush was demanding that
his staff cooperate fully with the investigation, or Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby had
told the president and he was not forthcoming in his public statements about his
knowledge of their roles.
"We know that Karl Rove, through Scott McClellan, did not tell Americans the
truth," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois and a former top
aide in the Clinton White House. "What's important now is what Karl Rove
told the president. Was it the truth, or was it what he told Scott
McClellan?"
There is a third option, that neither Mr. Rove nor Mr. Libby considered their
conversations with the journalists to have amounted to leaking or confirming the
information about Ms. Wilson. In that case, they may have felt no need to
inform the president, or they did inform him and he shared their view that they
had done nothing wrong.
Mr. Bush has also yet to answer any questions publicly about what if anything he
learned from aides about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Wilson in the days after Mr. Wilson
leveled his criticism of the administration in an Op-Ed article in The New York
Times on July 6, 2003.
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