Back in February of 2004, I wrote about the political woes of the Bush reelection campaign, predicting that the president would soon take a tremendous public relations hit “when the grand jury indicts someone from his administration for outing Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife, a covert agent in the CIA. Scott McClellan, White House Press Secretary, and Mary Matalin, former advisor to Vice President Cheney have already been called before a grand jury. This case may soon explode on several levels…” It turned out that I overestimated the speed of the wheels of justice by a year and a half, and underestimated the ability of the administration to stonewall special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the White House evasions of 2004 have reaped a bitter harvest. With each new revelation about Rovegate, there is growing evidence that Fitzgerald is looking into broad obstruction of justice charges against Rove, Scooter Libby, and assorted White House role players.

Last week we saw a new strategic ploy by Karl Rove, who let it be known through his lawyer, Robert Luskin, that it was a journalist who first informed him about Valerie Plame’s covert identity, rather than a government source. What a perfect story! It wasn’t, says Rove, the White House who disgracefully outed Plame; rather, it was some loose-lipped member of the fourth estate. For a brief moment, this factoid gained some traction and gave Bush apologists hope, as Republican Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman went on Meet the Press, to trumpet Rove’s innocence and demand an apology from all Rove’s detractors.

Rove’s version of events however, has collapsed under scrutiny. A huge problem arose when Rove could not “remember” which journalist it was who first told him about Plame. This memory lapse was too convenient and self-serving for even Republican partisans. According to the Washington Post, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby took this gambit even a step further by identifying NBC correspondent Tim Russert as the original source of Libby’s information. Russert however, has not only denied telling Libby about Plame, he denied having any such knowledge in the first place. So the attempts by both Rove and Libby at political ju-jitsu, at deflecting blame from themselves, and throwing it back on the press corps, not only have failed to pass the smell test, they may even rise to the level of perjury.

An additional problem for Rove emerged back in 2004, when Matt Cooper of Time Magazine agreed to testify before the grand jury, but only about his contacts with Scooter Libby. According to testimony leaked to the Washington Post, Cooper testified that he, Cooper, brought up Valerie Plame to Libby, who replied, “I heard that too.” This testimony was reportedly a surprise to the prosecution, who immediately asked Cooper where he had learned about Plame in the first place. Cooper refused to answer the question, reminding the prosecutors that he had only agreed to discuss his contacts with Libby. It was this turn of events that led the Special Prosecutor to take the case to the Supreme Court, to compel Cooper to provide the missing information. Only after being rebuffed by the Supreme Court, did Time Magazine and Cooper give up the source of the information: Karl Rove.

The fact that Rove was Cooper’s source is significant on several levels. First, it suggests that Rove was not completely candid in his testimony before the grand jury, and most likely omitted his contact with Cooper. What may have emboldened Rove to withhold information from the grand jury was the fact that there existed no White House record of his conversation with Cooper. Because Cooper had called Rove and was patched through the White House switchboard, no phone log of the contact was generated. It is possible that Rove made a bad gamble in his testimony before the grand jury, reasoning that the absence of a phone record and Cooper’s continuing pledge of confidentiality would allow Rove to deny that he was Cooper’s source. It was a gamble that Rove lost when the Supreme Court ruled against Time Magazine, and Time editor Norman Pearlstine agreed to turn the records of Cooper’s conversation with Rove over to the special prosecutor. A second way that Rove’s involvement is significant, is that it reminds us of how important reporters’ testimony has been in the unraveling of this scandal. To date, journalists Matt Cooper, Tim Russert, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Andrea Mitchell of NBC, and of course Robert Novak have all provided information on the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. In trying to unearth the full extent of White House machinations, it is not hard to see why prosecutor Fitzgerald has pressed jailed NY Times reporter Judith Miller so forcefully to give her testimony. She may have significant information on who broke the law, and when.

In the past week, the final pieces of the Rovegate puzzle may have emerged. The contours of a conspiracy have come into view, as new names such as Colin Powell and Ari Fleischer have surfaced: On July 7, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell boarded Air Force One, to accompany President Bush on his trip to Africa. Powell carried with him a three page memorandum from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) that discussed Ambassador Joe Wilson’s fact-finding trip to Niger. The memo, marked with a classified “S” (“Secret”), contained the information that Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent, and that she had participated in the CIA meeting in which Wilson was given the task of going to Niger. Of all the facts in this paragraph, the most important one to note is the date: July 7: One day earlier, on July 6, Joe Wilson had just published in the NY Times his rebuttal of White House claims of an Iraq-Niger uranium connection. How coincidental is it that Powell is boarding Air Force One a day later, armed with a State Department brief about Wilson’s trip and Wilson’s wife?

It is important to remember the political climate of July, 2003. The White House was urgently involved in selling the Iraq War, it was still involved in selling the notion of WMD, and most importantly, it was involved in selling the reelection of George W. Bush. There were powerful pressures on the administration to shore up its argument for WMD in Iraq. If a broad based scheme was hatched to discredit Joe Wilson, by suggesting that he was hiding behind his wife’s skirts, the first place one should look is that Air Force One flight to Africa. Officials on the flight with Powell included senior advisor Dan Bartlett, press secretary Ari Fleischer, and White House chief of staff Andrew Card. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald, no fool, has not only interviewed the principals, he has taken the step of subpoenaing phone logs from Air Force One. At this juncture, Fitzgerald may have in hand a lush flow chart of phone calls that emanated from that airplane. There is one additional White House official whose name is often left out of the discussion, who may have been central to the scheme: George W. Bush.

We will probably never know the extent of the damage done to the CIA by the outing of Valerie Plame. Obviously her future role as a covert agent has been short-circuited, but we will never learn of past contacts who were compromised. But we can gauge the amount of damage from the anger expressed by past CIA agents who testified on the Hill this week. Here is Jim Marcinowski, a former CIA case worker:

"Each time the political machine made up of prime-time patriots and partisan ninnies display their ignorance by deriding Valerie Plame as a mere paper pusher or belittling the varying degrees of cover used to protect our officers or continuing to play partisan politics with our national security, it's a disservice to this country.”

Former CIA analyst and Republican Larry Johnson, directed his ire at President Bush:

"We now know from press reports that at least Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were involved, and instead of the president being first and foremost concerned, in my judgment, with protecting this country and the intelligence officers who serve it, we're confronted with a president who's willing to sit by to this day while various political operatives go around and savage the good reputations of people like Valerie and Joe Wilson. This is wrong. This should stop, and it could stop in a heart beat if the president would simply put a stop to it. He hasn't. That speaks volumes."

In a recent blog, I suggested that the absolutist refusal to testify before the grand jury by jailed reporter Judith Miller was inappropriate in a case that had implications for both national security as well as White House corruption. The revelations that have come from reporters’ testimony this week have done nothing to dissuade me from this point of view. Joining me in this view is eminent investigative reporter Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, who on July 22, told Lou Dobbs on CNN, “the case of release of somebody's name, that is the crime. If you can't get it any other way then I think you have to go to the reporter.” Here is a further exchange between Dobbs and Pincus:

DOBBS: The protection of sources, confidential sources, Judith Miller is certainly not, and nor have you at any time suggested you are above the law, nor has any journalist, but they are paying the penalty for what the law requires. Do you believe that ultimately this will have a chilling effect on the ability of the press if this continues, this trend, to break important news in the public interest?

PINCUS: I know a lot of people in my profession say that. More than half of the people I deal with are in the intelligence field, and they take risks every day, giving me information that is classified, could cost them their jobs, could get them in trouble. I haven't had any diminution of sources.

Furthering this viewpoint was Constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago, who last week testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on reporters’ privilege. Stone was asked by Senator Arlen Specter whether he agreed with the decision of Time Magazine editor Norman Pearlstine to turn over relevant information to the special prosecutor. Here is Stone’s response:

“I believe that reporters, like the rest of us, should follow the law when the law is clear, and when they have exhausted all their legal remedies, as was true in this case. There are circumstances when I believe civil disobedience is appropriate, but I think they should be reserved to those situations in which there is a reasonable case to be made that the legal system itself, or the system of government, is oppressive, or unjust, or immoral. In this situation, I think there is a profound disagreement about public policy. But I think if that’s all there is…then there is a responsibility to comply with the law, so I agree with Mr. Pearlstine. I think it was the correct thing to do.”

It should be noted that ironically, much of the information in this blog entry stems from current, illegal leaks of grand jury testimony to the Washington Post, itself a strong argument against the idea that a great “chilling effect” has taken hold. I predict that not only will the Rovegate conspiracy be unveiled in detail soon, but moreover, that investigative journalism will survive, as vibrant and viable as ever.

Few recent controversies have had as many disturbing elements as that of the Karl Rove-Valerie Plame caper. If the notion of a high White House official leaking the identity of a covert CIA agent isn’t troubling enough, much of the resulting spin and analysis has managed to further muddy the waters. Let’s examine some of the problematic pieces of this puzzle:

Reporters and Confidentiality. On July 6, NY Times Reporter Judith Miller was jailed at a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia for refusing to divulge her source in the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame. One of the striking aspects of this development is that apart from those within Miller’s journalistic fraternity, there has been little public sympathy for Miller. One reason for this is that many people, like me, are skeptical of the very principle that Miller is upholding. Her notion that a reporter’s obligation to her source is absolute, seems overdrawn, lacking in nuance, and grandiose in nature. By way of explanation, let me offer a comparison. As a psychologist, my profession truly does depend on confidentiality. (By contrast, 99.9% of legitimate journalism takes place without concern for anonymous sources.) Few people would visit a therapist if they thought that the details of their discussions were open to public scrutiny. Such confidentially is formalized within the psychology profession, not simply asserted or claimed, as is often the case with reporters.

Having survived two tours of duty in Iraq, Mortenson spoke to a friend shortly before leaving on his third tour that he feared for his safety:

“It's like three strikes, you're out. I have a feeling I'm not going to come home."

On April 20 of this year, Marty Mortenson was killed by a roadside bomb, the thirteenth Marine to be killed on a third tour of duty. Richard H. Kohn, a former chief of Air Force history at the Pentagon was asked to comment on this trend:

"If they have to go back a second or third time, particularly a third time, is it really fair? I would call that an extraordinary burden.”

The administration knows that increasing troop levels creates the risk that young men who have served heroically such as Marty Mortenson, along with their families, will reach the boiling point and begin to express their frustration at the burden they’ve been asked to assume. It is for this reason that the administration has decided to stick to its head in the sand. It is for this reason the Bush persists in offering us an “Alice In Wonderland” version of troop requirements in Iraq.