Thanks to a piece in the New York Daily News, we now know the President's claims throughout the fall of 2003 that he had no knowledge of the identity of the Valerie Plame leaker are simply untrue. The article ("Bush Whacked Rove on CIA Leak") cites White House sources who describe a furious George W. Bush dressing down Rove in September 2003 for his role in the Plame outing and the attack on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson:

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak…the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger…"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.

All of which raises two key issues. First, the President did not tell the American people the truth about his knowledge of the affair. (Whether he told the truth to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is another matter.) Second and unsurprisingly, the Daily News story reflects that President Bush, the preeminent practitioner of the Politics of Payback, was concerned not about treason and threats to American national security in his own White House, but only about political embarrassment.

On October 7, 2003, weeks after his tirade with Rove, President Bush told reporters at a cabinet meeting that:

"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. That's why I've instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators -- full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is..."

Two weeks earlier on September 23, 2003, press secretary Scott McClellan pitched the same fiction to the White House press corps:

Q: All right. Let me just follow up. You said this morning, "The President knows" that Karl Rove wasn't involved. How does he know that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I've made it very clear that it was a ridiculous suggestion in the first place. I saw some comments this morning from the person who made that suggestion, backing away from that. And I said it is simply not true. So, I mean, it's public knowledge. I've said that it's not true. And I have spoken with Karl Rove...

President Bush, the man who promised to bring "honor and dignity" to White House, showed his true colors in the Plame affair. He not only dissembled about what he knew. He confirmed what most should have concluded long ago. His is the most secretive, paranoid and vengeance-filled White House since Nixon. As New York Senator Charles Schumer put it this week in a letter to the President, "It seems you may have been angry that White House officials were caught, not that they had compromised national security."

For a complete collection of the essential PlameGate documents, briefings, timelines, statutes and other materials, see the Perrspectives Rove/PlameGate Scandal Center.

For the dark history of President Bush's politics of payback, see: "The Smallness of King George."

—Perrspective 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) |