NY Daily News: Bush Furious with Rove Over Plame Leak in 2003
Just one day after excerpts from the upcoming Scott McClellan tell all book suggested President Bush lied about the roles of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Plamegate affair, the publisher is now back-tracking on the explosive claim. But despite a spokesman's assertion that McClellan "did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him," a seemingly forgotten 2005 story from the New York Daily News suggests otherwise.
As Perrspectives, Talking Points Memo, the Washington Note and other blogs noted in October 2005, the New York Daily News' Tom DeFrank revealed that President Bush was apoplectic with Karl Rove in the fall of 2003 over his role in the outing of Valerie Plame:
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.
(The DeFrank piece apparently is no longer available for free from the New York Daily News web site. The link leads only to the paper's home page. The full text of "Bush Whacked Rove on CIA Leak" is available for a fee.)
That picture of George W. Bush beside himself with rage in 2003 doesn't square with the McClellan retreat signaled by his publisher today:
Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan's book in April, tells NBC from his Connecticut home that McCLellan, "Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him."
Osnos says when McClellan went before the White House press corps in 2003 to publicly exonerate Libby and Rove, the problem was that his statement was not true. Osnos said the president told McClellan what "he thought to be the case." But, he says, McClellan believes, "the president didn't know it was not true."
As I detailed yesterday, on October 7, 2003, President Bush did what comes naturally and played dumb when it came to the identity of the "senior administration official" responsible for smearing Ambassador Joe Wilson and betraying his CIA agent wife Valerie Plame:
"I mean this town is a -- is a town full of people who like to leak information. And 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."
As it turns out, President Bush wasn't telling the truth. But on this as on so many othr matters, the American should have known George W. Bush was lying. After all, his lips were moving.
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Nice find on the Daily News piece. There's no way Bush wasn't in on this.
Posted by Patrick on November 21, 2007 6:14 PMYou just have to ask: If Bush was furious with Rove about this then why in the same hell didn't Bush fire him like he said he would do if anyone in "his administration" was involved.
George, spare us the histrionics -- you're not even a good spahgetti western extra actor. Like everything else you have done in your life you are a failure at this too.
Posted by Helen Rainier on November 21, 2007 6:36 PMJust found your blog, excellent writing and your sane. I do hope this doesn't get ignored like everything else Bush gets away with.
Posted by Jeff on November 21, 2007 7:53 PMKeep up the good work.
Kudos for not letting this fall down the memory-hole, but the timeline remains annoyingly vague despite how essential it is in backing up your premise that Bush lied.
In DeFrank's article, he states the following:
"None of these sources offered additional specifics of what Bush and Rove discussed in conversations beginning shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched into the leak of CIA agent Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak."
The DOJ publicly announced their investigation on Sept 30, but officially began it on the 26th. Bush made his statement Oct. 7, which then begs the following question: Exactly how long a period of time defines "shortly after"?
Please update your blog if you're able to do so, as it will render your comment irrefutable.
Posted by kiweagle on November 23, 2007 10:48 AMApologies if this runs afoul of copyright laws, but here's a link to AfterDowningStreet.org that contains the whole article:
Posted by kiweagle on November 23, 2007 10:50 AMhttp://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/3806
BTW, the article does prove the WH lied about Bush's knowledge - regardless of the timeline:
"A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President."
Gotta love the way it was put: The "...published reports were incorrect...", despite the stated intent of the WH aides to deceive.
Posted by kiweagle on November 23, 2007 10:55 AM