No Cracks Yet in Leak Investigation

Somebody is lying.

In Washington, that's like saying, "It's Tuesday." Or, "It's hot outside." Much of the nation is unconcerned that someone, or some people, might have hatched a plan to retaliate against a critic of the White House by exposing his CIA agent wife's undercover status. I say "might" because someone is lying, but we don't yet know whom.

But the bar for what grabs the public's attention is high outside of Washington, a town where every minor scandal is trumpeted by one party or the other as the next Watergate. And that bar is high in part because one of those scandals, former president Clinton's sexual relationship with a White House intern, turned out to be true and highly embarrassing.

Today's White House is suffering a mini-scandal that is still under the radar for much of America. But it threatens to explode into a full-blown controversy worthy of its own "gate" suffix. Did someone in the administration leak the name of a covert agent to punish her husband for criticizing the White House's claims that Iraq was seeking to purchase nuclear materials from Niger?

Karl Rove, the president's chief adviser and deputy chief of staff, has become the center of attention in the leak controversy. The administration's defenders have launched an aggressive public relations campaign that employs the time-honored, but Bush White House-honed strategy of assassinating the messenger, Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who blistered the administration for ignoring his warnings about the false Niger claims.

The GOP PR machine has sought to deflect the media's focus from Rove and onto Wilson by suggesting that he has lied repeatedly and is on a partisan mission to destroy the administration.

The White House's defenders suggest Rove heard of Wilson's wife from reporters, that he had no idea she was undercover and that he referred to her only in passing as a way of discouraging reporters from aggressively pursuing Wilson's charges. Neither Rove, nor Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, did anything more than mention Wilson's wife in passing to reporters who already knew her name, they say.

The Republican response also includes condemning Democrats who have called for Rove's head, which seems fair, given that in this country a person is innocent until proven guilty. But White House proxies go one step further in exonerating him and demonizing anyone, including journalists, who would even dare to ask questions or aggressively pursue this issue.

I got a taste of this when I interviewed Republican operative Victoria Toensing, an attorney in private practice in Washington and a popular conservative pundit. Toensing has taken a leading role in the PR strategy to defend Rove. In my interview with her, she suggested it was an outrage to even speculate as to whether Rove may have committed a crime.

Toensing characterized this as the type of piling on that's so typical of Washington, something she deplores. When I asked why she thought special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was investigating the case so aggressively, Toensing interrupted my questioning, incorrectly inferring I said that I believed Rove was the subject of the investigation.

"Stop, stop, don't do that to somebody's reputation!" she said. "He's not a target. Let me tell you how strongly I feel. I am a criminal defense attorney. I feel I have to keep clearing people's names... For someone to go around and recklessly accuse somebody of committing a crime is one of the biggest mortal sins in town. I don't like it when people do that in this town... Karl Rove's status is a witness."

Everyone in town is wondering exactly what Fitzgerald has. And just because Toensing and Rove's lawyer say he's not a target doesn't make it so.