As for the Plame case: "Rove's lawyer says that there has been no wrongdoing, and that the prosecutor has told him that Rove is not a 'target' of the probe. But this isn't just about the Facts, it's about what Rove's foes regard as a higher Truth: that he is a one-man epicenter of a narrative of Evil. The Manichaean politics that Rove had perfected over three decades now threaten to engulf him, or at least render him as something less than what he has been to Bush: the mastermind of Republican hegemony."
Fineman describes how former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV entered Rove's gun sights after publicly questioning one of President Bush's assertions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the runup to war.
"[T]he line between national security and politics had long since been all but erased by the Bush administration," Fineman writes. And while some officials were willing to back off on that one assertion, "Cheney --- who tended never to give an inch on any topic --- held firm. And so, therefore, did Rove, who sometimes referred to the vice president as 'Leadership.' Rove took foreign-policy cues from the pro-war coterie that surrounded the vice president, and was personally and operationally close to Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby."
Nancy Gibbs writes in Time magazine's cover story that Rove's defenders have found themselves "artfully pivoting from saying he hadn't done anything to saying he hadn't done anything wrong, that Plame wasn't really a secret agent anyway, or if she was, Rove didn't know that, or if he did, he only brought her up because he was trying to keep reporters from writing a bad story based on Wilson's false charges, and besides, it was a reporter who blew Plame's cover to him in the first place and not the other way around."
And, she adds: "[E]ven if Rove skates past any legal trouble, that still leaves the question of means and ends."
Cooper Tells His Story
Matthew Cooper writes in Time about his experience before the grand jury. He adds a few details to our understanding of what transpired in his now-famous interview with Rove, including how it ended:
"I have a distinct memory of Rove ending the call by saying, 'I've already said too much.' This could have meant he was worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else. I don't know, but that sign-off has been in my memory for two years."
More significantly, Cooper offers us the first look inside Fitzgerald's grand jury room.
"Did Fitzgerald's questions give me a sense of where the investigation is heading? Perhaps. He asked me several different ways if Rove indicated how he had heard that Plame worked at the CIA. (He did not, I told the grand jury.) Maybe Fitzgerald is interested in whether Rove knew her CIA ties through a person or through a document. . . .
"A surprising line of questioning had to do with, of all things, welfare reform. The prosecutor asked if I had ever called Mr. Rove about the topic of welfare reform. Just the day before my grand jury testimony Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, had told journalists that when I telephoned Rove that July, it was about welfare reform and that I suddenly switched topics to the Wilson matter. . . . To me this suggested that Rove may have testified that we had talked about welfare reform, and indeed earlier in the week, I may have left a message with his office asking if I could talk to him about welfare reform. But I can't find any record of talking about it with him on July 11, and I don't recall doing so."
Lorne Manley and David Johnston write in the New York Times: "Mr. Cooper's article, a rare look inside the deliberations from a prime participant in this political and journalistic drama, is likely to add fuel to a political firestorm over whether there was a White House effort to disclose Ms. Wilson's identity as payback for her husband's criticism of the administration."
The Scooter Libby (Not) News
Lots of headlines in the past 24 hours about how I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was Cooper's second source for the story that identified Plame as a CIA officer.
