Brace for Impact

The Bush White House this week is bracing for the possible indictments of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, the president and vice president's two most essential aides. The damage to the White House could be incalculable.

So what went wrong? Here's my theory.

If in fact Rove and Libby are indicted, it could turn out to be because the kind of hairsplitting, enigmatic answers that have worked so well as staving off the White House press corps over the years served them very poorly once a resolute federal prosecutor entered the picture.

From the get-go, Rove and Libby (and their lawyers) have cleaved to a very precisely constructed defense: That they didn't leak Valerie Plame's name to anyone -- and never explicitly told anyone that she was a covert CIA agent.

In one of Rove's few on-the-record pronouncements on the case, he said on CNN last year: "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name."

Libby, in a letter to New York Times reporter Judith Miller just a few weeks ago, reminded her of his position: "The public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me."

The "no-name" defense may be technically accurate. Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, for instance, recalled Rove telling him about "Wilson's wife" and that she generically worked at the agency. Miller on Sunday wrote that she and Libby spoke about Wilson's wife three times, but that she couldn't be sure if Libby had ever used Plame's name -- and she couldn't say how two mangled versions of Plame's name showed up in the notebook she used to record the interviews. She also wrote that her notes did not show that Libby described Plame as covert -- although Libby did tell her precisely what unit within the CIA she worked for.

This particular defense allowed Rove and Libby -- and the White House spokesman, on their behalf -- to issue what the press corps interpreted as authoritative blanket denials about their involvement in the leak.

And in the face of the original, narrowly defined criminal investigation -- into whether anyone had intentionally disclosed the identity of a covert agent -- it may have seemed like a good idea.

But this particular defense may also have locked Rove and Libby into some statements that defied a common-sense interpretation of the facts. And indeed, a variety of leaked reports suggest that Rove initially told the grand jury that he had never talked to Cooper about Plame, and Libby said he never talked to Miller about Plame.

Common sense, however, says there's no real difference between referring to "Valerie Plame" and "Joe Wilson's wife" -- and that whether or not they knew she was covert didn't change the fact that she was.

Common sense sometimes has no better ally than a determined federal prosecutor -- especially one with the liberty to expand the investigation to include allegations of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice.