Karl Rove not to be Charged

[akarunway 1]

If nothing else the scumbag should be charged w/ perjury. I don't recall my ass. Poor Scooter gonna take the hit on this one. And Fitzgerald, I THOUGHT he was a stand up guy from what I read about him. Guess the power/ MONEY got to him too. Sad.>--------------------------------------------------------Fitzgerald, sources have said, was exploring whether Rove testified falsely in February 2004 when he failed to disclose that he told a Time magazine reporter about Plame's CIA role seven months earlier.

In subsequent grand jury appearances, Rove essentially argued that he did not recall the conversation with the Time reporter, Matthew Cooper, until a few months after he first testified, when his attorney found a 2003 e-mail Rove had written to then deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.
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I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

[Gravitymaster 0]

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You do realize Fitzgerald is an independent prosecutor, don't you? Are you now going to actually claim he was bribed?

Just because you were hoping Rove would be indicted and are now disappointed there wasn't any evidence he committed a crime, is no reason to start smearing Fitzgerald. Especially when your accusations are nothing but unfounded, wild speculation at the very most.

Keep grasping at those straws, though.

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What is your problem? Quit putting words in my mouth. The only thing I alluded to was the possibility of a deal. I already showed you where Rove admitted that he conveyed the information to Cooper.

He admitted it himself!!!!

Since when is Grand Jury testimony made public?

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And for the record, Ken Starr was an "independant" counsel. Please tell me that you don't think that politics had an influence on him.

Right. I forgot anything you disagree with is politics or some type of backroom deal. Unless you get the outcome you want, everyone is corrupt. Sad some think everyone is for sale and ethics don't exist. Quite a turnaround from what we heard when Fitzgerald was first assigned the case.

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Tell me straight up, your posts have nothing to do with the acutal issues at hand do they? I'm pretty sure that you simply use every issue as a vehicle for an attack on whoever is to the left right of today's arbitrary "lefty" "righty" line or anyway to bash Bush. Admit your fetish. It's the first step towards recovery.

There..fixed that for you.

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[idrankwhat 0]

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Tell me straight up, your posts have nothing to do with the acutal issues at hand do they? I'm pretty sure that you simply use every issue as a vehicle for an attack on whoever is to the left right of today's arbitrary "lefty" "righty" line or anyway to bash Bush. Admit your fetish. It's the first step towards recovery.

There..fixed that for you.

Ohhh.......and I was sooooooo hoping for "I know you are but what am I?"

[JohnRich 4]

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Hmmmm.... let's see now. How many were influenced by the Press, jumped to conclusions and had Rove indicted, convicted and sentenced to jail. Let me think.

About the same number of liberals who had Tom Delay convicted even though all but one charge has been dropped, and there hasn't even been a trial yet on that one.

They don't need no steenkin' proof. Allegations are good enough!

[justinb138 0]

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I'm wondering what happened to that guy who had $90,000 is his freezer...

Ciels-
Michele

You mean storing $90,000 in cash wrapped up in foil in a freezer isn't acceptable for a congressman?

[Gravitymaster 0]

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Hmmmm.... let's see now. How many were influenced by the Press, jumped to conclusions and had Rove indicted, convicted and sentenced to jail. Let me think.

About the same number of liberals who had Tom Delay convicted even though all but one charge has been dropped, and there hasn't even been a trial yet on that one.

They don't need no steenkin' proof. Allegations are good enough!

Yep, as usual it the seriousness of the charge, not the validity of the evidence. Then when that doesn't work out, it's some kind of backroom deal.

[idrankwhat 0]

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About the same number of liberals who had Tom Delay convicted even though all but one charge has been dropped, and there hasn't even been a trial yet on that one.

It might help if the Republicans hadn't shut down the ethics committee after it admonished DeLay three times. He should have been gone a long time ago.

[Gravitymaster 0]

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About the same number of liberals who had Tom Delay convicted even though all but one charge has been dropped, and there hasn't even been a trial yet on that one.

It might help if the Republicans hadn't shut down the ethics committee after it admonished DeLay three times. He should have been gone a long time ago.

Probably not much choice knowing Mollohan was on the committee.

[rushmc 23]

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Charged or not, Rove is scum.

Zipp0

As is every effect conservative politition (according to the left)

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[justinb138 0]

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As is every career politician

Fixed it fer ya.

[rushmc 23]

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As is every career politician

Fixed it fer ya.

Hard to argue with that one

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[justinb138 0]

I honestly don't know why people argue over left, right, conservative, liberal, etc.. anymore.

They all have the same goals (money, power, etc), they just tell different stories in an attempt to get into office.

[Royd 0]

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He and Cynthia McKinney eloped to Vegas on the cash they didn't find in his mattress.

They probably got Corrine Brown as a bride's maid.

[kallend 2,148]

Associated Press
Analysis: Telling FBI the Truth Saved Rove
By PETE YOST , 06.13.2006, 02:07 PM



The decision not to charge Karl Rove shows there often are no consequences for misleading the public.

In 2003, while Rove allowed the White House to tell the news media that he had no role in leaking Valerie Plame's CIA identity, the presidential aide was secretly telling the FBI the truth.

It's now known that Rove had discussed Plame's CIA employment with conservative columnist Robert Novak, who exposed her identity less than a week later, citing two unidentified senior administration officials.

Rove's truth-telling to the FBI saved him from indictment.

And by misleading reporters, the White House saved itself from a political liability during the 2004 presidential campaign.

While the president and the vice president underwent questioning by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in 2004, Rove's role never surfaced. The lone blip on the radar screen was a one-day flurry of news stories the month before Election Day when Rove was brought before a federal grand jury - one of his five grand jury appearances in the probe.

The extent of Rove's involvement didn't become official until Oct. 28 of last year, when Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, was indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI about how he learned of Plame's CIA identity and what he told reporters about it.

The indictment recounted Rove's conversation with Novak about the CIA officer, as Rove later related it to Libby.

For nearly three years, the White House has refused to discuss the Plame investigation, citing the fact that it is still under way.

"The ability of this White House to stiff the press is probably better than any previous administration," said presidential scholar Stephen Hess, a former speechwriter for President Eisenhower and an adviser to Presidents Ford and Carter. "Clearly if there are no leaks, there's no damage."

Hess said Tuesday the Plame case is an example of the news media being complicit in the White House's conduct.

"I'm saying that there was a handshake and Bob Novak was honorable to the handshake" by refusing to publicly identify his sources, said Hess. "It's not quite a deal with the devil because these people are our elected and appointed officials, but it's a question of how much you want to let them off the hook."

Lee Edwards, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said other administrations have "flinched or blinked or said 'we've got to do more in response to this or that crisis.'"

"Rove and everyone else has been under enormous pressure and yet they have been able to stick to it and that's remarkable," said Edwards.

Among the many unanswered questions in the Plame probe are what, if anything, Rove told President Bush about his conversation with Novak. Another question is whether Rove told Bush about his conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.

It was the Rove-Cooper conversation on July 11, 2003, that threw the investigation back on the front pages a year ago.

Facing jail unless he cooperated with prosecutors, Cooper testified that Rove said Wilson's wife worked at the "agency" and that she was responsible for sending her husband on a CIA mission to Africa in 2002 to check out intelligence about Iraq.

"I inferred that he obviously meant the CIA and not, say, the Environmental Protection Agency," Cooper wrote in Time, recounting his conversation with Rove.

Wilson's mission to Africa was the basis for his later criticism of the Bush administration. In his State of the Union speech in 2003 in the run-up to war, Bush embraced intelligence that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of yellowcake uranium from Africa.

From his trip, Wilson had concluded it was highly doubtful any such transaction between Iraq and Niger had taken place.

It was the Rove-Cooper conversation about Wilson's wife that became the focus of Fitzgerald's investigative interest in the president's political adviser.

Unlike the conversation with Novak, Rove didn't reveal it to the FBI until more than a year into the criminal investigation of the Plame leak.

Rove's explanation for his belated disclosure of the conversation? He says he forgot about it.

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[idrankwhat 0]

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It might help if the Republicans hadn't shut down the ethics committee after it admonished DeLay three times. He should have been gone a long time ago.

Probably not much choice knowing Mollohan was on the committee.

[Gravitymaster 0]

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It might help if the Republicans hadn't shut down the ethics committee after it admonished DeLay three times. He should have been gone a long time ago.

Probably not much choice knowing Mollohan was on the committee.

There's that fetish again. You attack one Democrat our of the ten people on the committee and ignore that it was two Republicans who voted to admonish DeLay for his conduct, and who were subsequently replaced because they the ethical backbone to refuse to change the house rules to help out DeLay. After the two new party loyalists replaced them they shut down the committee. Talk about a lack of integrity.

[DaVinci 0]

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This isn't really that surprising, considering that this administration has done such a good job of protecting itself and this is a crucial election year. Bush would be serving fries at a Texas drive through if it weren't for Rove. Now "Turdblossom" is free to bloom this fall.

Thats funny. He was not charged, but you still think he did it. I guess you have no faith in anything unless it supports only YOUR veiws.

[Gravitymaster 0]

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ETERNAL PLAME

Or at least it seemed that way. Three years after the Valerie Plame kerfuffle began, it seems to be ending with a whimper--that whimper being "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Corn is the writer for The Nation, a left-wing magazine (or possibly a right-wing parody of a left-wing magazine) who got the whole thing started by parroting Joe Wilson's claims that his wife's "outing" violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Isikoff is a reporter for Newsweek. Their collaboration raises the possibility of liberal bias in the mainstream media.

First of all, "Hubris"? This comes on the heels of Tom Ricks's "Fiasco." Then there were "Slander," "Treason" and "Godless." It seems everyone wants to be Ann Coulter these days.

But we digress--for which you can hardly blame us, as the Plame kerfuffle is such a tedious affair. Nonetheless, out of an obligation to history, we shall recount the revelations from the Isikoff-Corn book, which Isikoff outlines in a story in Newsweek:

The man who "leaked" Plame's identity and her involvement in her husband's Niger junket to columnist Bob Novak and other reporters was not Karl Rove, Scooter Libby or anyone else in the White House. It was Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state.


Armitage's motives were not malicious. He is "a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters" and "apparently hadn't thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's identity."


It was from a classified memo that Armitage learned Plame worked for the CIA. But there was no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "found no evidence that Armitage knew of Plame's covert CIA status." (By all available evidence, Plame's covert status had expired by the time of her "outing" anyway.)


In October 2003 Armitage confessed to his boss, Colin Powell, that he was the "leaker." The State Department decided to withhold this information from the White House, because "Powell and his aides feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak's source--possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been unenthusiastic about Bush's Iraq policy."
David Corn weighs in on the Puffington Host in which he hilariously tries to downplay the extent to which these revelations discredit his initial enthusiasm for the purported scandal:

The Plame leak in Novak's column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about the prewar intelligence. The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework.

To say the least! As we observed on PBS 10 months ago, this was a "Seinfeld" scandal--an investigation about nothing.

Of course, much as this seemed like a sitcom, it had consequences in real life. Because Armitage did not come clean right away, many people suffered:

Millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted investigating a nonexistent crime.


Innocent White House officials were distracted from serving the country in order to participate in the investigation, which was in full swing a year ago when Hurricane Katrina struck.


Scooter Libby lost his job and was indicted for actions that never would have occurred but for the investigation.


The Democratic left, putting its faith in scandal to bring down the Bush administration, became even more fatuous and ineffective.

The only winner in this whole deal is Joe Wilson's ego--and think of the toll it's taken on his poor little superego.

Those who tried to turn the Plame kerfuffle into Watergate threw around words like "treason" and "slander" (though, interestingly, not "godless"). Armitage appears to be guilty of nothing of the sort. But it does seem that he was careless with secret information, eager to cover his own backside, and heedless of the consequences his actions had for others. So let it never be said that Richard Armitage is a profile in courage.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008857

So, it is starting to appear that the "leaker" was a well known Washington Gossip.

This also may explain why Colin Powell was pushed out of his job as Secretary of State. I sincerely hope this cover-up is investigated and the people responsible for it brought to justice, although I doubt it will.

I hope those who were so cock-sure Rove was the leaker are embarrassed because they jumped to false conclusions.

I just made a contribution to the Libby Legal Defense Fund.
http://www.scooterlibby.com/Default.aspx

[Andy9o8 2]

I've spent a fair amount of time in the DC metro area during my life, and I like it a lot. Except for the rather bombed-out areas of SouthEast DC and the adjacent sections of P.G. County (and every city has its bombed-out areas), it's actually a very nice metro area to visit, live in, and work in. I enjoy it every time I go back for a visit, either for pleasure or on business.

That being said, I have come to find (or, shall I say, realize) that so many of those that practice its principal cottage industry, in both parties, are downright reptilian. As a younger man, and as a lawyer with a government major as an undergrad, I enjoyed the vibrancy of DC being such a power center. DC has the same draw to someone like me that Silicon Valley has to a design engineer, or New York has to a theater major: it's the happening place. Time once was, I actually had aspirations of trying to become part of it. No longer. A pox on both their houses.

[Gravitymaster 0]

Agreed. I've lived here most of my life and I fully understand how the game is played.

I also find it incredibly sad how some are willing to believe the worst about any politician they don't agree with.

People on this forum said the most hateful things about Bush and Rove at the time. Remember how many were convinced this was retribution against Joe Wilson for his report on the attempted purchase of uranium from Niger by Iraq? Total BS. Remember how Wilson claimed he was sent to Niger by Cheney? More total BS. People also claimed GWB personally was behind this and were even calling for his impeachment.

I think the worst part of this that many people including Fitzgerald knew it was Armatige the whole time, yet this stupid investigation continued for nothing more than political advantage.

My hope is that Rove, being the political genius he is, can turn this incident around to help defeat as many Democrats as possible in November.

[rushmc 23]

The silence following your post will be defening......

But we all know it is the seriousness of the accusations that counts, not the facts..........

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[Andy9o8 2]

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People on this forum said the most hateful things about Bush and Rove at the time. Remember how many were convinced this was retribution against Joe Wilson for his report on the attempted purchase of uranium from Niger by Iraq? Total BS. Remember how Wilson claimed he was sent to Niger by Cheney? More total BS. People also claimed GWB personally was behind this and were even calling for his impeachment.

Personally I think Rove is the personification of the kind of reptile in Washington politics I'm talking about. He's far from the only example, but he's a very prominent and influential one. I also do believe that the White House deliberately retaliated and tried to discredit Joe Wilson. I think the Administration has demonstrated a pattern of trying to de-fang its critics by attacking the person and not the person's message. Just my opinion, but I'm not alone in it.

[rushmc 23]

From another post:
"I also do believe that the White House deliberately retaliated and tried to discredit Joe Wilson."



I told you the facts don't count!

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[kallend 2,148]

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I think the worst part of this that many people including Fitzgerald knew it was Armatige the whole time, yet this stupid investigation continued for nothing more than political advantage.

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What exactly is the political advantage that Fitzgerald, a REPUBLICAN, hoped to obtain here?

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[billvon 3,116]

>People on this forum said the most hateful things about Bush and Rove at the time.

Indeed. Rewind 8 years and you'd see the same sort of statements about Clinton and Gore. In another 3 years the GOP will be calling the next president a whore, or a bitch, or a war criminal, or a traitor. Nothing changes but the names.