Karl Rove outed as source of criminal leak from White House; will Bush fire him?
American Politics Today #36
Washington, D.C.
July 2, 2004
By Marc Strassman
Reporter
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Lawrence O'Donnell, a Senior Political Analyst at
MSNBC and an Emmy-winning producer of
NBC’s The West Wing, said today on a broadcast of
The McLaughlin Group that Karl Rove, President Bush's top political strategist and adviser, and recent subject of an in-depth article in the issue of
Vanity Fair featuring
Bewitched star Nicole Kidman on the cover, was the source of the "leak" naming
Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an opponent of Bush policy in Iraq, as a CIA operative. Such a revelation is a violation of federal law.
Right before saying this, Mr. O'Donnell indicated that his doing so would likely cause HIM to be called before the grand jury investigating this disclosure, which eventually led to
the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of a lower court's ruling that
Time magazine journalist Matt Cooper and
New York Times journalist Judith Miller would be imprisoned if they did not reveal their sources in this matter.
Mr. O'Donnell indicated in his
McLaughlin Group appearance that the internal Time e-mails turned over this week to the "special counsel" on the decision of
Time, Inc., editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine, would reveal that it was long-time Bush associate Karl Rove who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novack.
In a case of reality imitating art, Mr. O'Donnell used his appearance on the program to speculate about how many minutes might elapse following the public disclosure of President George W. Bush's top political advisor's complicity in what was widely seen as retaliation against Wilson for his claim that Saddam Hussein never tried to obtain "yellowcake," a form of enriched uranium useful in building nuclear weapons, and Mr. Rove's exit from the White House, which is just the kind of story line Mr. O'Donnell often supervises in his role in the production of the fictional "West Wing" television program.
You can read the United Press International (UPI) coverage of Mr. O'Donnell's revelation in this matter by clicking
here.
Read more about this in
"Reports Reveal Karl Rove Named in Matt Cooper Documents".
