Rove's Defense Team

[Nbadan]

It appears that no one in Washington has bothered to ask why it is that the Republican National Committee is leading the defense of Karl Rove. But it's a good question.

If Rove is really the president's deputy chief of staff in charge of policy, as opposed to a political hack operating within the White House and using taxpayer money to do the work of the Republican Party, wouldn't it make sense that his defenders would be current and retired policy specialists? And since the controversy in which he is embroiled has something to do with national security, wouldn't it be at least a little more assuring if a former Secretary of Defense, National Security Adviser or chief of the Central Intelligence Agency were to speak up on his behalf?

But, no, as the controversy about his leaking of classified information heats up, Rove is being defended, for the most part, by RNC chair Ken Mehlman, a political operative who has never been seriously involved in policy matters – let alone national security issues.

Mehlman is a second-string hack, a veteran of the losing presidential campaigns of George Bush I in 1992 and Mr. Elizabeth Dole in 1996.

To the extent that Mehlman has a reputation is it as a professional "spin doctor" – a party operative who is paid to warp the truth.

That's precisely what Mehlman is doing in his defense of Rove. Instead of trying to muster a defense of Rove's leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to reporters -- apparently in an effort to punish Plame's husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for exposing the administration's lies regarding Iraq and weapons of mass destruction – Mehlman and his team have been busy spreading lies about Wilson. Attacking Wilson is currently mission critical for the RNC. The latest display items on the committee's website are headlined "Joe Wilson's Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies And Misstatements" and "In Case You Missed It: Excerpts From RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman on FOX News' ‘Fox And Friends,' – a Friday morning appearance in which the RNC chair essentially repeated the list of supposed inaccuracies and misstatements.

Here's the problem: It is the RNC, not Wilson, which is guilty of spreading inaccuracies and misstatements. The RNC claims that Rove told Time magazine writer Matthew Cooper that "Wilson's wife" had OK'ed the former ambassador's 2002 mission to Niger in Africa to check out claims that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis had been attempting to buy materials that might be used to develop WMDs. In fact, it was not Plame but the CIA's Directorate of Operations for the Counterproliferation Division, which sent Wilson to Niger.

The folks at the watchdog group MediaMatters, who are working hard to set the record straight, state that, "The Los Angeles Times reported on July 15, 2004, that an unnamed CIA official confirmed that Plame was not responsible for the CIA's decision to send Wilson to Niger, saying: ‘Her bosses say she did not initiate the idea of her husband going. ... They asked her if he'd be willing to go, and she said yes.'"

The second big lie that the RNC is spreading suggests that Rove was leaking information to Time's Cooper in order to prevent the reporter from repeating a supposed false claim by Wilson – that he was sent on the Niger mission by Vice President Dick Cheney.

This is just pure fantasy. Wilson has always been exceptionally precise about how he ended up in Niger. He laid things out in the original op-ed piece for The New York Times in July, 2003, where he explained,

"In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake -- a form of lightly processed ore -- by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office."

The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=6473#pid6503)

The GOP talking points are either easily refuted or red herrings. Especially MSNBC and Rush Limbaugh who today are claiming that the case against Rove is over and mute. Wilson's trip to Niger in February 2002 was properly authorized; people CIA chose him to go after the agency was tasked by someone in Mr. Cheney's office to look into a memorandum of agreement between the governments of Niger and Iraq for the former to sell yellowcake to the latter; the document, as reported by even Robert Novak in the piece that started the criminal investigation, was a forgery. Mr. Cheney did not directly request Ambassador Wilson to go to Niger, and Ambassador Wilson, contrary to the current set of GOP talking points, has never made any such claim. The CIA sent Wilson, not Valerie Plame on her own account in some elaborate conspiracy to embarrass the administration over a year later. What part Ms. Plame made in choosing Wilson is entirely irrelevant.

What we have here is a smear campaign against the Wilsons. We've seen this from this administration before in their attempts to discredit critics of Mr. Bush's ill-advised misadventure into Iraq. we saw it from the administration of elder Bush; just ask Anita Hill. One might begin to wonder if this sort of thing is a Bush family value.

Whatever fancy title they choose to give him, Karl Rove is nothing but a glorified political hatchet man. It is fitting that other hatchet men come to his defense and defend him with a battery of lies, half-truths and red herrings.

Having failed to discredit Wilson two years ago, they are back at it again as concern grows that Rove will face criminal charges. Repeating that Wilson is a liar over and over and spelling it in all capital letters will not make him one. And he is not one.

[Nbadan]

Oh what a tangled web we weave...


o: National Desk, Media Reporter
Contact: Dennis Yedwab of Media Matters for America, 202-756-4143 or [email protected]


WASHINGTON, July 15 /U.S. Newswire/ -- In recent media appearances, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Ken Mehlman has issued numerous distortions and falsehoods regarding allegations of White House senior adviser Karl Rove's involvement in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cable news hosts Wolf Blitzer and Chris Matthews failed to question Mehlman's various falsehoods, allowing him to misinform unchallenged and at length. Media Matters for America offers the following breakdown of Mehlman's lies, and the facts that rebut them.


Mehlman is scheduled to appear on the July 17 editions of NBC's Meet the Press and CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.


Lie no. 1: Wilson falsely claimed Cheney sent him to Niger


In an attack on the credibility of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame's husband, Mehlman twice claimed that it was Vice President Dick Cheney who sent him to Niger in 2002 to investigate a rumored sale of yellowcake uranium to Iraq. As Media Matters for America noted, Wilson claimed the CIA -- not Cheney -- sent him to Africa. In his July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, and in an August 3, 2003, interview on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Wilson noted that the CIA sent him to Niger to investigate a question from Cheney's office about the uranium issue. The RNC cropped and twisted quotes from the Times op-ed and the CNN interview to back up this false talking point. From Mehlman's July 12 appearance on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports:


MEHLMAN: Karl was right; Joe Wilson was wrong. The story was false. It was based on a false premise, and, of course, the conclusion was false. (...) What Joe Wilson alleged was that the vice president, then he said the CIA director, sent him to Niger.


From Mehlman's July 13 appearance on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:


MEHLMAN: Karl Rove said to a reporter that you ought not include the Joe Wilson report because it's inaccurate. And Karl was right. Mr. Wilson was wrong. The report was inaccurate. He was wrong in the sense that the vice president had not sent him down.


Lie no. 2: Rove did not reveal Plame's name, so he did nothing wrong


In an email summarizing a conversation with Rove, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper stated that Rove referred to Plame as "Wilson's wife." Relying on this report, Mehlman claimed that Rove did not leak Plame's identity because he did not reveal her name. But, as is clear from the language of the statute and Rove's own lawyer, this defense has no legal merit. Moreover, as a practical matter, anyone with access to Google could very easily have come across Wilson's Corporate & Public Strategy Advisory Group bio, which noted: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame."


Lie no. 3: Rove didn't even know her name


Mehlman also cited the Newsweek article containing Cooper's email as evidence that Rove "didn't even know" Plame's name at the time he talked to Cooper. But as Think Progress pointed out, a July 15 New York Times article reported that Rove told investigators that three days before his July 11, 2003, conversation with Cooper, he learned Plame's name from syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who outed Plame in a July 14, 2003, column.


From the July 12 Wolf Blitzer Reports:


MEHLMAN: The fact is, Karl Rove did not leak classified information. He did not, according to what we learned this past weekend, reveal the name of anybody. He didn't even know the name, so he couldn't have revealed it.


From the July 15 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:


MEHLMAN: One article last weekend was an article in Newsweek, which I thought exonerated Karl Rove in many ways. What it said was Karl Rove was not leaking anybody's name, he didn't know that name.

Lie no. 4: Wilson claimed his mission to Niger "positively proved" that the country had not sold nuclear materials to Iraq

During his recent appearances, Mehlman has attempted to impugn Wilson's credibility by falsely alleging that he claimed his Niger findings conclusively refuted the allegation that Iraq had purchased or attempted to purchase nuclear materials from Niger.

The CIA sent Wilson to the African nation in February 2002 to investigate such allegations. Upon his return, he disclosed his findings in a CIA debriefing, which were later disclosed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Wilson's New York Times op-ed presented his personal interpretation of his findings -- specifically, that they did not support President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

From the July 12 Wolf Blitzer Reports:

BLITZER: When you say the story was false, is there any evidence Niger was sending uranium, enriched uranium to Iraq?

MEHLMAN: What Joe Wilson alleged was that the vice president, then he said the CIA director sent him to Niger. He then alleged that he wrote a report which positively proved that, in fact, that wasn't occurring and that the vice president sat on the report.

BLITZER: But the upshot of his bottom line report to the CIA was there was no evidence uranium, enriched uranium, yellowcake as it's called, was being sent to Iraq. So he was right on that.

MEHLMAN: Well, both the Senate Intelligence Committee and others who have studied it have found that, in fact, his report was largely irrelevant to that finding.

From the July 13 Hardball:

MEHLMAN: Joe Wilson's comments on Newt Gingrich, like his comments on so many other things, who sent him to Niger, the definitiveness of his report, whether the vice president reviewed his report, all of these allegations have been disproved by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by others who have studied it who are objective sources. Once again, what Joe Wilson said is not supported by the facts.

But Wilson never claimed that he had provided definitive evidence that the Bush administration's Niger claim was unfounded. Rather, he wrote in his Times op-ed that on the day after the 2003 State of the Union address, "I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them."

Moreover, Wilson's personal assessment of his findings, as conveyed in his Times op-ed, concurred with the assessment by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) that the intelligence failed to support the Niger allegation and, more broadly, that Iraq had not reconstituted its nuclear program. As the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA have admitted, Wilson and INR turned out to be right.

Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usnw/20050715/pl_usnw/memo_to_mehlman_interviewers__rnc_chair_tells_the_ same_lies_over_and_over_about_rove_controversy209_ xml)

Funny thing, people tend to forget that when there's trouble, the RNC chairman tends to lie with abandon. It's been a long time, so I wouldn't expect many people to remember, but George H.W. Bush told more than his share of whoppers and half-truths when he was RNC chairman at the same time that Watergate was going down.

Bush's credibility was so bad by the time Watergate was over that Ford yanked him and installed Mary Louise Smith. If people then had challenged 41's credibility more thoroughly, we might have been spared twelve years of him as VP and Pres.

Mehlman literally talks out of the side of his mouth. Have you seen him?