by Last Night in Little Rock

Rep. Henry Waxman called for a Congressional hearing over the Valerie Plame leak as the N.Y. Times this afternoon reported here.

Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey said the intentional disclosure of a covert agency's identity amounted to an "act of treason," while Representative Henry Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, called for a Congressional hearing.

Congress's institutional memory may be too short. Remember Oliver North? He testified under compulsion at the Iran-Contra hearings and succeeded in excluding that evidence at retrial. United States v. North, 910 F.2d 843 (D.C.Cir. 1990).

As close as outing a CIA agent comes to treason, and it is only one or two steps below treason in the Sentencing Guidelines, one can see the Congressional villagers coming for Frankenstein with torches and pitchforks.

Liberal groups and blogs are calling for Rove's resignation:

• Digby
• America Blog
• MoveOn. Pac
• Timothy Noah at Slate: Turd Blossom Must Go

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid just released this statement (received via e-mail)

Washington, DC – “I agree with the President when he said he expects the people who work for him to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration. I trust they will follow through on this pledge. If these allegations are true this rises above politics and is about our national security.”

The ethics watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW)has written a letter to President Bush asking him to direct that Karl Rove's security clearances be revoked as a result of the Plame leak:

Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) sent a letter today to President George Bush requesting that he immediately direct Karl Rove's security clearances be suspended pending the outcome of the government's investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

As grounds, the group asserted:

"Considering that it is a federal crime to identify covert agents, and that President Bush signed executive orders identifying the vital role the President plays in protecting national security secrets from unauthorized disclosure, it is appropriate for the President to suspend Mr. Rove's clearance pending the investigation's outcome," Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today.

In April, 1999, former President Herbert Walker Bush, the 11th director of central intelligence, said at the opening of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va, named the George Bush Center for Intelligence:

"I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are in my view the most insidious of traitors."

Source: Associated Press, April 26, 1999; Houston Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1999.

White House Press Secretary played cat and mouse today at the press briefing on Newseek's disclosure that Karl Rove was a source of Matthew Cooper in the Valerie Plame leak. Think Progress has the transcript.

McClellan may be clamming up, but read what former CIA agent Larry Marcinkowski had to say (pdf) about the senior official of the White House who leaked the information:

I don't believe President Bush will fire Karl Rove. But, David Corn makes a good argument for why he should.

He leaked national security information as part of a fierce campaign to undermine Wilson, who had criticized the White House on the war on Iraq. Rove's overworked attorney, Robert Luskin, defends his client by arguing that Rove never revealed the name of Valerie Plame/Wilson to Cooper and that he only referred to her as Wilson's wife. This is not much of a defense. If Cooper or any other journalist had written that "Wilson's wife works for the CIA"--without mentioning her name--such a disclosure could have been expected to have the same effect as if her name had been used: Valerie Wilson would have been compromised, her anti-WMD work placed at risk, and national security potentially harmed.

Either Rove knew that he was revealing an undercover officer to a reporter or he was identifying a CIA officer without bothering to check on her status and without considering the consequences of outing her. Take your pick: in both scenarios Rove is acting in a reckless and cavalier fashion, ignoring the national security interests of the nation to score a political point against a policy foe.

I don't think that whether Plame was undercover at the time of the leak is the determinative issue. I think the question is whether the U.S. would have wanted to protect her identity because of her past or present covert status. At this hearing (pdf) of the Democratic Policy Committee in October, 2003, three current and former CIA Agents emphatically and repeatedly answer that question in the affirmative.

As Corn says, at best, Rove was reckless or cavalier. Others have said Rove probably didn't know about the law prohibiting disclosure. If true, that in itself suggests he shouldn't be privy to classified information or occupy such a senior position in the Administration.

The news is reporting that Karl Rove's lawyer's said Sunday that Rove mentioned Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA to Matthew Cooper before the Novak article was published.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.

Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.

I don't think Rove has admitted a crime. This is nothing different than what Luskin has been saying for the past week. As I wrote here on July 5:

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) reacts to today's Newseek column confirming that Karl Rove was one of Matthew Cooper's sources.

David Corn's thoughts are here. Josh Marshall's here. Here's Hunter at Daily Kos.

The most important statements of the Bush officials may be those they made to investigators before they appeared at the grand jury. Don't forget, many were interviewed with and without lawyers in their offices, even in bars. Making a false statement to a federal official is a five year offense under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001. From the International Herald Tribune, April 3, 2004:

Back in September, 2003, Robert Novak wasn't as close-mouthed as he is today. This appeared on Drudge's site and was attributed there to Novak:

'Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives'...

I found this in the TalkLeft archives, here.

David Corn scoops a Newsweek exclusive to be released today confirming that Karl Rove was Matthew Cooper's source. Corn says,

This new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or, at least it should). If what I am told is true, this is proof that the Bush White House was using any information it could gather on Joseph Wilson--even classified information related to national security--to pursue a vendetta against Wilson, a White House critic. Even if it turns out Rove did not break the law regarding the naming of intelligence officials, this new disclosure could prove Rove guilty of leaking a national security secret to a reporter for political ends. What would George W. Bush do about that?

I continue to believe that Karl Rove was Matthew Cooper's second source. (Cooper has acknowledged that Lewis Libby was his first source.) But, before we jump the gun, I think we need to ask: Is it possible that Fitzgerald wants Cooper to tell what he and Rove talked about not to get Rove, but because that conversation may make a case against Libby and possibly others? Or, does he want Rove as well?

Further research is indicating to me that Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, is one of those special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has in his cross-hairs. Whether he will get him, or whether there's anything to get, remains unknown. I also now believe that Matt Cooper's second source (Libby being the first) is Karl Rove. But...is it possible that Fitzgerald wants Cooper to tell what he and Rove talked about not to get Rove, but because that conversation may make a case against Libby and possibly others? Or, does he want Rove as well?

I've accumulated another few dozen documents off of Lexis and I don't have the space on a blog to go through all of them. So I will list some that I haven't seen discussed much either in MSM or on the blogs I've read. These are just more dots and I'm not done trying to connect them. Also, my goal is to figure out where Fitzgerald is headed from publicly available information. I'm not an investigative reporter. My focus is on the legal issues and possible criminality involved - not on national security issues.

1. First up is the transcript (25 pages, pdf) of a Democratic Policy Committee Hearing held on October 24, 2003, presided over by then Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, on the national security implications of the leak of Valerie Plame's identity. The chief witnesses were Jim Marcinkowski, Former CIA Case Officer; Larry Johnson,Former CIA Analyst; and Vince Cannistraro,Former Chief of Operations and Analysis, CIA Counterterrorism Center.

David Corn thinks he's figured it out. I think he's only partly right. Here's what I think now, and the steps I take to get there:

1. Fitzgerald said in court the investigation has run its course and only Cooper and Miller can move it forward. (Chicago Tribune, July 7)

Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, has said for months that his investigation has concluded except for the testimony of Miller and Cooper. On Wednesday, he told the court that with Miller's refusal to testify, "we are having this whole thing derailed by one person."

2. After Cooper got his call, the New York Times reports there was a conference between lawyers for Rove and Cooper and Fitzgerald.

Mr. Cooper's decision to drop his refusal to testify followed discussions on Wednesday morning among lawyers representing Mr. Cooper and Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser, according to a person who has been officially briefed on the case. Mr. Fitzgerald was also involved in the discussions, the person said.

I think during the discussions they disclosed what Cooper's testimony would be and Fitzgerald agreed Cooper did not implicate Rove in a crime.

3. The issue is not who Miller and Cooper's sources are, but what Miller's source told her - which she never printed.

4. Floyd Abrams, Miller's attorney, said that he and Miller assume they want her testimony because of what someone else told the grand jury.

Asked why prosecutors sought Miller's testimony when she never wrote a story about Plame, Times attorney Floyd Abrams said, "We don't know, but most likely somebody testified to the grand jury that he or she had spoken to Judy."

5. Lewis Libby gave a waiver for others to speak to the grand jury. Cooper had more than one source. All reporters but Miller and Cooper accepted Libby's waiver.