The Discovery of the Rove-Hadley Email
[update below]
In his latest column in Newsweek, Michael Isikoff provides us with a little more information about the now infamous email from Karl Rove to Stephen Hadley. Isikoff writes:
This is mostly old news, except perhaps the part about Rove not mentioning his conversation with Cooper in his initial appearance before the grand jury (for more on that keep reading). But Isikoff does add this interesting new fact:
This explanation for the late discovery of such an important email has been greeted with a fair amount of skepticism in the blogosphere (see here, here, here, here). Given the way this case has unfolded--with anonymous sources leaking half truths on a regular basis--I certainly don't blame people for being skeptical. But I have to say, Isikoff's explanation strikes me as perfectly plausible.
The way these things generally work is that the prosecutor's office issues a subpoena or an informal document request calling for all documents related to a particular subject. The party complying with the request--in this case the White House--then attempts to negotiate with prosecutor to narrow the request to something more manageable. Rather than manually searching through millions of emails to determine which ones are responsive (which is obviously very time-consuming and expensive), subpoenaed parties routinely work with prosecutors to come up with search terms that are likely to capture most of the emails the prosecutor is looking for.
In the early stages of the CIA leak investigation, before Fitzgerald took over, the DOJ prosecutors handling the case likely requested that all relevant emails be collected. Following that request, the White House counsel's office likely worked with the DOJ attorneys to come up with effective search terms. I highly doubt that the White House counsel's office unilaterally decided what search terms to use. That would be very unusual. Most likely, the final search terms were either suggested or approved by the DOJ prosecutors working on the case.
So why wasn't the Rove-Hadley email discovered during this process? Well, let's consider the text of the email itself. As far as I can tell from reading press reports, the entirety of the email was as follows:
Well, for starters, the two most obvious search terms--"Wilson" and "Plame"--are not used in the email. There's no mention of "Novak" or "CIA" or "operative" or anything along those lines either. The email does mention "Niger" and "Matt Cooper," but it's not entirely implausible to think that those words would not have been included in the search terms ("Time" is also in the email, but is too general a word to be useful). So it may be that Isikoff's source is telling the truth.
When Fitzgerald took over in January 2004, one of his first acts as Special Prosecutor was to issue a trio of broad ranging subpoenas to the White House (for a description of the subpoenas, see this old post by Jeralyn Merritt). Fitzgerald may have realized that the initial document search was too narrow and did not want to let anything important slip through the cracks. It was likely in the process of complying with these subpoenas that the White House counsel's office discovered the Rove-Hadley email. As soon as it was found, it would have been brought to the attention of Rove and his attorney Robert Luskin. Luskin then approached Fitzgerald, and Rove finally told the prosecutor and the grand jury about his conversation with Cooper.
The question that remains is whether Rove's failure to mention his conversation with Cooper was the result of a genuine lapse of memory or a purposeful lack of candor. I suspect the latter, but ultimately it's the opinions of the grand jurors that will matter.
On a final note, Isikoff's source says that Rove did not "mention" his conversation with Cooper in either his initial FBI interview or his initial grand jury testimony. This makes it seem as if Rove was asked a few open-ended questions about who he talked to, and he simply failed to mention Cooper. I suppose that's possible. But as I've written before, I find it hard to believe that a competent FBI agent or prosecutor would have failed to ask Rove specifically about any conversations he may have had with Matt Cooper. After all, Cooper's article, "A War on Wilson," was one of the few primary sources that investigators had to work with at the time. In the article, which was published just three days after Novak's column, Cooper wrote:
If I were an FBI agent or prosecutor investigating the leaking of Plame's name, one of my first questions to Rove would have been whether or not he was one of the officials cited in Cooper's article. I find it hard to believe that Rove was not asked that very question in either his initial FBI interview or his grand jury appearance. Could it be that Isikoff and others are merely repeating Luskin spin? Did Rove "fail to mention" his conversation with Cooper, or did he affirmatively deny having had one? If the latter, Rove's "I forgot" defense looks even weaker.
UPDATE: A helpful commenter, PollyUSA, points me toward this October 3, 2003 document collection memo sent by Alberto Gonzalez to White House employees. The memo asks White House employees to turn over the following categories of documents:
Gonzalez was almost certainly just repeating verbatim the categories provided to him by the DOJ, either in an informal docoument request or a formal subpoena. The Rove-Hadley email is clearly responsive to both category 1 and 2. If Rove still had the Hadley email on his own system (perhaps in the "sent email" folder?), and he didn't turn it over to the Counsel's office in response to this memo, that would certainly not look good for Rove. It's possible, however, that the email--which was almost three months old at the time of the memo--had already been transfered into some central archiving system. I know that some email systems work that way. If so, then the White House Counsel's office itself, under the direction of the DOJ, likely would have performed some sort of key word search of the archive. As I wrote above, it's possible that such a search would not have turned up the email in question given its lack of some of the more obvious key words (such as "Wilson" and "Plame"). It would certainly be better for Rove if this latter scenario is what actually happened.
It's also interesting to note that Matt Cooper's name is not among the journalists listed in category 3 of Gonalez' memo. That may indicate that Cooper was not yet a focus of the investigation (and, therefore, that his name was unlikely to have been used as a search term). This memo may also bode well for Rove with respect to my above speculation about what questions he was asked in his initial FBI interview and grand jury appearance. If investigators were not yet focused on Cooper, they may not have specifically asked Rove about any conversations he had with Cooper. Rove, therefore, might not have affirmatively denied talking to Cooper in his testimony. If this is the case, however, why did it take investigators so long to realize that Cooper's article was significant? Shouldn't that have been obvious from the outset?
In his latest column in Newsweek, Michael Isikoff provides us with a little more information about the now infamous email from Karl Rove to Stephen Hadley. Isikoff writes:
Fitzgerald appears to be focusing in part on
discrepancies in testimony between Rove and
Time reporter Matt Cooper about their
conversation of July 11, 2003. In Cooper's
account, Rove told him the wife of White House
critic Joseph Wilson worked at the "agency" on
WMD issues and was responsible for sending
Wilson on a trip to Niger to check out claims
that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. But Rove
did not disclose this conversation to the FBI
when he was first interviewed by agents in the
fall of 2003—nor did he mention it during his
first grand jury appearance, says one of the
lawyers familiar with Rove's account. (He did
not tell President George W. Bush about it
either, assuring him that fall only that he was
not part of any "scheme" to discredit Wilson
by outing his wife, the lawyer says.) But after
he testified, Luskin discovered an e-mail Rove
had sent that same day—July 11—alerting
deputy national-security adviser Stephen
Hadley that he had just talked to Cooper, the
lawyer says.
This is mostly old news, except perhaps the part about Rove not mentioning his conversation with Cooper in his initial appearance before the grand jury (for more on that keep reading). But Isikoff does add this interesting new fact:
Why didn't the Rove e-mail surface earlier?
The lawyer says it's because an electronic
search conducted by the White House missed
it because the right "search words" weren't
used.
This explanation for the late discovery of such an important email has been greeted with a fair amount of skepticism in the blogosphere (see here, here, here, here). Given the way this case has unfolded--with anonymous sources leaking half truths on a regular basis--I certainly don't blame people for being skeptical. But I have to say, Isikoff's explanation strikes me as perfectly plausible.
The way these things generally work is that the prosecutor's office issues a subpoena or an informal document request calling for all documents related to a particular subject. The party complying with the request--in this case the White House--then attempts to negotiate with prosecutor to narrow the request to something more manageable. Rather than manually searching through millions of emails to determine which ones are responsive (which is obviously very time-consuming and expensive), subpoenaed parties routinely work with prosecutors to come up with search terms that are likely to capture most of the emails the prosecutor is looking for.
In the early stages of the CIA leak investigation, before Fitzgerald took over, the DOJ prosecutors handling the case likely requested that all relevant emails be collected. Following that request, the White House counsel's office likely worked with the DOJ attorneys to come up with effective search terms. I highly doubt that the White House counsel's office unilaterally decided what search terms to use. That would be very unusual. Most likely, the final search terms were either suggested or approved by the DOJ prosecutors working on the case.
So why wasn't the Rove-Hadley email discovered during this process? Well, let's consider the text of the email itself. As far as I can tell from reading press reports, the entirety of the email was as follows:
Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up
that he's got a welfare-reform story coming.
When he finished his brief heads-up, he
immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this
damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt?
I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him,
I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this.
Well, for starters, the two most obvious search terms--"Wilson" and "Plame"--are not used in the email. There's no mention of "Novak" or "CIA" or "operative" or anything along those lines either. The email does mention "Niger" and "Matt Cooper," but it's not entirely implausible to think that those words would not have been included in the search terms ("Time" is also in the email, but is too general a word to be useful). So it may be that Isikoff's source is telling the truth.
When Fitzgerald took over in January 2004, one of his first acts as Special Prosecutor was to issue a trio of broad ranging subpoenas to the White House (for a description of the subpoenas, see this old post by Jeralyn Merritt). Fitzgerald may have realized that the initial document search was too narrow and did not want to let anything important slip through the cracks. It was likely in the process of complying with these subpoenas that the White House counsel's office discovered the Rove-Hadley email. As soon as it was found, it would have been brought to the attention of Rove and his attorney Robert Luskin. Luskin then approached Fitzgerald, and Rove finally told the prosecutor and the grand jury about his conversation with Cooper.
The question that remains is whether Rove's failure to mention his conversation with Cooper was the result of a genuine lapse of memory or a purposeful lack of candor. I suspect the latter, but ultimately it's the opinions of the grand jurors that will matter.
On a final note, Isikoff's source says that Rove did not "mention" his conversation with Cooper in either his initial FBI interview or his initial grand jury testimony. This makes it seem as if Rove was asked a few open-ended questions about who he talked to, and he simply failed to mention Cooper. I suppose that's possible. But as I've written before, I find it hard to believe that a competent FBI agent or prosecutor would have failed to ask Rove specifically about any conversations he may have had with Matt Cooper. After all, Cooper's article, "A War on Wilson," was one of the few primary sources that investigators had to work with at the time. In the article, which was published just three days after Novak's column, Cooper wrote:
[S]ome government officials have noted to
TIME in interviews, (as well as to syndicated
columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife,
Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
If I were an FBI agent or prosecutor investigating the leaking of Plame's name, one of my first questions to Rove would have been whether or not he was one of the officials cited in Cooper's article. I find it hard to believe that Rove was not asked that very question in either his initial FBI interview or his grand jury appearance. Could it be that Isikoff and others are merely repeating Luskin spin? Did Rove "fail to mention" his conversation with Cooper, or did he affirmatively deny having had one? If the latter, Rove's "I forgot" defense looks even weaker.
UPDATE: A helpful commenter, PollyUSA, points me toward this October 3, 2003 document collection memo sent by Alberto Gonzalez to White House employees. The memo asks White House employees to turn over the following categories of documents:
1. All documents that relate in any way to
former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson,
his trip to Niger in February 2002, or his
wife's purported relationship with the
Central Intelligence Agency; and
2. All documents that relate in any way to a
contact with any member or representative of
the news media about Joseph C. Wilson, his trip
to Niger in February 2002, or his wife's
purported relationship with the Central
Intelligence Agency; and
3. All documents that relate in any way to a
contact with any or all of the following:
reporters Knut Royce, Timothy M. Phelps,
or Robert D. Novak, or any individual(s)
acting directly or indirectly on behalf of them.
Gonzalez was almost certainly just repeating verbatim the categories provided to him by the DOJ, either in an informal docoument request or a formal subpoena. The Rove-Hadley email is clearly responsive to both category 1 and 2. If Rove still had the Hadley email on his own system (perhaps in the "sent email" folder?), and he didn't turn it over to the Counsel's office in response to this memo, that would certainly not look good for Rove. It's possible, however, that the email--which was almost three months old at the time of the memo--had already been transfered into some central archiving system. I know that some email systems work that way. If so, then the White House Counsel's office itself, under the direction of the DOJ, likely would have performed some sort of key word search of the archive. As I wrote above, it's possible that such a search would not have turned up the email in question given its lack of some of the more obvious key words (such as "Wilson" and "Plame"). It would certainly be better for Rove if this latter scenario is what actually happened.
It's also interesting to note that Matt Cooper's name is not among the journalists listed in category 3 of Gonalez' memo. That may indicate that Cooper was not yet a focus of the investigation (and, therefore, that his name was unlikely to have been used as a search term). This memo may also bode well for Rove with respect to my above speculation about what questions he was asked in his initial FBI interview and grand jury appearance. If investigators were not yet focused on Cooper, they may not have specifically asked Rove about any conversations he had with Cooper. Rove, therefore, might not have affirmatively denied talking to Cooper in his testimony. If this is the case, however, why did it take investigators so long to realize that Cooper's article was significant? Shouldn't that have been obvious from the outset?
posted by A.L. at 9:32 PM
1 Comments:
Here is what Gonzalez requested on 10/3/03.
One other point of interest is the desciption of material that would be termed "documents", in particular "telephone records of
any kind (including but not limited to any documents that memorialize
telephone calls having been made)".
Rove failed to produce two items requested in the Gonzalez memo, the Hadley email and the record of the Cooper call.
1. All documents that relate in any way to former U.S. Ambassador
Joseph C. Wilson, his trip to Niger in February 2002, or his wife's
purported relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency; and
2. All documents that relate in any way to a contact with any
member or representative of the news media about Joseph C. Wilson,
his trip to Niger in February 2002, or his wife's purported
relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency; and
3. All documents that relate in any way to a contact with any
or all of the following: reporters Knut Royce, Timothy M. Phelps,
or Robert D. Novak, or any individual(s) acting directly or
indirectly on behalf of them.
The dates are interesting as well, the request was for material dating from 2/1/02 - 9/30/03.
Best,
Pollyusa
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