Rove's "I Forgot" Defense

Although it's taken me a few days to get around to it, John Dickerson deserves praise for yet another great column at Slate. Dickerson comes right out and says what I'm sure most journalists who have been following the leak investigation think (but are too afraid to say): "Karl's story doesn't make sense."

As those of you who have been following this case know, on July 11, 2003--three days before Robert Novak published his famous column outing Valerie Plame, Karl Rove told TIME magazine reporter Matthew Cooper that Joe Wilson's wife (Plame) worked for the CIA. Rove, however, failed to mention this conversation in either his initial FBI interview or grand jury appearance. He eventually did testify about the conversation, but only after it became clear that Fitzgerald was going to force Cooper to divulge his source. Under those circumstances, it's entirely reasonable for Fitzgerald to conclude that Rove deliberately withheld material information.

Rove maintains, however, that he simply forgot about the Cooper conversation, that he had no intention of misleading investigators. Dickerson puts it this way:

Rove is relying on the "what I had for lunch"
defense. Who among us, Rove defenders have
argued to me, hasn't had the experience on a
busy day where we can't remember what we
had for lunch, or whether we had lunch at all?
Bush's top political adviser has a lot on his plate.
Rove can't reasonably be expected to remember
conversations that may have had no special
relevance in his mind at the time they took
place with a reporter he was talking to for the
first time.

Dickerson starts with an obvious rebuttal:

But wouldn't a man who has such a busy life
filled with so many distractions have been
extra careful to examine his memory and
his files when the question of who revealed
the identity of Joe Wilson's wife started to
become an issue? Lots of important people
in Washington were asking, and some of
them had subpoena power.

Dickerson then highlights a number of subsequent events that should have caused any reasonable person in Rove's position to remember and understand the significance of a conversation that would have been still fresh in his mind. Dickerson discusses the publishing of Novak's column, the publishing of Cooper's two stories on Wilson, the launch of the investigation, and the White House's receipt of a subpoena specifically mentioning Cooper. He makes a compelling case.

In fact, Dickerson actually understates his argument. He leaves out an important event. On July 16, a mere five days after the Cooper conversation, David Corn published an online article for the Nation reporting that Novak's column may have exposed a CIA agent working on non-official cover. He noted that the administration officials who provided the information to Novak might have committed a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Now, I know the White House probably doesn't read the Nation religiously, but they don't get accused of committing felonies every day either (at least not back then). And Corn cited Wilson himself extensively in the article. I'd bet a lot of money that Corn's allegations got the White House's attention. That means that less than a week after his conversation with Cooper, Rove was put on notice that discussing Plame with reporters was potentially a criminal offense. Yet we're supposed to believe that by then Rove had already wiped any memory of the Cooper conversation from his mind? Please. Rove couldn't have forgotten the conversation so quickly. And even if he had, all he would have had to do was check his sent email folder or pick up a copy of TIME magazine to jog his memory. To go back to the lunch analogy, it's not so hard to remember what you had for lunch when you kept a receipt and the person you had lunch with wrote a story describing the entire meal.

Rove's defenders have suggested that he wasn't really following the Wilson story very closely at the time, that he was disengaged and didn't appreciate the significance of the Novak column. Rubbish. All indications are to the contrary. Rove seems to have taken the Novak column as a green light to shop the Plame angle all around town. Newsweek reported the following:

Wilson told NEWSWEEK that in the days
after the Novak story appeared, he got
calls from several well-connected Washington
reporters. One was NBC correspondent
Andrea Mitchell. She told NEWSWEEK that
she said to Wilson: "I heard in the White
House that people were touting the Novak c
olumn and that that was the real story." The
next day Wilson got a call from Chris
Matthews, host of the MSNBC show
"Hardball."? According to a source close to
Wilson, Matthews said, "I just got off the
phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife
was fair game."

In other words, Rove was not only following the Wilson story, he was actively pimping the Plame aspect of it to multiple reporters. And the fact that he suddenly felt free to talk about Plame after Novak published his column is strong circumstantial evidence that Rove knew he was NOT supposed to talk about Plame before. It's circumstantial evidence that he knew Plame's identity was--if not classified--at least sensitive. Once Novak let the cat out of the bag, however, she was suddenly "fair game."