White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.

Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove's accounts was the claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has said that Rove never knew that Plame was a covert officer when he discussed her CIA employment with reporters, and that he only first learned of her clandestine status when he read about it in the newspaper. Luskin did not return a telephone call today seeking comment for this story.

If recently disclosed press accounts of conversations that Rove had with reporters are correct, Novak and Rove first spoke about Plame on July 8, 2003. It was three days later, on July 11, that Rove also spoke about Plame to Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper. Three days after that, on July 14, Novak's column appeared in which he identified Plame as an "agency operative." According to Novak's account, it was he, not Rove, who first broached the issue of Plame's employment with the CIA, and that Rove at most simply said that he, too, had heard much the same information.

Temporarily freed from Aruba duty, Scarborough hosted a discussion of the Karl Rove leak. Predictably, Kelley Anne Conway began to spin. She made a ludicrous claim:

CONWAY (7/18/05): There is no evidence that anybody lied to Scott [McClellan]. And there is certainly no evidence that Karl Rove was a producer of any information. If anything, the two most recent news accounts about this issue suggest that Karl was the recipient of the information from a media source, not the producer of that information. And, look—

Say what? Rove wasn’t “the producer of that information?” The “two most recent news accounts” show this? In fact, one day earlier, on Meet the Press, Matt Cooper had said just the opposite. According to Cooper, when he spoke with Rove on July 11, 2003, Rove told him that Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. And it was the first time he’d ever heard this, Cooper said; Rove had “produced (leaked) the information” to him. Conway’s statement didn’t make sense. And as any actual anchor would do, Scarborough called Conway on it:

SCARBOROUGH (continuing directly): Well, he produced—he produced it to Time magazine and Cooper, didn`t he?

CONWAY: No. There is no evidence of that. In fact, when Joe Wilson himself testified before the—

SCARBOROUGH: Where have I been?

CONWAY: Pardon me?

SCARBOROUGH: Where have I been? I mean, I am sorry. I thought I read the Time magazine article. I thought I saw Matt Cooper on Meet the Press this weekend saying that he got the information from Karl Rove.

CONWAY: And—

SCARBOROUGH: I mean, was I—was it all a dream? Was it like the last season of Dallas?

“Where have I been?” Scarborough asked, openly mocking Conway’s statement. As any sensible host would have done, he quickly challenged what Conway had said, noting that Cooper just got through saying that Rove had “produced information.” Conway got to offer rebuttal, but her original claim had been sheer nonsense—and Scarborough quickly called her on it. It’s what you’d expect from a well-paid news anchor—unless, of course, you’re watching the NewsHour, and Ifill is there in the chair. Scarborough functioned just as he should have.

Talk show host Pat Campbell asked the Littleton Republican how the country should respond if terrorists struck several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons.

"Well, what if you said something like -- if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.

"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.

"Yeah," Tancredo responded.

"It's best people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions. I don't know all the facts. I want to know all the facts," Bush said Monday. "I would like this to end as quickly as possible. If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration."

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Bush shouldn't wait for charges to be filed to take action.

"The standard for holding a high position in the White House should not simply be that you didn't break the law," he said. "It should be a lot higher and if Mr. Rove or anyone else aided and abetted the leaking of the name of an agent, even if they don't meet the narrow criminal standard, the president should ask for their resignation."

In Washington, Rove and others were discrediting Wilson's story even as then-CIA director George J. Tenet said that the yellowcake allegation should never have been included in Bush's speech. "This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was removed," Tenet said in a July 11 statement.

In a conversation that same day, Rove told Time magazine's Matthew Cooper that Wilson's wife was in the CIA and authorized the mission to Niger; but he did not use her name. Afterwards, Rove e-mailed then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to tell him he had waved Cooper off Wilson's claim.

A day later, Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, told Cooper he had heard the same thing about Plame, and a senior administration official flagged the role of Wilson's wife, almost in passing, to The Washington Post's Walter Pincus.

"I didn't dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

Bob Novak, Newsday, July 21, 2003

...White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar.

These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

"I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here."
- Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti.

"Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't have the president's confidence."
- Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday.

Friday, July 15, 2005 -- A fact sheet released by Rep. Waxman explains that the nondisclosure agreement signed by Karl Rove prohibited Mr. Rove from confirming the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Wilson to reporters. Under the nondisclosure agreement and the applicable executive order, even “negligent” disclosures to reporters are grounds for revocation of a security clearance or dismissal.

Randel was a Drug Enforcement Agency analyst, a PhD in history, working in the Atlanta office of the DEA. Randel was convinced that British Lord Michael Ashcroft (a major contributor to Britain's Conservative Party, as well as American conservative causes) was being ignored by DEA, and its investigation of money laundering. (Lord Ashcroft is based in South Florida and the off-shore tax haven of Belize.)

Randel leaked the fact that Lord Ashcroft's name was in the DEA files, and this fact soon surfaced in the London news media. Ashcroft sued, and learned the source of the information was Randel. Using his clout, soon Ashcroft had the U.S. Attorney in pursuit of Randel for his leak.

By late February 2002, the Department of Justice indicted Randel for his leaking of Lord Ashcroft's name. It was an eighteen count "kitchen sink" indictment; they threw everything they could think of at Randel. Most relevant for Karl Rove's situation, Court One of Randel's indictment alleged a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 641. This is a law that prohibits theft (or conversion for one's own use) of government records and information for non-governmental purposes. But its broad language covers leaks, and it has now been used to cover just such actions.

Randel, faced with a life sentence (actually, 500 years) if convicted on all counts, on the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty to violating Section 641. On January 9, 2003, Randel was sentenced to a year in a federal prison, followed by three years probation. This sentence prompted the U.S. Attorney to boast that the conviction of Randel made a good example of how the Bush Administration would handle leakers.

...What a pity all that intelligence and information is a complete waste of space!

Over the years of the Bush regime, I have come to realize that Rove could have written: "Joe Wilson's wife Victoria Plame is an undercover CIA operative and outing her as I ask you to do, as part of our political attack on Wilson, is treason and will endanger the lives of all her contacts living in other countries, but go ahead and do it anyway" in letters 9 feet high on a billboard, signing his name with a flourish; he could have been filmed doing so by a documentary news crew and 26 amateur videographers, and still not one damn thing would happen to him.

The Bush administration has never held anyone accountable for anything. They give medals to total screw-ups. Karl Rove knows the deepest, darkest, dirtiest secrets of everyone in the administration. Between his knowledge and his ability to spin any amount of evil into looking like it's OK, he is far too dangerous and valuable to them to let anything happen to him, even if they ever did hold anyone to account.

He will not be convicted, he will not go to trial, he will not be fired, he will not be asked to resign, he will not be reprimanded. He will go on dismantling American democracy and covering up for others who do so. Notice that, though willing to push Scott McClellan around a little –- and a wonderful sight that was! -– no reporter has yet so much as mentioned all the senior intelligence people who stepped forward when Ms. Plame was outed and said, "The lives of many if not all of her contacts have just been endangered."

No one dares harm Karl Rove. And what could be a more sad and profound statement of how the democracy of America has crumbled into tyranny?

-- Katharine Wiley

Grant's presidency was plagued with scandals, such as the Sanborn Incident at the Treasury and problems with U.S. Attorney Cyrus I. Scofield. The most famous scandal was the Whiskey Ring fraud in which over $3 million in taxes were taken from the federal government. Orville E. Babcock, the private secretary to the President, was indicted as a member of the ring and escaped conviction only because of a presidential pardon. After the Whiskey Ring, Grant's Secretary of War, William W. Belknap, was involved in an investigation that revealed that he had taken bribes in exchange for the sale of Native American trading posts.

Although there is no evidence that Grant himself profited from corruption among his subordinates, he did not take a firm stance against malefactors and failed to react strongly even after their guilt was established. He was weak in his selection of subordinates. He alienated party leaders by giving many posts to his friends and political contributors, rather than listen to their recommendations.