Red Rover

The man simply needs to be put in jail, right now....

What Rove said a year ago:

Rove has carefully chosen his words when questioned about the leak. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," he told CNN last year when asked if he had had anything to do with it.

Yes, but Rove identified her by calling her "Wilson's wife", and it's pretty obvious who Wilson's wife is. THAT information isn't classified. Rove didn't mention that at the time.

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's lawyer, Robert Luskin... said yesterday that Rove did not know Plame's name and was not actively trying to push the information into the public realm.

Instead, Luskin said, Rove discussed the matter -- under the cloak of secrecy -- with Cooper at the tail end of a conversation about a different issue. Cooper had called Rove to discuss other matters on a Friday before deadline, and the topic of Wilson came up briefly. Luskin said Cooper raised the question.

"Rove did not mention her name to Cooper," Luskin said. "This was not an effort to encourage Time to disclose her identity. What he was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren't true."

So, let me get this straight. Rove's attorney said Rove leaked a CIA agent's identity (by referring to "Wilson's wife") several days before Novack made it public. The attorney said that Rove leaked this information to a person not authorized to know it. Rove gave this information to a newspaper reporter in order to NOT encourage the reporter to use the information, with large consequences, in a story?

What Rove has done is at minimum, illegally disclosing an agent's identity. At worst, he's committed treason during a time of war.

A lot of people are asking a very sensible question right now. Why hasn't Karl Rove's security clearance been revoked?

Finally, what the fuck is the "cloak of secrecy"? I have a government security clearance (all engineers working on government systems do), and if I yanked some sensitive data and passed it to a reporter and called it "cloak of secrecy", what would be done to me would make the Spanish Inquisition look tame. And I'm just a low level grunt. Karl Rove has the highest clearance, and I'd bet a ton of money that the FBI is having MAJOR internal strife between those that want his clearance yanked, and those that are afraid of him.

I can understand that Rove hasn't been indicted yet, since the grand jury is still hearing evidence. But, somebody explain to me how Rove still has a job and a security clearance?