Bush moves the goalposts

It's an archetypal rich-kid gambit: When you're not winning the game, change the rules so you can win.

Right after his inauguration, Bush said:

"We must remember the high standards that come with high office," he said. "This begins careful adherence with the rules. I expect every member of this administration to stay well within the boundaries [that] define legal and ethical conduct.

"No one in the White House should be afraid to confront the people they work for over ethical concerns, and no one should hesitate to confront me as well."

September 2003:

On Sept. 30, 2003, Mr. Bush said he was eager to find out if there had been "a leak" from his administration about Mrs. Wilson. "I want to know who it is," he said. "And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of."

Just one day earlier, Mr. McClellan had stated a more categorical standard. "The president has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people in his administration," Mr. McClellan said. "He's made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."

Bush yesterday:

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration. I don't know all the facts; I want to know all the facts."

Now, this last statement is interesting, not just from the "moving the goalposts" standpoint. It means one of two things: either the President of the United States has no idea what's going on in his Administration, in which case he's a mindboggling incompetent, or he's lying, which may come out later on as this story unfolds. Remember, it's HIS party who decided that it's not the [fill in the transgression here], it's the LYING.

So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman has pointed out in a letter to Bush that this violation extends beyond the Intelligence Identities Protection Act:

Your new standard is not consistent with your obligations to enforce Executive Order 12958, which governs the protection of national security secrets. The executive order states: "Officers and employees of the United States Government ... shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently ... disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified."3 Under the executive order, the available sanctions include "reprimand, suspension without pay, removal, termination of classification authority, loss or denial of access to classified information, or other sanctions."4

Under the executive order, you may not wait until criminal intent and liability are proved by a prosecutor. Instead, you have an affirmative obligation to take "appropriate and prompt corrective action."5 And the standards of proof are much different. A criminal violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is investigating, requires a finding that Mr. Rove "intentionally disclose[d]" the identity of a covert agent.6 In contrast, the administrative sanctions under Executive Order 12958 can be imposed without a finding of intent. Under the express terms of the executive order, you are required to impose administrative sanctions – such as removal of office or termination of security clearance – if Mr. Rove or other officials acted "negligently" in disclosing or confirming information about Ms. Wilson's identity.7

But let's make one thing perfectly clear: This isn't just about the leak of the identify of a CIA agent. Unfortunately, the importance of the Downing Street Minutes has been lost in this far-juicier scandal, but it's all related. It's all about cooking up justification for a war that was already being planned. It's all about lying to the American people in order to send their children to war.

While I support what Waxman is trying to do here, this is NOT about getting Rove out of the picture, as important as that might be. If Rove is fired, he can still fulfill his role as "Bush's Brain" behind the scenes. This is about the lies the Administration told -- LIES. Not "bad intelligence", but LIES. And now it's about the cover-up.

Geov Parrish reminds us to keep our eyes on the bigger picture:

In the matter of Valerie Plame, it's entirely possible that Rove isn't the culprit, and is guilty of nothing more than talking about her to a reporter when, two years ago, the White House said that he had not. That doesn't mean he did so knowingly, or knew Plame was undercover, two aspects of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- a law that is extremely difficult to prosecute.

It could well be that Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, is being entirely truthful when he says that Rove testified voluntarily before the federal grand jury, never invoked the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination, and has been assured by prosecutors that Rove is not a focus of the investigation into who leaked Plame's name.

In their zeal to nail Rove, liberals and progressives may be missing the real story here. Rove says he first learned about Plame's status from reporters. If so, somebody had to tell those reporters.

A clue as to who comes from who the reporters are. Matthew Cooper, Time correspondent, says he talked with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, after he talked with Rove. Libby has also claimed in the past not to have talked with reporters about Plame.

The leak originally hit print with Robert Novak, a columnist tight with Bush's neocon crowd. But the most intriguing figure is Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter previously most notorious as the credulous scribe who reprinted, on page one, mountains of pre-war lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, lies often sourced to Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi was a favored protégé of the neocon war hawks who pushed the Bush White House into war, a cabal led by Cheney himself. Miller was their favored mouthpiece.

It's no stretch of the imagination to picture a situation in which the neocons were alarmed by the nerve former Ambassador Joseph Wilson struck with his revelations that the Bush team knew that accusations Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger were not only false, but based on crude forgeries. Their preferred response was to go after the messenger -- to discredit Joseph Wilson, just as this administration has attacked Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and various other high-profile critics of administration policy.

Karl Rove is not the only figure in the Bush administration who plays nasty. But these men are not stupid. They would not have leaked such an explosive secret about Plame, one that endangered CIA agents and compromised national security, without some level of deniability. One reason it's hard to imagine Rove as the culprit is that he's simply too smart to blurt out something like this.

Those people wanting Karl Rove's head probably aren't going to get it. There are too many doubts about his guilt, and he is too indispensable to George Bush, for Bush to fire him.

But that doesn't mean heads aren't going to roll somewhere. By all accounts, the investigation of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expanding rapidly. It is probably, at this point, encompassing far more than the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

In all likelihood, this is about more than Karl Rove, more than simply getting back at Joseph Wilson for his criticisms of the administration. This is about taking on members of the Bush administration who were and are so committed to war, so committed to empire, that compromising national security is less important than maintaining the political momentum necessary to launch an illegal invasion.

And THAT's what we need to focus on. We all know that Karl Rove isn't going anywhere. He knows too much. This isn't about Bush's much-touted "loyalty". This is about Karl Rove being a walking treasure trove of information about George W. Bush. He knows where all the proverbial bodies are buried. And given the kind of bizarre thrall/vicarious life symbiosis between the two men, a hatchet man like Rove wouldn't hesitate to spill the beans if the man to whom he's devoted his adult life were to spurn him.

But as odious as Rove is, from where I'm sitting, this isn't about scoring a few points by cutting Bush's tactician off at the knees. It's about bringing an administration to justice that lied to the American people, that exploited its fears in the aftermath of 9/11 and sent its children off to die for no good reason whatsoever.

UPDATE: John at Blogenlust (via Shakespeare's Sister) wonders if the "no one who has committed a crime" standard is going to be grandfathered to include other prominent members of the Bush Administration.