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Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter explains Treasongate: Why the Leak Probe Matters

Still with me? It's going to move faster ...

Traitor Karl Rove Laughs at the
Zombie Loyalists Who Blindly
Defended His Treason

"Suspicion for the leak was immediately cast on White House adviser and long time Bush confident, Karl Rove, known as one of the few men in Washington with flesh colored hair"

--Jon Stewart

That would be Karl Rove who used his puppet Robert Novak to conceal his treasonous actions. If Karl told Novak - that would be when the treason occured ... To sum up:

Ted Rall: REPUBLICANS MUST CHOOSE: BUSH OR AMERICA?

NEW YORK--"Karl Rove is loyal to President Bush," a correspondent wrote as Treasongate broke. "Isn't that a form of patriotism?" Not in a representative democracy, I replied. Only in a dictatorship is fealty to the Leader equal to loyalty to the nation. We're Bush's boss. He works for us. Unless that changed on 9/11 (or 12/20/00). Rove had no right to give away state secrets, even to protect Bush.

Newly loquacious Time reporter Matt Cooper has deflated half a dozen Rove-defending talking points since we last visited. Republicans, for instance, have argued that Rove had merely confirmed what Cooper already knew: that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. That claim evaporated in Cooper's piece in the magazine's July 25 issue: "This was the first time I had heard anything about Wilson's wife."

"I've already said too much," Cooper quotes Rove as he ended their 2003 conversation.

Rove may avoid prosecution under the Intelligence Identities and Protection Act, says John Dean, counsel at the Nixon White House. "There is, however, evidence suggesting that other laws were violated," he says, alluding to Title 18, Section 641 of the U.S. Code. The "leak of sensitive [government] information" for personal purposes--say, outting the CIA wife of your boss' enemy--is "a very serious crime," according to the judge presiding over a similar recent case. If convicted under the anti-leak statute, Rove would face ten years in a federal prison.

Even if Rove originally learned about Plame's status from jailed New York Times journalist Judith Miller, Dean continues, "it could make for some interesting pairing under the federal conspiracy statute (which was the statute most commonly employed during Watergate)." Conspiracy will get you five years at Hotel Graybar.

Rove's betrayal of a CIA WMD expert--while the U.S. was using WMDs as a reason to invade Iraq--is virtually indistinguishable from Robert Hanssen's selling out of American spies. Both allowed America's enemies to learn the identities of covert operatives. Both are traitors. Both are eligible for the death penalty.

And he's not the only high-ranking Bush Administration traitor.

In last week's column I speculated that Treasongate would almost certainly implicate Dick Cheney. Now, according to Time, Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby is being probed as a second source of leaks to reporters about Plame.

We already know that Rove is a traitor. So, probably, is Cheney. Since George W. Bush has protected traitors for at least two years; he is therefore an accomplice to the Rove-Libby cell. We are long past the point where, during the summer of 1974, GOP senators led by Barry Goldwater told Richard Nixon that he had to resign. So why aren't Turd Blossom and his compadres out of office and awaiting trial?

Democrats are out of power. And, sadly, Republicans have become so obsessed with personal loyalty that they've forgotten that their first duty is to country, not party or friend. Unless they wake up soon and dump Bush, Republicans could be permanently discredited.

Bush sets the mafia-like tone: "I'm the kind of person, when a friend gets attacked, I don't like it." His lieutenants blur treason with hardball politics--"[Democrats] just aren't coming forward with any policy positions that would change the country, so they want to pick up whatever the target of the week is and make the most out of that," says GOP House Whip Roy Blunt--and blame the victim--Rove, absurdly argues Congresswoman Deborah Pryce, was innocently trying to expose Wilson's "lies."

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds Bush's credibility at 41 percent, down from 50 in January. Given events past and present, that's still a lot higher than it ought to be.

We don't need a law to tell us that unmasking a CIA agent, particularly during wartime, is treasonous. Every patriotic American--liberal, conservative, or otherwise--knows that.

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, left, talks to "Meet the
Press" host Tim Russert about the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name.

Cooper claims he learned of Plame through Rove

Bush administration handling of pre-war intelligence

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July 18, 2005

In a TIME magazine article, reporter Matthew Cooper claimed he learned that Plame worked with the CIA through a conversation with Karl Rove. However, he denied that Rove directly named Valerie Plame. He also revealed that he discussed Plame with Lewis Libby, the deputy Chief of Staff for the U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The revelation corroborates Rove's testimony to the grand jury, leaked to several news sources, that he learned of Plame's name from Robert Novak and another journalist (Rove testified that he cannot remember which one), and that he did tell Cooper in a later discussion that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, though he testified he never mentioned Plame by name.

In a Sunday MSNBC Meet the Press broadcast, Cooper said he secured a more specific written waiver from two sources, Rove and Libby, which led him to reverse his earlier refusal to cooperate with the federal grand jury investigation into the CIA disclosure of Plame. This second waiver was signed only hours prior to the contempt of court proceedings that would have put him in jail, the fate of the New York Times reporter Judith Miller who refused to reveal her sources to the same court. He said during the broadcast there were other White House sources as well, but declined during the interview to disclose their names.

The waiver Cooper secured releases him from the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. He wrote a 1st person account of the conversation with Rove that was published Sunday on the TIME Online Edition. In a marketing move made by TIME, they turned the high interest in the story into an online money maker by charging $1.99 for access to the story. 6 print issues of the magazine come with the purchase.