Rove, Fake Documents and How The Left Is Often Played By Rightwing Operatives

Did Rove Blow a Spook's Cover?
The White House won't say.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2003, at 4:59 PM PT

A minor flap has been brewing since syndicated columnist Robert Novak, citing "two senior administration officials," reported in July that Joseph C. Wilson IV was married to a Central Intelligence Agency specialist on "weapons of mass destruction" named Valerie Plame. Wilson is the former diplomat sent by the CIA last year to check out allegations that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger. He caused the Bush administration no small embarrassment by stating, in a July 6 op-ed, that he'd reported "it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." Novak hasn't particularly supported the Iraq war, and his column essentially took Wilson's side. But the fact that Novak blew Plame's cover (in the course of relating that Wilson was sent at Plame's suggestion) gave The Nation's David Corn the opportunity to accuse the Bush administration of compromising national security, in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Wilson wouldn't confirm that his wife works for the CIA, but he told Corn that if she did, then

Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames.

The question of whether to investigate who in the Bush administration blew Plame's cover surfaced Aug. 21 at a forum about intelligence failures on Iraq held by Rep. Jay Inslee, a fervently anti-war Democrat. Wilson, who was present, had this to say:

It's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.

This appeared to be an unsubtle hint that Wilson knew one of the leakers to be Rove. Taking the bait, someone asked White House press spokesman Scott McClellan about it today:

Q: On the Robert Novak-Joseph Wilson situation, Novak reported earlier this year quoting "anonymous government sources" telling him that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. Now, this is apparently a federal offense, to burn the cover [of] a CIA operative. Wilson now believes that the person who did this was Karl Rove. He's quoted from a speech last month as saying, "At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." Did Karl Rove tell that—

A: I haven't heard that. That's just totally ridiculous. But we've already addressed this issue. If I could find out who anonymous people were, I would. I just said, it's totally ridiculous.

Q: But did Karl Rove do it?

A: I said, it's totally ridiculous.

Now, on one level, Chatterbox feels mildly sympathetic toward McClellan. White House etiquette prevented him from saying, "How the hell should I know? If Rove blew the cover of a CIA agent, do you suppose he'd be stupid enough to tell me about it?" And McClellan deserves points for not taking a leaf from his predecessor Ari Fleischer's playbook, which says that you should always deny damaging stuff well before you know whether it's true.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088471/

He's America's Joseph Goebbels. As a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush. Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove onto the national stage. From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation and disinformation mill.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen1101.html

Rove is known for his political tactics when he was a protege of Donald Segretti, convicted Watergate conspirator. In 1970, he sneaked into the campaign office of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon and stole some letterhead. He printed fliers on the letterhead promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" and distributed the fliers at rock concerts and homeless shelters. Admitting to the incident much later, Rove said, "I was nineteen and I got involved in a political prank." [1] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/rove072399.htm) [2] (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010305&c=2&s=dubose) [3] (http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/2/reich-r.html)

After dropping out of the University of Utah in 1971, Karl Rove started his political career as the executive director of the College Republican National Committee. He held this position until 1972 when he became the National Chairman of the College Republicans (1973-1974). As chairman, Rove had access to many powerful politicians and government officials during the Watergate scandal, including then CIA director George H. W. Bush. For the next few years, he worked in various Republican circles and assisted George H. W. Bush's 1980 presidential campaign. Rove's greatest claim to fame at the time was that he had introduced Bush to Lee Atwater.

In 1993, according to the New York Times, John Ashcroft's campaign paid Karl Rove & Co. over $300,000 to aid his Senate race. In 1999, the George W. Bush campaign effort paid Karl Rove & Co. $2.5 million for July through December. According to Rove, "About 30 percent of that is postage."

In early 2000, during the Republican primary, Senator John McCain led George W. Bush in the race for the Republican presidential nomination and won several state primaries. A push poll was allegedly launched against McCain: telemarketers were allegedly hired to call voters in South Carolina, claiming that McCain was mentally unstable due to torture he had endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and that he had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman. These allegations had no basis in fact. A reporter, Wayne Slater, suggested in print that Rove might be behind the whisper campaign. Rove denied any involvement. McCain's support subsequently dwindled, and Bush won the nomination. (There were other factors in that primary contest as well, including a long exchange of negative television advertisements between the two candidates.)

After the presidential elections in November 2000, Karl Rove organized an emergency migration of Republican politicians and supporters to Florida to assist the Bush campaign during the recount.

George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001. Karl Rove accepted a position in the Bush administration as Senior Advisor to the President.

In March 2001, Rove met with executives from Intel, successfully advocating a merger between a Dutch company and an Intel company supplier. Rove owned $100,000 in Intel Co. stock at the time. In June 2001, Rove met with two pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. At the time, Rove held almost $250,000 in drug industry stocks. On 30 June 2001, Rove divested his stocks in 23 companies, which included more than $100,000 in each Enron, Boeing, General Electric, and Pfizer. On 30 June 2001, the White House admitted that Rove was involved in administration energy policy meetings, while at the same time holding stock in energy companies including Enron.

On 10 April 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger met with Rove to discuss whether the actor should run for Governor of California in 2006.

On 14 May 2003, during a meeting with South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, President George W. Bush brought only Rove and Condoleezza Rice.

On 29 August 2003, retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson named Rove as the White House official who leaked to the press the identity of a CIA operative as the wife of a prominent journalist and Bush administration critic. The White House denied the allegation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Rove

By his own account, Rove's sights are set even further into the future than Bush's re-election. He has spoken about strategic shifts of power that happen every so often in American history. The precedent he often refers to was set over a century ago by William McKinley, another Republican with brilliant advisers, who narrowly defeated a populist Democrat (William Jennings Bryan) in 1896 and established a Republican hegemony that lasted more than three decades.

The Republicans now control the presidency, the senate, and the house of representatives. Rove's task now is to consolidate that dominance of the White House and Capitol Hill and then use it to recast the Washington's third source of power, the supreme court, from its current cautious conservatism to a more red-blooded Republicanism.

To achieve that, Rove has to win the November elections for the Republicans. They have all the advantages of incumbency, but there is disillusion in the air over unemployment and the Iraq war, and a newly united Democratic party behind Kerry is making inroads in the polls. On the other hand, the Republicans have Rove, to whom no other campaign strategist comes close.

Rove prepared for the harder edges of US politics by surviving his youth. Born on Christmas Day 1950 in Denver, Colorado, he grew up in or near the Rockies, where his father worked as a geologist. On his 19th birthday, his father walked out on him. Soon afterwards, he found out that he was not his father after all, the news dropped into a dinner-table conversation by his aunt and uncle. Twelve years later, alone in Reno, his mother committed suicide.

At high school in Utah, Rove was known as a nerd and a motor-mouth, unpopular but irrepressibly opinionated. While his peers were fixated on girls he became obsessed with school politics, campaigning for student positions in a precocious jacket and tie. Although his parents were apolitical, he was a vocal Nixon supporter from the age of nine.

Like Dick Cheney, he avoided the Vietnam draft with a college deferment, but gave up his education to work on Republican campaigns, and never got a degree. He launched his political career by wresting control of the College Republicans, a radical group in the Nixon era. It was an unpleasant business. In an interesting precursor to the Florida battle 17 years later, Rove took on his opponent, Robert Edgeworth, principally on procedural grounds - challenging the credentials of every single Edgeworth delegate to the1973 College Republican convention and putting forward a rival delegate.

The aggressive tactics won the 22-year-old Rove a walk-on role in the Watergate saga that was consuming the nation. A report was published in the Washington Post on August 10, 1973, titled "[Republican party] Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks", gave an account, based on tape recordings, of how Rove and a colleague had been touring the country giving young Republicans political combat training, in which they recalled their feats of derring-do, such as Rove's Chicago heist at the Dixon headquarters.

At the time, Rove claimed the tape had been doctored to exclude a warning to the audience not to try to emulate any of his past misdeeds. Others present simply remember a caution not to get caught. The publicity forced the intervention of the Republican National Committee and its chairman, a former Texas congressman clinging on to his political career: George Herbert Walker Bush. After considering the case, Bush Sr took action. He drove Edgeworth out of the party on suspicion of having leaked the tapes, and hired Rove, bringing him to Washington.

The incident marked the genesis of the Rove-Bush axis and it was in Washington that Rove met the younger Bush. He fell, politically speaking, in love. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow," Rove recalled years later. In 1977, Rove was sent to Texas, in theory to run a political action committee, but according to one Texan political consultant who knew him at the time, "It was really to baby-sit Bush back when Bush was drinking".

While doing that, Rove discovered his true calling. He set up a "direct mail" operation, Rove + Company [sic], pinpointing potential Republican voters and sending them fundraising or voter registration letters written specifically to appeal to the target audience.

At this time, he married Valerie Wainright, a wealthy Houston woman from the Bush social circle, but the marriage could not withstand his consuming preoccupation with politics.(He married his second wife, Darby, in 1986.)

Rove was in Texas at a turning point in its political history. The Democrats' hegemony, inherited from the civil war era, was crumbling, as the party moved to the left and Republican northerners moved into the state's city suburbs. Election by election, post by post, the Republicans began to take over the state, and Rove was there to help them.

The 1986 governor's race was a prime example. The contest between Rove's Republican client, Bill Clements, and the Democratic incumbent, Mark White, was neck and neck, when Rove announced he had found an electronic listening device in his office, and cried foul. The furore swung the election to Clements and to this day Texan Democrats are convinced Rove concocted the whole episode.

Eight years later, another Democrat, Anne Richards, occupied the governor's mansion, but Rove was promoting another Republican candidate, George W Bush. Governor Richards' advisers laughed openly at the challenge, but they were in for a shock. "We did not believe that Bush would be as disciplined as he was. He was extremely disciplined," recalls George Shipley, who was then Richards' campaign adviser. "Karl gave him 10 index cards and said, 'This is what you are going to say. Don't confuse yourself with the issues.' It's the model for the presidency."

In its last days, the 1994 campaign also turned nasty. Texan voters began receiving calls from "pollsters" asking questions such as: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if you knew her staff is dominated by lesbians?" In the business, it is called "push-polling" and Shipley has no doubt who was behind it."Rove has used this kind of dirty tricks in every campaign he's ever run."

Only circumstantial evidence links Rove to the push-polling. In fact, his fingerprints have not been found on any dirty tricks since his College Republican days. Ray Sullivan, a political consultant who worked for Rove on a string of campaigns, argues that Rove is the target of "revisionist history" that portrays every low blow in every campaign to his orchestration. "He can be tough," Sullivan says, but insists he was always fair. "Politics in Texas is a contact sport. It is rough and tumble but those who cut corners and don't back up claims with facts don't last very long and Karl has lasted longer than anyone."

Last year, however, Rove's taste for personal politics entangled him in an extraordinary spy scandal. He is reported to have made calls to Washington journalists last July identifying a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame, who was married to Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had called into question the administration's claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear programme. Rove allegedly told the journalists that Plame was "fair game" because her husband had gone public with his criticism.

A grand jury is now investigating the leak of Plame's name, a federal felony. Rove has denied being its source, and Wilson believes now he may have tried to push the story only after her name had already been published. Rove has yet to appear before the grand jury, but he has retained an expensive Washington lawyer.

It is a dangerous moment for Rove, but he has escaped from a litany of political scandals unscathed, and even enhanced. Bush's other nickname for the Boy Genius is "Turd Blossom" - a Texanism for a flower that blooms from cattle excrement. This year, there should be ample opportunity for him to earn the title.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1165126,00.html

Rove fancies himself an expert in both policy and politics because he sees no distinction between the two. This matters for a number of reasons. There is always a time during any president's administration when what is best for the future of the country diverges from what best serves that president's political future. If Rove is standing with George W. Bush at that moment, he will push the president in the direction of reelection rather than the country's best interests.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0507-02.htm

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe today said neither his organization nor John Kerry´s campaign leaked to CBS documents questioning President Bush´s service record, which may have been forged.
He suggested White House adviser Karl Rove could be behind the documents.
"I can unequivocally say that no one involved here at the Democratic National Committee had anything at all to do with any of those documents. If I were an aspiring young journalist, I think I would ask Karl Rove that question," Mr. McAuliffe said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040910-011417-2610r.htm