More Plame Game

American Prospect Online - The Plame Game

Following are excerpts from a long report on the Plame affair. For all the background details and a thorough examination of Sargent's reasoning, click on the links.

"The Plame Game
What Murray Waas’s big scoop may really tell us about Bush’s pre-war deceptions.
By Greg Sargent

"Murray Waas’s latest scoop -- in which he broke new ground with a detailed account of the Bush administration’s deceptions about Iraq -- has won plenty of plaudits already. But its true larger significance is still crying out to be explained...

Waas's story -- presuming it’s right, and his track record has thus far been admirable -- suggests a plausible motive for both “Scooter” Libby and Karl Rove to have misled the grand jury about Plame. Their motive for doing this has hitherto been rather difficult to explain...

The thing about the Plame investigation that never quite seemed to make sense was this: Why would Libby or Rove deliberately mislead the grand jury, risking perjury charges when it wasn’t clear the leak was a crime?

Thanks to Waas, for the first time, we may now know for a fact that Rove and other Bush advisers viewed the truth about the run-up to war as something that could destroy his re-election prospects. It is entirely plausible that Bush advisers calculated that if it came out that they’d outed Plame, Congress would have been forced by the resulting firestorm to run a far more aggressive investigation of Bush’s pre-war deceptions – and possibly uncover the smoking gun Waas reports on, among other things. Remember, Libby and Rove testified in early 2004, during the heat of a presidential campaign which Rove himself had apparently concluded was at risk if existing hard evidence of Bush’s deceptions surfaced.

So it seems plausible that Libby and Rove sought to minimize the chance of the aggressive congressional oversight that might have resulted if it became known that they’d outed Plame. In short, misleading the grand jury about Plame may simply have been a key piece of a broader effort to get past the election before the truth about the run-up to the war surfaced to sink his campaign."