Bush Whacked Rove On Plame Leak?

[NATO AIR]

it appears we're reaching the endgame to all this mess.

we know joe wilson's a liar. we know most people who knew them knew plame was a CIA agent.

but we DON'T know who exactly leaked all this... was it cheney? rove?

now someone says rove did it and bush rebuked him for it. not an unrealistic scenario, as time after time has shown the president to be a good, honorable man, who often times is let down by his people who stoop to low levels of both performance and morality.

http://nydailynews.com/front/story/357107p-304312c.html

Bush whacked
Rove on CIA leak

BY THOMAS M. DeFRANK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

An exultant President Bush appeared to whisper to his top aide Karl Rove as they headed for Indiana in July.

WASHINGTON - An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the Daily News.
"He made his displeasure known to Karl," a presidential counselor told The News. "He made his life miserable about this."

Bush has nevertheless remained doggedly loyal to Rove, who friends and even political adversaries acknowledge is the architect of the President's rise from baseball owner to leader of the free world.

As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald nears a decision, perhaps as early as today, on whether to issue indictments in his two-year probe, Bush has already circled the wagons around Rove, whose departure would be a grievous blow to an already shell-shocked White House staff and a President in deep political trouble.

Asked if he believed indictments were forthcoming, a key Bush official said he did not know, then added: "I'm very concerned it could go very, very badly."

"Karl is fighting for his life," the official added, "but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The President knows that and appreciates that."

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said.

But the President felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush's claim that Saddam Hussen tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.

A second well-placed source said some recently published reports implying Rove had deceived Bush about his involvement in the Wilson counterattack were incorrect and were leaked by White House aides trying to protect the President.

"Bush did not feel misled so much by Karl and others as believing that they handled it in a ham-handed and bush-league way," the source said.

None of these sources offered additional specifics of what Bush and Rove discussed in conversations beginning shortly after the Justice Department informed the White House in September 2003 that a criminal investigation had been launched into the leak of CIA agent Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.

A White House spokesman declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of Fitzgerald's investigation.

Originally published on October 19, 2005

 

[Hagbard Celine]

How do we know Joe Wilson is a liar? And are we naive enough to actually believe that something like this leaked by a top official in the Vice President's office would not have first gone through at the very least, the Vice President and almost certainly the president too?