Bush knew about Rove & Plame - Part 2

Since my last post on this subject, the President has finally made public reference to his 2003 pledge to lay off any members of his Administration involved in revealing the identity of a CIA covert operative - and her various front companies and all related government agents - to the world for the sake of a political vendetta.

What the President says now is that he will fire anyone found to have "committed a crime." (As Josh Marshall put it, he's set a high bar for his staff: no felons.) What he said then was that he would fire anyone found to have "leaked classified information." This is a revealing retreat on his part, mainly because the leaking of classified information is not itself a crime. Some news reports of the President's statement have claimed that he was clarifying (or "narrowing") his earlier position. Since the two statements refer to disjoint types of action, however, this cannot be the case.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, the President's statements - both directly and through spokesman Scott McClellan - have mirrored Karl Rove and his lawyer's justifications in near-eerie fashion throughout this scandal. His new position hews to this pattern, since obviously, Rove and his lawyer still hope to beat the rap, even though it is now public knowledge - not even denied by them - that Rove was involved in compromising Plame's covert status. They can maintain this hope because the governing statute sets a high bar for conviction; in any case, the wheels of justice grind exceeding slow.

We thus have four independent lines of argument that Bush knew - in 2003 - that Rove had played a role in compromising Plame's status:

1. His invocation of the phrase "classified information" in 2003, which was designed by Rove to exclude his own actions (see my previous post);
2. His lack of action in response to the revelation of Matthew Cooper's testimony about Rove. This absence of action confirms that the original pledge was not meant to apply to Rove;
3. His new statement, which appeals to an external standard for the first time, rather than referring to what actually happened (one presumes that the President can ask for the truth from his trusted aides);
4. His new statement, which retreats from the "classified information" standard, which would now very clearly indict Rove (who was too clever by half with that initial framing).

Simply because it is so hard to get one's head around, I'll say it again: The preponderance of the evidence implies that the President has, knowingly and for almost two years now, participated in keeping this traitor employed, with your tax dollars and a security clearance, in his Administration.