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Gathering Storm Tests Bush's Loyalty to Rove White House Letter

Posted on: Thursday, 14 July 2005, 12:00 CDT

Loyalty has long been the most hallowed virtue in the White House of George W. Bush, but rarely has it been tested the way it has this week.

No one has been closer to the president or bailed him out of more tight spots than Karl Rove, his chief political adviser. Now the question is whether Bush will protect Rove from a gathering storm.

Current and former White House officials who know both men say they have no doubt that as long as Rove faces no serious legal charges, Bush will defend him. They point to the words Bush used to silence conservative critics of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last week: "I'm loyal to my friends."

Bush, who once said he would fire anyone on his staff who had knowingly leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Wilson, also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, was asked about Rove on Wednesday, at the end of a cabinet meeting, and he said that he would "not prejudge the investigation based on media reports." He reminded reporters twice that "we're in the midst of an ongoing investigation."

The day before, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, having declined Monday to answer any questions about the matter, broke briefly out of no-comment mode to come to Rove's defense. He noted that reporters had asked whether the president still had "confidence in particular individuals, specifically Karl Rove." He answered his own question, saying, "Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't." Bush did not, on Wednesday, make such a declaration of confidence. But McClellan later noted that no one had asked the president to do so. Bush's loyalty has limits. Paul O'Neill discovered what happens to those on the outside looking in when he was abruptly removed as Treasury secretary. Others have suffered similar fates. In a White House this secretive, it is impossible to know whether any conversation has begun about whether to find a graceful way for Rove to partially exit.

On Tuesday, the Republican National Committee put in motion the political machine Rove has built up over the past four and a half years to rally to his defense. It offered detailed rebuttals to any suggestion that Rove had done anything wrong and specifically that there had been an organized White House effort to leak Wilson's identity in retaliation for criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy by her husband, Joseph Wilson.

"He wasn't talking at all about her identity," said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the committee and a protege of Rove's, accusing Democrats of playing an unseemly game in criticizing the chief strategist of Bush's victory over John Kerry last year. Speaking of Rove's conversations on July 11, 2003, with Matt Cooper, a White House correspondent for Time magazine, he added: "He was saying, 'This is a bum story, you shouldn't write this story.' He didn't use her name because he didn't know her name."

Rove can take heart in one fact: So far, every senior official caught up by the questions that were touched off by 16 words in the State of the Union address by Bush in 2003 has survived, even prospered. Three of Bush's closest advisers were involved in the drafting of the discredited language that said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The most senior of them, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, accused the CIA of feeding bad information to the White House. In an interview this year, she said that "I was the national security adviser and the president said something that probably shouldn't have been in the speech, and it was as much my responsibility" as anyone else's. Bush stuck by her, making her secretary of state.

Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy, stepped into the Oval Office in August of that summer to tell the president that he, not Rice, was responsible for letting the language into the speech, and by several accounts he offered to resign. Bush refused and gave him Rice's old job late last year.

And George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who had been sent a copy of the speech but did not read it before it was delivered, reluctantly issued a statement two years ago saying, "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president." He later resigned, for unrelated reasons, and last December Bush rewarded him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

But Rove's case is a lot more complicated. By all accounts he had nothing to do with the wording in the speech. Instead, it appears that he might have been part of the White House effort to push back after Joseph Wilson wrote on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on July 7, 2003, that Bush's description of Saddam's search for uranium was false and that it ignored information that Wilson passed on to the CIA casting doubt on the whole story about an Iraqi search for uranium.

The issue with Rove centers on whether he tried to discredit Wilson by suggesting that his mission to Niger was the product of nepotism, and that Valerie Wilson had arranged for it. The Senate Intelligence Committee, in a report last year, quotes a State Department official as saying that Valerie Wilson had suggested sending her husband. She denies it.

Joseph Wilson was the first to accuse Rove of outing his wife.

But until this week, it was Wilson's word against the White House's insistence that Rove was not involved. That is what has changed. An e-mail message that Time magazine turned over to the prosecutor investigating the naming of Valerie Wilson asserts that Rove discussed her role, though apparently without naming her or suggesting she was a covert officer. If that version is correct, it is not clear that anything Rove said could be considered a crime.

*

David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting.

Tomorrow: Richard Bernstein writes about Europe's threatened countries either hanging together or getting picked off separately.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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