RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Bushgate

Since I don't see the righties acting like they did back than I suggest the two are not comparable. The ATF agent isn't being attacked by conservatives like Plame was for example.

It's still a trumped-up allegation Plame is making against Cheney and others in the Bush administration, of allegedly outing her.

Again, slicing through RAW (and MEM's ) circumnavigation of the truth, if there were any true wrongdoing against Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson, then the true leaker of Plame's name and CIA employment, Richard Armitage, would be on trial.

But he's not, so there's clearly no wrongdoing.

And what we truly have is an elaborate web of empty allegations by Democrats in Washington and their lackeys, to smear Cheney and other Bush officials.
When in truth, as I said earlier, a public allegation was made by Wilson in a Wall Street Journal editorial, and that obligated Bush officials to respond and question how legitimate and credible (or not) Wilson's mission was.

And investigating the circumstances of how Wilson was chosen (by Plame) for the Niger mission discussed in his editorial, was fair game. It was Wilson himself who made his covert mission public, and Wilson's action gave Robert Novak and other journalists the right and the obligation to investigate every detail of the mission, how Wilson was selected for it (by Plame), and how thorough and credible (or not) Wilson's Niger investigation was.

Hair splitting.

The Plame incident was allegedly about the abuse of power by the government in leaking confidential information to punish an employee.

The ATF incident is allegedly about the abuse of power by the government in leaking confidential information to punish an employee.

In neither case is/was the alleged abuse committed by private citizens exercising their first amendment rights in criticizing a government employee.

To be intellectually consistent, if you [are] outraged by the Plame matter, you should be outraged by the latest incident.

Ahh, the old "Republicans do bad things too" moral equivalency defense, ...

...But is spun by Obama's people (and M E M) as a traitor betraying secrets for personal gain, or for mercenary criminal sale of information.
...

Fast and Furious: U.S. Attorney sought to discredit agent by leaking documents

I'm sure all the lefties who were having a nervous breakdown about Valerie plame are going to be coming along any minute now to blast the Obama administration for this.

Since I don't see the righties acting like they did back than I suggest the two are not comparable. The ATF agent isn't being attacked by conservatives like Plame was for example.

You're being ridiculous, M E M.

G-Man resurrected this topic (dormant for almost 4 years prior) with this post:



Your response:



A moral equivalency argument.

....

Where did I spin this guy as a traitor? Nowhere did I say one bad thing about him. What makes it ok in your book to do that stuff?

White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan

• The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops.
  
  The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

Karl Rove Whitewashes His Role In Outing CIA Agent
Blog ››› 6 hours and 53 minutes ago ››› ERIC HANANOKI
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Fox News contributor Karl Rove exploited the Obama administration's accidental exposure of a CIA operative's identity to absolve his own culpability in deliberately leaking former CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity during the Bush administration.

Over the weekend, the name of the CIA's top officer in Kabul, Afghanistan, was "inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama's surprise visit with U.S. troops. The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list."

During the May 27 broadcast of Fox News Radio's Kilmeade & Friends, host Brian Kilmeade discussed the story and remarked: "You think Valerie Plame's a big deal, fine. She's at the -- she's at a desk job in the CIA. What about a guy in one of the most dangerous jobs in the world?"

Plame is a former CIA operative whose identify was leaked by Karl Rove and others in the Bush administration as payback for an opinion piece that her husband, Joe Wilson, wrote rebutting Bush's case for invading Iraq.

Rove -- who was a senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President Bush -- responded on Kilmeade's show by claiming Plame "was not an active agent" and that he "didn't know her name. All I'd heard was the rumor that Wilson's wife had, at the CIA, had helped send him to Niger":

ROVE: Right. Well look, one point. Valerie Plame was not covered by the statue that you bring up. She was not an active agent. She was legally outside the law, and that's why there was no action taken by the special prosecutor against anybody who had mentioned her name. And I, for example, didn't know her name. All I'd heard was the rumor that Wilson's wife had, at the CIA, had helped send him to Niger. But you're right.

Rove's claim that Plame "was not an active agent" and Kilmeade's description of Plame as just having "a desk job" are false. Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who lead the Plame leaks investigation, concluded that she traveled "overseas on official business" and "was a covert employee for whom the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States." Plame herself testified in 2007 to the House Government and Oversight Committee: "In the run-up to the war with Iraq, I worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified."

Rove's excuse that he "didn't know" Plame's "name" is also a dishonest -- and frequently used -- dodge of his. Rove leaked to the press that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and thus exposed her covert identity. Specifically, Rove was one of two sources for the late Robert Novak's 2003 column outing Plame. Former Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper also named Rove as the source who identified Wilson's wife as a CIA agent during a telephone conversation.

Rove has regularly attempted to offer a dishonest accounting of the Plame scandal. Former Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff noted that Rove wrote a "highly selective (and at times blatantly distorted) version of the events that got him into trouble" in his ironically titled 2010 book Courage and Consequence.

Fox & Friends -- co-hosted by Kilmeade -- similarly used the Obama administration's serious, but accidental, recent release of the CIA Chief of Station's name to draw a false equivalence to the Bush administration's purposeful leak of Plame's identify.

Former intelligence officials are speaking out about the disastrous mistake by the White House Press Office to publish the name of a CIA operative in Afghanistan.

"It looks like a rookie mistake, but it's in year six of the administration," retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden and former CIA director told Newsmax, after Obama’s press team inadvertently listed the spy on Obama’s itinerary for his four hour trip to Afghanistan on Sunday.

"This is not the president's first trip overseas," former House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) added.

"He's now nearly six years into his presidency, and for an 'experienced' staff to be making these kinds of mistakes is pretty inexcusable."

Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA operative outed by the W. Bush administration, also chimed in.


“Astonishing: White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan,” she tweeted in a sardonic message on Monday.



The name of the CIA’s chief of station in Kabul, the agency’s top spy in Afghanistan, was listed among the 15 officials briefing Obama upon his arrival at Bagram Air Base.

The White House only caught the error when Washington Post reporter Scott Wilson alerted the press office, after Obama’s schedule was included in an email that was circulated to as many as 6,000 members of the media.

With little recourse after the sensitive information was already out in the open, the press office issued a revised schedule without the officer’s name.

The White House has not yet commented on the mistake but requested that news agencies not publish the individual’s name.

Considering Plame wasn't a field operative at the time this arguably far worse

Novak confirms Rove was one of his sources in outing Plame
Updated 7/13/2006 4:58 AM ET E-mail | Print |

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now that Karl Rove won't be indicted, now that the president won't fire him, now that it really doesn't matter anymore, more details of the Valerie Plame leak investigation trickle out.

In his latest syndicated column released Wednesday, columnist Robert Novak revealed his side of the story in the Plame affair, saying Rove was a confirming source for Novak's story outing the CIA officer, underscoring Rove's role in a leak President Bush once promised to punish.
...

McClellan points finger at Bush, Rove

By MIKE ALLEN & MICHAEL CALDERONE | 11/20/07 1:05 PM EST
Updated: 11/21/07 7:34 AM EST

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

The excerpts give no details about the alleged involvement of the president or vice president.

But McClellan lists five top officials as having allowed him inadvertently to mislead the public.

“I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

McClellan then absolves himself and makes an inflammatory — and potentially lucrative for his publisher — charge.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.
See Also


“And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."

McClellan says he was in that position because he trusted the president: "The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

Shortly after news of the McClellan excerpt broke, Politico caught up with Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, two reporters who received information about Valerie Plame’s identity and were caught up in the subsequent legal proceedings.

“You’re only as good as your sources,” Miller, who was a reporter at the New York Times when the imbroglio broke, said with a mischievous laugh.

Miller, now an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, spent 85 days in jail by not revealing her source. “Nothing surprises me about Washington during this administration anymore,” she said.

Cooper, who was a White House correspondent for Time magazine and is now the Washington bureau chief of Portfolio magazine, said he “was always frustrated that Rove and Libby misled McClellan.”

“I’m glad McClellan is, too,” Cooper said.

McClellan, who is still writing the book, declined to comment further.

In recent conversations and in his many public speaking engagements, McClellan has made it clear he retains great affection for the president.

But White House sources have long said that Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, allowed McClellan to suggest day after day that they had no involvement in the publication of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

...

So Obama should vow to fire anybody involved with the leaking just like Bush?

Saying "a republican did it first" now could be problematic if you've already said its a crime

False equivalency. This looks to be an accidental leak.

The disclosure — that is, the publishing of the name — was intentional. The name was placed right there next to the title of the post in Afghanistan. Name, post. What the law does not require is malice, evil intention, desire to harm, or the effect of actual harm. Just the intent to disclose, which exists. And the rest of the statute was obviously violated, since the Chief was covert, he or she was taking measures to stay covert, and the press who received the disclosure was not authorized to receive it.

The disclosure — that is, the publishing of the name — was intentional. The name was placed right there next to the title of the post in Afghanistan. Name, post. What the law does not require is malice, evil intention, desire to harm, or the effect of actual harm. Just the intent to disclose, which exists. And the rest of the statute was obviously violated, since the Chief was covert, he or she was taking measures to stay covert, and the press who received the disclosure was not authorized to receive it.

usatoday.com

On July 2, 2005, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed that Rove spoke to Time reporter Matt Cooper "three or four days" before Plame's identity was first revealed in print by commentator Robert Novak. Cooper's article in Time, citing unnamed and anonymous "government officials," confirmed Plame to be a "CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." Cooper's article appeared three days after Novak's column was published. Rove's lawyer asserted that Rove "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA."[73][74][75] Luskin also has said that his client did not initiate conversations with reporters about Plame and did not encourage reporters to write about her.[76]

Initially, Rove failed to tell the grand jury about his conversations with Cooper. According to Rove, he only remembered he had spoken to Cooper after discovering a July 11, 2003, White House e-mail that Rove had written to then-deputy National Security advisor Stephen J. Hadley in which Rove said he had spoken to Cooper about the Niger controversy. Luskin also testified before the grand jury. He told prosecutors that Time reporter Viveca Novak had told him prior to Rove's first grand jury appearance that she had heard from colleagues at Time that Rove was one of the sources for Cooper's story about Plame. Luskin in turn said that he told Rove about this, though Rove still did not disclose to the grand jury that he had ever spoken to Cooper about Plame. Viveca Novak testified she couldn't recall when she spoke to Luskin. Rove testified a total of five times before the federal grand jury investigating the leak. After Rove's last appearance, Luskin released a statement that read in part: "In connection with this appearance, the special counsel has advised Mr. Rove that he is not a target of the investigation. Mr. Fitzgerald has affirmed that he has made no decision concerning charges."[69][77]