President Bush’s closest political adviser, Karl Rove, was yesterday at the centre of a criminal investigation into allegations that he leaked the name of a CIA agent in an attempt to suppress criticism of the administration’s Iraq policy, in what is fast becoming the administration’s worst scandal since coming to office.
The White House fended off calls for an independent inquiry but urged its staff yesterday to cooperate with a justice department investigation.
Over the next few days, FBI agents will question Washington journalists and administration officials about claims that Rove and others in the White House deliberately blew the cover of Valerie Plame, a CIA expert on weapons of mass destruction.
Under US law, it is a serious crime to reveal the identity of a covert US intelligence official, carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and $50 000 (about R350 000) in fines.
If Rove was implicated, it would seriously damage the president’s standing at the start of his re-election campaign and rob him of an electoral mastermind who orchestrated his rise to the Texas governorship and then the presidency.
One veteran of the Clinton administration compared it to the Hutton inquiry. ”In the Kelly case there’s a body but no crime. Here there’s no body but there is a crime,” he said.
Ms Plame is the wife of Joe Wilson, a former US ambassador who in July accused the White House of misleading the nation over claims of Iraq’s attempts to buy uranium in Africa. In a New York Times commentary he said he had been sent to Niger to check such claims in 2002 and found them to be baseless.
A few days after Wilson went public with his allegations, a conservative columnist, Robert Novak, wrote that he had been told by ”two senior administration officials” that Wilson had been sent on the Niger mission at his wife’s suggestion.
Reporters at Time magazine and NBC News and a handful of others were also tipped off about Plame, and Democrats claim the source in each case was Rove. According to some accounts, Rove, did not mention Plame by name but referred to ”Wilson’s wife” being a CIA employee.
At a public meeting in August, Wilson, a staunch Democrat himself, said: ”It’s of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frogmarched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.”
Novak and the other journalists involved have refused to name their sources. Their lawyers are expected to claim protection from the law under the first amendment of the constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech.
But a 1972 supreme court ruling, Branzburg v Hayes, states ”the first amendment does not relieve a newspaper reporter of the obligation that all citizens have to respond to a grand jury subpoena and answer questions relevant to a criminal investigation”.
FBI investigators will also subpoena telephone records from the White House in an attempt to pin down the source of the leak.
Novak claimed he was told by CIA officials that Plame was an analyst, not a covert operative. But intelligence analysts have argued that the CIA director, George Tenet, would not have called for an inquiry if the identification of Plame had not caused potential damage to national security.
Charles Schumer, the Democratic senator leading the campaign for an independent counsel inquiry said yesterday: ”When you reveal the name of an agent, it’s like putting a gun to that agent’s head. You are jeopardising their life in many cases. You are jeopardising the lives of the contacts that they have built up over the decades. You are jeopardising the security of the nation.”
The White House has insisted it has no evidence that any of its employees was responsible for the leak and has turned down Democratic demands for the appointment of an independent counsel to look into the matter. The inquiry will instead be carried out by the FBI under the supervision of the attorney general, John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist. – Guardian Unlimited Â