(2 of 8)
But that does not mean that all the mysteries are solved, or that Rove will be tarred and feathered and fired. This has always been a tale in which what is not known is as important as what is, and so the spotlight shifts once more, to Fitzgerald and what he has learned about the motives and methods behind the outing of Valerie Plame. It is no longer clear even what crime he is investigating: the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a federal offense to intentionally reveal a covert operative's identity. (See story on page 32.) But the law was designed to be hard to break, and last week lawyers with knowledge of the case suggested that Fitzgerald might be investigating a different crime--perhaps perjury or obstruction of justice. It had to be something serious, they suggested, for Fitzgerald to have interviewed the President and Vice President, to have threatened Cooper with prison time if he didn't testify and to have insisted that New York Times reporter Judith Miller go to jail for contempt of court when she refused to. Much about Fitzgerald's hunt is still a secret: in the court ruling demanding that the reporters reveal who leaked Plame's name, several pages were blacked out for national-security reasons.
In the vacuum of facts, partisans on both sides headed straight for their armories; it felt like five years of political warfare in concentrated form. Naturally it would feature Rove, as brass-knuckled a player as has walked onstage in a generation. But in addition there was John Kerry, promoting a Fire Rove petition on his website. There was Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman declaring that it was not Plame or Wilson but Rove who was the victim of "blatant partisan political attacks." There was White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who had once called the notion that Rove was involved "ridiculous," looking like a piñata as he refused again and again in long and painful press conferences to comment on the implications of Rove's being a source for reporters. President Bush, who had vowed to fire anyone in his Administration who turned out to have leaked the name of Wilson's wife and blown her cover, was left declaring that "this is a serious investigation" and had nothing to say for the moment about Rove.
And all the while, Rove's defenders were artfully pivoting from saying he hadn't done anything to saying he hadn't done anything wrong, that Plame wasn't really a secret agent anyway, or if she was, Rove didn't know that, or if he did, he only brought her up because he was trying to keep reporters from writing a bad story based on Wilson's false charges, and besides, it was a reporter who blew Plame's cover to him in the first place and not the other way around.
The whole thing felt at times like a half-glimpsed game of charades; but the fight matters because the issues at stake matter: the ongoing struggle between the Administration and the intelligence community, the debate over the case for going to war, the tensions over the role and rights of a free press, the eternal distinctions between what is legal and what is right. Until Fitzgerald issues his report, there will be no way to know if anyone committed a crime. But in the meantime, there is plenty of evidence of recklessness, ruthlessness and political passion that have made the search for the truth all that much harder.
ROVE'S REPERTOIRE