WASSHINGTON, 30 October 2005 — It could have been worse for the Bush White House, but not very much worse. Karl Rove has not been charged for leaking intelligence, but he remains the subject of an investigation that will continue to gnaw away at the administration’s weakest point: Its justification for going to war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been indicted and will face trial for perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice. He is no mere extra in this drama. He is the right-hand man of the most powerful vice president in modern American history, and he got himself in trouble trying to protect his boss over the critical issue of US pre-war intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Libby told the grand jury he had learned the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame from journalists. It turned out, according to Friday’s indictment, that he had been told about her in June 2003 by Dick Cheney, who had discovered that her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, had been telling journalists the administration had “twisted” the WMD evidence to sell the war to America and the rest of the world. At the same time, Rove was also talking to journalists about Wilson and his secret-agent wife in a concerted White House effort to rebut his WMD allegations. The continuing investigation into the president’s closest adviser will inevitably explore what the White House had to hide about how far it went to make the case for an invasion.
So will Libby’s trial. Libby is a top neoconservative, a protégé of Paul Wolfowitz, and, like his mentor, he came to work in a Bush administration already pushing to oust Saddam Hussein in early 2001. The witness list at his trial could well include CIA and State Department officials who did battle with him over WMD intelligence. It could become a forum in which CIA officials, who feel they were made a scapegoat for the intelligence debacle, try to focus attention back on the White House’s role in shaping the evidence.
Every investigation of the Iraqi WMD fiasco so far has avoided directly tackling the politicization of intelligence in the run-up to the war, when Cheney and Libby visited the CIA headquarters in Langley several times to chivvy analysts who were skeptical about tales of banned weapon systems told by Iraqi exiles. A trial could fill that gap. Cheney would almost certainly be a witness in the Libby case. His cross-examination could be extremely uncomfortable for the vice president and the White House.
“We’re likely to move to a trial of the war in Iraq and how we got into that war,” David Gergen, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, told CNN. “The trial would inevitably bring a lot of witnesses who would have to explain what the administration was doing from one day to next. If you’re in the White House you profoundly do not want that to be occurring when you are trying to keep a focus on the war itself, on how to win the war.”
It adds up to a serious distraction for an administration that has already lost its way. Its second-term agenda, supposed to focus on pension and tax reform, has been shelved as the White House struggles to deal with the tenacious insurgency in Iraq, the resounding rejection of its supreme Court nominee by its own political foot soldiers and the rising tide of scandal lapping at the White House door.
The president’s two top allies in Congress — Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, and Tom DeLay, the House of Representatives majority leader — are both in legal trouble. DeLay has been charged with laundering campaign donations to bypass Texan election laws. Frist is being investigated for a suspiciously lucrative sale of stock in his family’s medical corporation just before it announced bad financial news. In fact, all the major players who would otherwise be expected to drive the administration’s program in the last three years of the Bush presidency will be spending more time with their lawyers, leaving a vacuum at the inner circle around the president.
The whole affair will also hack away another plate of the administration’s armor. And Bush minus Rove would be an unknown quantity. He has been there from the genesis of the Texan’s political career. Before throwing their hat in for the Texas governorship election in 1994, Rove sequestered his protege for weeks, drilling him on public policy and instilling the discipline of picking a simple message and sticking to it. Rove found Bush as a gland-handing good ol’ boy trading on his family name and his charm. He turned him into an effective candidate, and eventually, a president.
Rove was clearly relieved yesterday. “I’m going to have a good Friday and a fantastic weekend,” he told journalists. His longer-term outlook, however, is cloudy. Fitzgerald has clearly not made up his mind whether Rove’s role in the leak was inadvertent or part of a deliberate campaign. If Rove is ultimately forced to step down or is neutralized by his legal problems, the president could lose his political compass, and will have to go looking for another.
Meanwhile, almost every sentence uttered by the hapless White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, in recent days, has been engineered to convey the message that it was business as usual on Pennsylvania Avenue. That is no longer possible after yesterday. Whatever now happens in Rove’s investigation or at Libby’s trial, it is fair to say that nothing will ever be the same again for the Bush presidency.
When he was first running for president, Bush sold himself as a breath of fresh air after the months of tawdry revelations about Clinton’s sex life. “I will restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office,” he told America. It is that pledge that is now in question.
Bush had been hoping to use his last three years to build a lasting legacy. He may need that long just to climb out of a hole he dug when he ordered the invasion of Iraq.
