Isikoff: Karl Rove as Jean Valjean: An Upside-Down Look at the Plame Affair

[deminks]

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/03/09/karl-rove-as-jean-valjean-an-upside-down-look-at-the-plame-affair.aspx

In his fat and highly skewed new memoir out today, Karl Rove portrays himself as an improbable Jean Valjean—an innocent man who, like the persecuted hero of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, is relentlessly hounded by an obsessed lawman determined to put him behind bars.

As the former White House senior adviser tells it in Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, he was forced to drain his personal savings and watch his family subjected to "countless hours of abuse and fear"—all because special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was supposedly seeking any way possible to indict him for lying about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

(snip)

Rove reveals that when the FBI launched its criminal probe into the sourcing of Novak's column that fall, he went to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, chief of staff Andy Card, and President Bush himself and told them all about his conversation with Novak. But somehow no one thought to correct or modify McLellan's public denial—even when on Oct. 1, 2003, Novak himself removed virtually any doubt. On that day, Novak wrote another column describing the sourcing of his original account. His initial source about Wilson's wife, he wrote, was "no partisan gunslinger" (that turned out to be Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage). His second source? Another senior official who, when questioned about Wilson's wife's employment, told him: "Oh, you know about it." While not exactly "I heard that, too," it was close enough. Rove knew for sure that Novak was talking about him. "I was sick to my stomach," he writes. Yet neither he nor anybody else at the White House thought to fess up.

(snip)

In the course of all this, Rove takes swipes at everyone he blames for his misfortune. Fitzgerald is portrayed as an "obsessive" and out-of-control prosecutor. ("Anything for a Scalp," is the title of one of two chapters on the prosecutor.) MSNBC host Chris Matthews was an "agent provocateur" who misquoted him by claiming that Rove had described Plame as "fair game." Rove even rips into Cooper, who was on the verge of going to jail for protecting Rove's identity. In Rove's telling, the genial reporter was only trying "to milk the drama" so he could become "a journalistic martyr."

(end snips)

emphasis mine. Who else gets 5 trips to the grand jury to correct previous statements?

I hear:

:nopity:

tiny violins