Good News On The Physical Fitness Front

We are roughly one month into the latest spasm on the Plame investigation, and there is excellent news on the physical fitness front - Mark Kleiman and Kevin Drum seem to have reclaimed their ability to leap to conclusions.

Mr. Kleiman flexes first; we will strip away his caveats in order to justify our tiresome, union-mandated snark:

Buried in the fifth paragraph of a story buried below the fold on page eighteen of the New York Times is this little land mine:

At one point, the aides were asked why Mr. Cooper's call to Mr. Rove was not entered in Mr. Rove's office telephone logs. There was no record of the call, the person who has been briefed said, because Mr. Cooper did not call Mr. Rove directly, but was transferred to his office from a White House switchboard.

If you believe that explanation, I'll tell you another. Obviously, call logs aren't of any value unless all calls are logged: the whole point is to allow someone to say, months later, "No, I know I didn't talk to X on that date; I've checked my call logs." This reads to me like strong evidence that Rove and his crew knew at the time they were doing something they didn't want to get caught doing.

In prosecutorese, that's called "evidence of consciousness of guilt," and it's extremely helpful in proving intent.

First, I am not an expert on the procedures employed by the White House in maintaining call logs, and I doubt Mr. Kleiman is, either; I decline to speculate as to how such an oversight might have occurred.

However, if Mr. Kleiman seriously thinks Karl ordered his aides into his office and said "That call never happened - remember that", and they dutifully replied "What call?", then let me ask him this - what foolish impulse prompted Karl to send an e-mail to Hadley documenting his chat with Cooper?  I think that by 2003, most people realized that e-mails are subject to subpoena.

Well, if the secret staff meeting to doctor the call log was evidence of criminal intent, I guess the e-mail is evidence of... a desire to get caught?  That's it!

Let's see where Mr. Drum manages to leap in his Big Finish:

Mark may have a point. After all, we know that in his initial testimony Rove lied and said he hadn't spoken to Cooper at all. We know that when he later recanted that testimony, he continued to lie by claiming the call was actually about welfare reform and that Plame only came up incidentally. And now we know that he failed to log his call with Cooper. Since call logging is standard procedure, this could only happen if Rove specifically asked one of his aides not to log the call.

Oh, boy - we don't know that "in his initial testimony Rove lied and said he hadn't spoken to Cooper at all".  What we think we know (per Newsweek, p. 3) is that Rove did not mention Cooper in his testimony initial chat with the FBI.  There is no reason to think he specifically denied speaking to Cooper, as implied by Drum, and it may well be that he offered caveated, "as best I recall" testimony saying he spoke about Ms. Wilson only to Novak.

We also certainly don't know that Rove "continued to lie by claiming the call was actually about welfare reform and that Plame only came up incidentally".  Per Cooper, the call only lasted about two minutes; per Rove's e-mail to Hadley, the initial subject, brought up by Cooper, was welfare reform:

"Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare-reform story coming," Mr. Rove wrote Mr. Hadley, who since has risen to the top job of national security adviser.

"When he finished his brief heads-up, he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him, I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."

Byron York has more on this - per Cooper's own account, he may have left a message for Rove earlier in the week asking for a chance to talk about welfare reform.  Possible?  The President signed an extension of the welfare bill on June 30, so the subject was topical.

And unlike Mr. Drum, I am simply not enough of an authority on White House procedures to make this statement:

Since call logging is standard procedure, this could only happen if Rove specifically asked one of his aides not to log the call.

That is the *only* way a breakdown in procedures could occur?  The Reality-Based Team seems to be rounding into mid-season leaping form.

Here is Technorati for the posts from Mark and Kevin - they have not swept the blogosphere, but they did find an audience.  And that audience includes Arianna herself - well done!  We also note the skepticism from The Crank.

MORE:  A puzzle to ponder - just when did Fitzgerald develop an interest in the Rove-Cooper relationship?  Cooper was originally subpoenaed with Russert, Kessler, and Pincus to talk about Libby.  After he complied with that subpoena, he was slapped with a second one for Rove.

So, had Fitzgerald been sitting on that subpoena, did something in the "Libby Round" of testimony trigger an interest in Rove, did something else happen at about the same time (e.g., they finally found the Rove-Hadley e-mail), or what?

If we thought we could solve this (color us pessimistic), it *might* hint at whether Karl remembered Cooper under his own power, or whether his memory was jogged by e-mails and testimony from, say, Hadley.

MORE:  OK, based on the Newsday story reporting subpoenas for the White House Iraq Group e-mails in Jan 2004, I will Boldly Assert that Rove's lawyers, Rove, and presumably Fitzgerald learned about the Hadley-Rove e-mail and hence the Rove-Cooper conversation by March 2004.  More links in this comment.

Comments

[jukeboxgrad]

"even Bob Somerby doubts Joe Wilson"

In some respects Somerby supports Wilson ("No, Joe Wilson didn’t really say that Dick Cheney sent him to Africa"), and in some respects he doubts Wilson. However, Somerby's analysis in this regard has some odd lapses. For example, here he accuses Wilson of using a straw man when he says Plame did not make "the decision to send me to Niger." Somerby correctly points out that SSCI didn't claim that she did. But Somerby oddly neglects to mention that Rove apparently did make exactly that claim, that Plame "authorized" the trip (see Cooper's email). So in fact Wilson wasn't responding to a straw man. Wilson was responding to something Rove said. I could point out other errors. The errors are especially surprising because in some ways Somerby is very thorough.

By the way, a very odd characteristic of this post by Somerby is that he refers to a Paula Zahn interview, and suggests Zahn asked a question on this subject (did Plame suggest Wilson for the trip). But Zahn did not ask such a question. In fact, Somerby directly acknowledges this when he says "Zahn had never mentioned this topic at any prior point in the interview." Yet a few paragraphs later, Somerby says "Question One: Did Wilson’s wife suggest his name?"

In other words, it looks like Somerby wasn't getting enough sleep, because he contradicts himself.

So even though Somerby's analysis is better than some, he makes some odd mistakes which undermine his conclusions and his credibility.

[kim]

I think you missed Bob's point. Why am I surprised?
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[kim]

Quaff deeply, my friend, it seems such a waste of a capable mind.
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[kim]

Go rest, then forage, Young Man.
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