Washington – President Bush changed his stance Monday on his close adviser Karl Rove, stopping short of promising that anyone in his administration who helped to unmask a CIA officer would be fired.
“If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration,” Bush said in response to a question, after declaring, “I don’t know all the facts; I want to know all the facts.”
For months, Bush and his spokesmen have said that anyone involved in the disclosure of the CIA officer’s identity would be dismissed. The president’s apparent raising of the bar for dismissal Monday, to specific criminal conduct, comes amid mounting evidence that, at the very least, Rove provided backhanded confirmation of the CIA officer’s identity.
In the months after the name of the officer, Valerie Plame, was made public in July 2003, the White House said repeatedly that no one working for the administration was part of the disclosure.
Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, has asserted that his wife was unmasked, and her career consequently damaged, in retaliation for his criticism of the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq. He also has said he suspects that Rove, by all accounts one of the president’s most trusted political advisers and an architect of his successful re-election strategy, had a role in the disclosure.
Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter, said in a first-person account in this week’s issue that Rove was the first person to tell him that Plame was an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. Cooper writes that Rove used indirect language – not mentioning Plame by name, for instance – but that he supplied him information nonetheless.
The first journalist to disclose Plame’s identity was columnist Robert Novak, who has declined for two years to say whether he has testified to a federal grand jury investigating the leak.
Some Democrats have called for Bush to fire Rove, who is now the deputy White House chief of staff. The Democrats assert that Rove may have violated a federal law that bars the deliberate disclosure of the name of a CIA agent.
The questions about Rove and the unmasking of Plame have dominated the political conversation, so much so that the issue came up Monday as Bush was appearing with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India at the White House.
Bush said he hopes the investigation will be over “very soon” and that people should reserve judgment until then.