A few more Rove thoughts before turning to something less tiresome
I looked at the transcript of the "Meet the Press" segment--hyperlinked in the email--and this is what it said:
"MR. TAYLOR: You never know. It would be awfully odd for a prosecutor to go to put as many people through as long an ordeal as this one has and then come up and said, "Well, I couldn't find anything." Maybe that's one reason he's carrying it to this point. If you look at all the signs, it appears the theory he may be pursuing, or one theory, is that people in the White House leaked this based on official information. And by the way, there's another law that everybody's forgotten, that says you intentionally leak a classified document, you've committed a felony, bang; 1917 espionage law that's been used in the past to prosecute someone for doing that and for only doing that.
MR. RUSSERT: To...
MR. SAFIRE: Intentionally.
MR. TAYLOR: Intentionally."
Of course, "intentional" and "accidental" mean opposite things. I would not have hyperlinked to this exchange stressing "intentionally" to support a characterization of the Espionage Act as covering "accidental" disclosure, but maybe that's just my quirky personality.
Here is the pertinent part of the Espionage Act of 1917:
"(d) Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it;"
Now there's quite a bit there that might apply to Rove, depending on the facts. Certainly worth looking into. It's interesting that almost all attention in the press and from both poles of the blogosphere has focused on the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (aptly named to attract all the attention). Either it's example n+1 of media Groupthink, or there is something sneakier going on. For it seemed that the consensus that Rove didn't violate the IIPA built in tandem with pressure on the President to clarify his position about firing people. So just after he clarifies that he'll only fire someone who broke the law, the focus shifts from the law that probably wasn't violated over to the one that very well could have been (to say nothing of the usual hangers-on, perjury and obstruction of justice). While the idea of a sneakily-orchestrated effort to induce the Administration to paint itself into a corner is appealing, I'll go for the media Groupthink hypothesis. I'd like to think that if I were being paid to think about all this stuff I might not have fixated on the IIPA along with most of the world, but you never know.
I think I'll stop posting about this topic until Fitzgerald finishes up. What a pleasure for us all.
posted at 8:59 PM
1 Comments:
Well, there must be something going on otherwise the grand jury would be done by now...at least the WH press briefings have become very entertaining.
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