What Did He Know, and When Did He Know It?

Maybe the more urgent question here is what did the President tell the special prosecutor?

Many of you have by now already read the article in the NY Daily News claiming that Bush knew more than two years ago that Karl Rove had leaked the name of Valerie Plame to several reporters. What's even more interesting is that the anonymous source claims that Bush was angry with Rove not because he leaked classified information, but because he botched the job of discrediting Wilson. We don't know what the President told Pat Fitzgerald in the private meeting in the White House, but we do know that his lawyers insisted that the conversation was not under oath. So no perjury here, and most likely no wrong doing that anyone can prove. Although we don't know what the President said to Fitzgerald, we do know what he said to the press and the American public about the investigation. It went something like this:


"The investigators will ask our staff about what people did or did not do. This is a town of -- where a lot of people leak. And I've constantly expressed my displeasure with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information. And I want to know, I want to know the truth. I want to see to it that the truth prevail. And I hope we can get this investigation done in a thorough way, as quickly as possible.

But the Justice Department will conduct this investigation. The professionals in the Justice Department will be involved in ferreting out the truth. These are citizens who will -- were here before this administration arrived and will be here after this administration leaves. And they'll come to the bottom of this, and we'll find out the truth. And that will be -- that's a good thing for this administration."

Rumors continue to fly around DC, everyone is talking about a huge number of people being indicted, as many as 20 people from the White House. Before today, no one said anything about the President, this news if true comes as a huge shock, mainly because we all assume that the President doesn't get involved in the down and dirty part of politics, I assumed that he left those things to Rove and Cheney.

AS my friend Neil pointed out today:

"What Plame-Wilson points to is the big lie spread by the President, Condi Rice, Colin Powell and of course, Dick Cheney. This was a carefully crafted campaign to fix the intelligence and sell the people on the war. What can be more immoral than telling such lies in order to start a war?"

I'm not feeling some great sense of joy, but rather disappointment, because I always figured that Bush was just a puppet played by people like Cheney and Rove, oblivious and ignorant of all of the horrible things done by his administration in the name of all Americans. If he knew about the slimy attempt to discredit Joe Wilson by exposing his wife to danger and lied about it to the American people, then he must have known about all of the lies about WMD's, the lies about Niger and uranium, and the truth is that he led this nation down a path of horror, violence, and war crimes to the state of shame that we all carry as Americans.

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