Rove on the spot

By Rachel on July 18, 2005 4:51 PM

We mentioned that “Karl Rove” was the top search on Technorati (bloggers do sink their teeth in, don’t they?). Two weeks after being broken (and then hesitatingly confirmed in bite-sized chunks), it’s finally all over Google News and, yes, The New York Times. After the disgruntled press scrums and the McClellish obfuscations of last week, the heat is now on. As our sage elder brother at FishbowlDC points out, “Any week that Karl Rove makes both Time and Newsweek‘s covers–and not in a good way–is not going to be a good one for the White House.” And in truth, it was not – see today’s press briefing – where Scott McClellan tried to stave off an insistent, impatient press and defend the President’s raising of the Rove-getting-fired bar from “anyone involved in this” to “anyone who commits a crime.”

That’s one subtle shift. The other is a bit more significant, another revelation tossed out on a Friday, maybe not to be buried over the weekend but to take root: the notion that Rove learned about Plame from Novak. Or, per Time, just “a reporter — or perhaps from someone else in the administration who said he got it from a reporter — Rove just couldn’t be certain or remember which one, a source who has been briefed on his account tells TIME.” As Andrew Sullivan says, “So it could have been from the administration or the CIA. The bottle keeps spinning. When it stops, who’ll be the guilty one? And guilty of what? It’s not even clear any more what possible crime Fitzgerald is investigating.”

On the press side, Jay Rosen is clearly fed up. First he called on journos to freeze out Robert Novak and now he calls the White House on their campaign to roll back press access and demote the press to just another interest group rather than an essential player in the checks and balances of democracy.

But that’s theory, and as Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman has pointed out, Rove has perfected that in practice. Now that Bush has raised the bar to require a crime that’s extremely difficult to prove, Rove is more secure.

Until he’s not, according to Frank Rich: “Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there’s only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it’s essential to protect the king.”

Transcript: McClellan Defends President On Failure to Fire Rove [E&P]
Rove at War: He rose using tactics his foes are turning against him. But never bet against Karl Rove [Newsweek]
The Rove Problem [Time]
“What I Told The Grand Jury” [Time]