Bush's Current Libby Dilemma

George Bush has enormous problems with verb-noun agreement, as you may have noticed. Given that there's usually a 50% probability of getting it right, it's astounding how often he comes up with ungrammatical clunkers like "Is our children learning?" So it would not surprise me if his version of Bill Clinton's famous evasion, "It depends on what the meaning of is, is," were to come out, under Bush's brutal ministrations, "It depends on what the meaning of is, are."

We may soon see how adept GWB is at artful dodging. Take this quote:
"I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action." [Bush Remarks: Chicago, Illinois, 9/30/03]

From my own review, this is probably Bush's most definitive pronouncement on the Valerie Plame matter. There are others to choose from, and we could throw in the categorical denials from Scott McLellan that Libby or Rove was involved in talking to reporters about Valerie Plame. But McLellan is a serial, compulsive, unapologetic liar himself, and one step removed from Bush. Further, to avoid ratifying his mendacity, the Bushies retired McLellan from his job; he was useless at that point anyway, because he was fully depreciated during his handling of l'affaire Plame.

I've been a lawyer for a long time, and I've observed hundreds of witnesses in depositions and trials deal with critical, "jugular" issues in litigation. By that I mean the fulcrum point in a case. It might concern liability; it might concern state of mind; it might concern when someone first kenw some crucial fact. When opposing counsel is saddled with a witness or client who has a tendency to wander, to ad lib in disastrous ways, who's maybe not all that bright to begin with, he coaches his client to recite carefully prefabricated sentences to cover this critical ground. Bush certainly fits the description of such a client-control problem. Bush himself once inadvertently disclosed the exact content of one of his coaching sessions. As he finally, at long last, admitted that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, he stated, with evident pride, that he "was always careful to say that Saddam did not order the attacks on 9/11." On that one point, you can take him at his word.

With this as primer, review the quoted statement above. Notice anything peculiar about it?

Good for you. You either are, or would have made, a good lawyer. It's all in that phrase "leak classified information," isn't it? I used to be a State Bar grader, and for spotting that issue, I can almost assure you of a bar card. In this coached phrase, Bush does not actually talk about Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover agent for the CIA. This is not surprising, because it was critical, at the end of September, 2003, a full 2-1/2 months after Robert Novak's exposure of Valerie Plame to the general public, to leave Bush some wiggle room. Let us be realistic: does anyone actually believe that in late September, 2003, George Bush did not know that Karl Rove, his chief political apparatchik; Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff and also Assistant to the President; and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's Man Friday in the State Department, had been singing like Heckel & Jeckel to anyone in the press who would listen?

Of course Bush knew. What we learned during the course of Patrick Fitzgerald's curiously circumscribed case was that the Bushies, in a hysterical rush to counter Wilson's damning disclosures in the New York Times, went so far as to declassify important intelligence information on the order of the President. That's the first clue. The second clue is the noise made by the Right Wing echo chamber attempting to establish that Valerie Plame was never covert or undercover at all, that her "classified" status was either nonexistent or had been rendered de facto nugatory.

Bush's handlers foresaw the day when Bush's denials could become severely problematic. So they created an out for him. Compare his first statements about Valerie Plame, in the immediate aftermath of the disclosure, with this lawyerly script. To avoid being tarred with an accusation (perhaps as an unindicted co-conspirator) of obstruction of justice with his misleading, and dishonest, characterizations of Administrative intent, Bush engaged in a parsing of words that created a loophole. We will see that loophole exploited in the coming weeks.