Decision ‘08

Rove Indictment Rumor of the Day

HUGE grain of salt advised - hell, take the whole shaker:

Within the last week, Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

Details of Rove’s discussions with the president and Bolten have spread through the corridors of the White House where low-level staffers and senior officials were trying to determine how the indictment would impact an administration that has been mired in a number of high-profile political scandals for nearly a year, said a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources confirmed Rove’s indictment is imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove’s situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on “wildly speculative rumors.”

Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, did not return a call for comment Friday.

Why bother you with pure speculation? Well, it is sourced - thinly; i.e., six White House aides and two RNC staffers.

I’ve been publicly pooh-poohing the chances of Rove’s indictment for some months now - now, I’m not so sure (but hey, it won’t be the end of the world - Rove has done great things for the President, but his usefulness seemed to end in November, 2004)…

4 Responses to “Rove Indictment Rumor of the Day”

1 Rick Moran Says:
May 13th, 2006 at 3:44 am
I have been advised by some people who know this guy Leopold that he is a serial liar. He’s a proven plagiarist and once fabricated an email while working at Slate (or maybe in was Salon; I get those two mixed up).

Grain of salt, indeed.
2 Muffin the Cat Says:
May 13th, 2006 at 9:00 am
This is an extremely far left site.
3 Dennis Says:
May 13th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Mark, your final point is one I’ve been harping on for some time. From a political perspective, a Rove indictment may give some satisfaction to those who think Rove is the alpha and the omega of all their troubles. But it seems to me that 1) Bush isn’t running again anyway, and 2) this way overstates Rove’s powers, which, as the current polls indicate, are not quite magical.

To paraphrase the old saying, the political graveyards are filled with indispensible men…

The only thing that would frustrate me about a Rove indictment is it would be further evidence of the ridiculousness of special prosecutors who can’t find any evidence of the crime they were charged with investigating, so they file charges regarding the investigation itself. This was the same stuff that had Democrats fuming, quite rightly, when Ken Starr was tailing President Clinton.
4 Decision ‘08 » Blog Archive » The Weekend Bookend Says:
May 14th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
[…] I started the weekend with the Jason Leopold ‘Karl Rove is definitely going to be indicted’ story - and I’ll end it that way, too. From Byron York at National Review Online: Jason Leopold, who has written a memoir, entitled News Junkie, in which, according to the book’s promotional material, he portrays himself as a writer “whose addictive tendencies led him from a life of drug abuse and petty crime to become an award-winning investigative journalist,” has written wildly unreliable reports about the CIA leak affair before. But still, reporters of every stripe felt they had to check this one out. […]