reality-based educator

Jeralyn Merrit at Talk Left and Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake had this story about TIME reporter Viveca Novak tipping off Karl Rove's lawyer in the CIA leak case before the NY Times ran it today. Still, it's nice to see that not every reporter simply takes dictation from Karl Rove's defense team when writing up CIA leak stories (though most seem to):

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 - A conversation between Karl Rove's lawyer and a journalist for Time magazine led Mr. Rove to change his testimony last year to the grand jury in the C.I.A. leak case, people knowledgeable about the sequence of events said Thursday.

Mr. Rove's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, spoke in the summer or early fall of 2004 with Viveca Novak, a reporter for Time. In that conversation, Mr. Luskin heard from Ms. Novak that a colleague at the magazine, Matthew Cooper, might have interviewed Mr. Rove about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the case, the people said.

Time reported this week that the prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has summoned Ms. Novak to testify about a conversation she had with Mr. Luskin, but provided no explanation of what Mr. Fitzgerald might be looking for. The account provided Thursday by people with knowledge of the discussions between Ms. Novak and Mr. Luskin suggests that Mr. Fitzgerald is still trying to determine whether Mr. Rove was fully forthcoming with investigators and whether he altered his grand jury testimony about his dealings with reporters only after learning that one, Mr. Cooper, might identify him as a source.

...

Lawyers in the case have said that Mr. Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, remains in legal jeopardy because his initial statements to investigators and to the grand jury were not accurate.

Months before the conversation between Ms. Novak and Mr. Luskin, Mr. Rove testified to the grand jury that he had held a conversation about the C.I.A. officer with only one journalist, Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist. Mr. Rove did not disclose that he had also spoken to Mr. Cooper either in his first grand jury testimony, in February 2004, or in an earlier interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But after his conversation with Ms. Novak, who is not related to the columnist, Mr. Luskin asked Mr. Rove to have the White House search for any record of a discussion between Mr. Rove and Mr. Cooper around the time that Ms. Wilson's identity became public in July 2003.

The search turned up an e-mail message from Mr. Rove to another senior White House official, Stephen J. Hadley, who was the deputy national security adviser, that recounted a conversation between Mr. Rove and Mr. Cooper. On Oct. 14, 2004, Mr. Rove went before the grand jury again to alter his earlier account, by saying he had also discussed the C.I.A. officer with Mr. Cooper.

Associates of Mr. Rove said that he did not initially recall the conversation with Mr. Cooper amid the hundreds of calls and e-mail messages he deals with each day, and that once the message to Mr. Hadley was uncovered he took it to prosecutors and testified fully.

They have said that Mr. Rove had signed a waiver to allow reporters to testify about their confidential discussions with him and that he testified about his conversation with Mr. Cooper long before Mr. Cooper did.

But Mr. Fitzgerald appears to be evaluating whether Mr. Rove came forward with the e-mail and his new testimony only after it became apparent that Mr. Cooper might be compelled to testify about it. It is not clear precisely what Ms. Novak told Mr. Luskin, or what the context for their conversation had been.

People involved in the case said that at a minimum Ms. Novak communicated to Mr. Luskin that Mr. Rove might face legal problems because of potential testimony from Mr. Cooper, her colleague. They said Ms. Novak had told Mr. Luskin that Mr. Cooper might have been in contact with Mr. Rove about Ms. Wilson in the days before her identity became public. Mr. Cooper helped write an article on Time's Web site in July 2003 that was among the first, after Mr. Novak's column, to divulge Ms. Wilson's identity, using her maiden name, Valerie Plame.

At a minimum, Viveca Novak should be fired from her job at TIME for her horseshit behavior in all of this. Tipping off Rove's lawyer and covering the story for TIME?

Isn't that a conflict of interest?

Uh, huh - it sure is. But what's new in Washington these days? Can we count the reporters who have either behaved unethically, illegally, or badly in this case.

First, there's Judy Miller and her career as a stenographer to the stars.

Then there's Pumpkinhead Russert, who often discusses the CIA leak case on his snoozefest Meet The Press without disclosing his role in the Scooter Libby indictment.

We also know that Washington Post "reporter" Bob Woodward went all over the cable news shows and network morning shows to denounce Patrick Fitzgerald as a "junk yard dog" prosecutor and the CIA leak case as a nothing case without disclosing his role in the case, namely that he appears to have been the first member of the press "known" to have learned Valerie Plame's identity from a member of the Bush administration.

And there's Andrea Mitchell of NBC news. She's married to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and wines and dines with members of the administration on a nightly basis. But that's no matter. So do lots of other "objective journalists."

No, Mitchell's problem is that she also is up to her eyeballs in the leak case and has engaged in unethical behavior at the very least, having been identified as one of the six reporters who received the leaked name/identity of Ms. Plame (although she claims she wasn't leaked the name until AFTER Robert Novak's newspaper column outed Ms. Plame.)

She also told Alan Murray on CNBC on October 3rd, 2003 that Ms. Plame was widely known as a CIA operative within the Washington press corps that was covering intelligence issues. Her claim seemed to bolster the administration's defense that Ms. Plame wasn't covert because many people in Washington knew she worked at the CIA. Mitchell later retracted that statement on Imus in the Morning, however, when Don Imus pressed her about it, claiming she had "mispoken". Here's the relevant portion via David Fiderer at Huffingtonpost). First, the Murray part:

Alan Murray: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?

Mitchell: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that. But frankly I wasn't aware of her actual role at the CIA and the fact that she had a covert role involving weapons of mass destruction, not until Bob Novak wrote it. "Analysis: Possible criminal outing of CIA agent" CNBC: Capital Report October 3, 2003

Now, Andrea Mitchell backpedaling on Imus:

Mitchell: I said that it was widely known that - here's the exact quote - I said that it was widely known that Wilson was an envoy and that his wife worked at the CIA. But I was talking about . . .

Imus: OK, so you did say that. It took me a minute to get that out of you.

Mitchell: No, I was talking about after the Novak column. And that was not clear. I may have misspoken in October 2003 in that interview.

Imus: When was the Novak column?

Mitchell: The Novak column was on the 14th, July 12th or 14th of '03.

Imus: So this was well after that?

Mitchell: Well after that. That's why the confusion. I was trying to express what I knew before the Novak column and there was some confusion in that one interview. (Just One Minute)

It is not the first time Andrea Mitchell has mispoken when she has covered this case. Interestingly enough, whenever she "mispeaks," she tends to mispeak in the favor of the Bush administration by passing along information that bolsters their talking points or short circuits criticism of the administration. Regardless, whenever Andrea Mitchell opens her mouth, some RNC spin is coming out and she never acknowledges that fact.

The Washington press corps, with a few exceptions, has been abominable in their coverage of this case. We happen to know just how abominably they have behaved because of the transparency generated by the special prosecutor. One wonders just how abominably the Washington press corps has behaved in its coverage, say, of the lead-up to the Iraq war or in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks when Bush was running away from danger. Were they "objective journalists" covering stories honestly or were they advocates for themselves (like Woodward and Russert) or advocates for their husband's administration (like Mitchell) or advocates for their own political agendas (like Miller.)

No wonder the country's so fucked up.

I bet we could improve Washington a bit by sending Bob Woodward and Viveca Novak into press exile along with Judy Miller.