Philadelphia Daily News | 08/06/2005 | Before CIA leak case, Rove and Novak ties go way bak
Before CIA leak case, Rove and Novak ties go way bak
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON - These hot months will be remembered as the summer of the leak, a time when the political class obsessed on a central question: Did Karl Rove, President Bush's powerful adviser, commit a crime when he spoke about a CIA officer with the columnist Robert D. Novak?
Whatever a federal grand jury investigating the case decides, a small political subgroup is experiencing the odd sensation that this leak has sprung before. In 1992, in an incident well-known in Texas, Rove was fired from the state campaign to re-elect President George H.W. Bush on suspicions that Rove had leaked damaging information to Novak about Robert Mosbacher Jr., the campaign manager and the son of a former commerce secretary.
Since then, Rove and Novak have denied that Rove was the source, even as Mosbacher, who no longer talks on the record about the incident, has never changed his original assertion that Rove was the culprit. "It's history," Mosbacher said last week in a brief telephone interview. "I commented on it at the time, and I have nothing to add."
But the episode, part of the bad-boy lore of Rove, is a telling chapter in the 20-year friendship between the presidential adviser and the columnist. The story of that relationship, a bond of mutual self-interest of a kind that is long familiar in Washington, does not answer the question of who might have leaked the identity of the CIA officer, Valerie Wilson, to reporters, potentially a crime.
But it does give a clue to Rove's frequent and complimentary mentions over the years in Novak's column, and to the importance of Rove and Novak to each other's ambitions.
"They've known each for a long time, but they are not close friends," said a person who knows both men and who asked not to be named because of the investigation into a conversation between Novak and Rove in July 2003 about Wilson. The investigation has put a reporter for the New York Times, Judith Miller, in jail for refusing to testify to the grand jury.
People who have been officially briefed on the case have said Rove was the second of two senior administration officials cited by Novak in his column of July 14, 2003, that identified Wilson by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and said she was a CIA operative.
The larger question has been whether Rove might have been using the columnist to confirm Plame's identity to punish or undermine her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had accused the Bush administration of leading the nation to war with Iraq on false pretenses.
Novak, who stalked out of a live program on CNN on Thursday after uttering a profanity on the air, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Novak, through his office manager, Kathleen Connolly, provided information about his first encounter with Rove. Novak, by his recollection, first met Rove in Texas in the mid-'80s, when Novak would turn up to write columns about the state's shift from Democratic to Republican control.
Still, a computer search of Novak's columns shows that Rove's name did not appear under his byline until 1992, when Novak wrote the words that got Rove in such trouble.
Rove again turned up in Novak's columns in 1999, when George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, was running for president. Rove was Bush's national campaign strategist.
These days, friends of both men say they have not seen Rove and Novak at dinner together, and note that there is little the two would have to celebrate. But in June 2003, the Chicago Sun-Times threw a party for Novak at Washington's Army and Navy Club to salute 40 years of his columns.
The biggest political celebrity guest, to no one's surprise, was Rove.
