[Mb-civic] C.I.A. Leak Case Recalls Texas Incident in '92 Race

[Jef Bek]

New York Times 
August 6, 2005

C.I.A. Leak Case Recalls Texas Incident in '92 Race
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - These hot months here 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 C.I.A. 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, Mr. Rove was
fired from the state campaign to re-elect the first President Bush on
suspicions that Mr. Rove had leaked damaging information to Mr. Novak about
Robert Mosbacher Jr., the campaign manager and the son of a former commerce
secretary. 

Since then, Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove was the source,
even as Mr. Mosbacher, who no longer talks on the record about the incident,
has never changed his original assertion that Mr. Rove was the culprit.

"It's history," Mr. 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 Mr. 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 C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, to
reporters, potentially a crime.

But it does give a clue to Mr. Rove's frequent and complimentary mentions
over the years in Mr. Novak's column, and to the importance of Mr. Rove and
Mr. 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 by Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove in July 2003
about Ms. Wilson, part of a case that has put a reporter for The New York
Times, Judith Miller, in jail for refusing to testify to the grand jury.

The two men share a love of history and policy, as well as reputations as
aggressive partisans and hotheads.

People who have been officially briefed on the case have said Mr. Rove was
the second of two senior administration officials cited by Mr. Novak in his
column of July 14, 2003, that identified Ms. Wilson by her maiden name,
Valerie Plame, and said she was a C.I.A. operative.

The larger question has been whether Mr. Rove might have been using the
columnist to confirm Ms. 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.

Mr. 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. 

The anchor of the program, "Inside Politics," Ed Henry, has said he was
preparing later in the broadcast to ask Mr. Novak about his role in the leak
case.

Mr. Rove also declined to be interviewed.

But Mr. Novak, through his office manager, Kathleen Connolly, provided the
information about his first encounter with Mr. Rove. Mr. Novak, by his
recollection, met Mr. Rove in Texas in the mid-80's, when Mr. Novak turned
up to write columns about the state's shifting out of Democrats' hands into
those of Republicans.

In those years, Mr. Rove regularly had dinner with Mr. Novak when the
columnist went to Austin. Mr. Rove, in his mid-30's, was a rising political
operator who in 1981 founded his direct-mail consulting firm, Karl Rove &
Company. Gov. William P. Clements, a Republican, was one of his first
clients.

Mr. Novak, in his mid-50's, was big political game for Mr. Rove. He was the
other half, with Rowland Evans Jr., of a much read and increasingly
conservative column that was syndicated by The Chicago Sun-Times and
published weekly in The Washington Post. Evans and Novak, as it was called -
Mr. Evans retired in 1993 -closely chronicled the Reagan era, and it would
have been a sign of Mr. Rove's arrival on the national scene for Mr. Novak
to mention him in print.

Still, a computer search of Mr. Novak's columns shows that Mr. Rove's name
did not appear under his byline until 1992, when Mr. Novak wrote the words
that got Mr. Rove into such trouble.

"A secret meeting of worried Republican power brokers in Dallas last Sunday
reflected the reality that George Bush is in serious trouble in trying to
carry his adopted state," the column began.

The column said that the campaign run by Mr. Mosbacher was a "bust" and that
he had been stripped of his authority at the "secret meeting" by Senator
Phil Gramm, the top Republican in the state.

Also at the meeting, Mr. Novak reported, was "political consultant Karl
Rove, who had been shoved aside by Mosbacher."

Specifically, Mr. Mosbacher told The Houston Chronicle in 2003 that he had
given a competitor of Mr. Rove the bulk of a $1 million contract for direct
mail work in the campaign.

"I thought another firm was better," Mr. Mosbacher told The Chronicle. "I
had $1 million for direct mail. I gave Rove a contract for $250,000 and
$750,000 to the other firm."

The other firm belonged to Mr. Rove's chief competitor, John Weaver, and Mr.
Rove was so angry, Texas Republicans say, that he retaliated by leaking the
information about Mr. Mosbacher to Mr. Novak.

Mr. Mosbacher fired Mr. Rove. As a result, Mr. Weaver, who later faced off
against Mr. Rove as the political director of Senator John McCain's
presidential campaign in 2000, walked away with Mr. Rove's $250,000, too.

"That's about the only time that a Novak column benefited me," Mr. Weaver
said this week in a telephone interview.

Mr. Rove again turned up in Mr. Novak's columns in 1999, when Gov. George W.
Bush was running for president. Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's national campaign
strategist, was quoted briefly on the record in at least three columns, even
though Mr. Novak has said on CNN, "I can't tell you anything I ever talked
to Karl Rove about, because I don't think I ever talked to him about any
subject, even the time of day, on the record."

Whether Mr. Novak forgot about the 1999 mentions is unclear. What is clear
is that Mr. Rove has made frequent appearances in Mr. Novak's column in a
positive light, often in paragraphs that imparted information about the
inner workings of Mr. Bush's operation, feeding perceptions here that Mr.
Rove is one of the columnist's most important anonymous sources.

In April 2000, under the headline "Bush Thriving Without Insiders," Mr.
Novak wrote of the fears of the Republican old guard about the triumvirate
of "rookies" in Austin - led by Mr. Rove - who were running Mr. Bush's
"supposedly fading" presidential campaign.

"Actually," Mr. Novak wrote, "the Austin triumvirate has managed the most
effective Republican campaign since Dwight D. Eisenhower's in 1952."

Last December, Mr. Novak wrote that the "retention of John Snow as secretary
of the treasury was viewed in the capital's inner circles as a defeat for
presidential adviser Karl Rove, who wanted a high-profile manager of
President Bush's second-term economic program."

Although Mr. Novak did not directly debunk that view, he did suggest a
different turn of events when he wrote that two Wall Street executives had
said no to the position and that it was "decided at the White House to
relieve Snow from his uncertainty and keep him in office."

These days, friends of the two men say they have not seen Mr. Rove and Mr.
Novak at dinner together and note that there is little the two would have to
celebrate. But in June 2003, The Chicago Sun-Times gave a party for Mr.
Novak at the Army and Navy Club here to salute 40 years of his columns.

The biggest political celebrity guest, to no one's surprise, was Mr. Rove.