In his first public comments about the deal to secure his testimony on the US Attorney firings, Karl Rove told Fox News.com:
I understand they may be the hors d’oeuvres, but I’m the main course. Some Democrats would love to have me barbecued.
But beyond that eye-catching quote, something far sneakier came out of the interview. Rove used a curious argument to defend his role in the firings, saying:
If White House contact with the Justice Department is inappropriate, then what are we doing by allowing anybody who has anything remotely to do with the political campaign — like the general counsel of the Obama White House — to have any contact with the Justice Department?. I mean, we named the Justice Department building after the campaign manager of the 1960 presidential campaign - Robert F. Kennedy.
Leave aside the shot at Bobby Kennedy. Rove seems to be arguing that the White House’s coordination with the Justice Department over the firings is comparable to any contact that the White House counsel might have with the department.
But as Rove knows, one of the concerns that the firings scandal brought up was the fact that the Bush White House allowed numerous White House staffers to talk to DOJ officials about the case. Democrats responded with efforts to limit those contacts — and Rove certainly has never before expressed the view that those efforts didn’t go far enough.
And while we’re on the subject of Rove’s mendacity, here’s another point worth noting: Yes, Rove will testify under penalty of perjury. But he appears to have shown in the past that he’s perfectly capable of dissembling even under such conditions.
In 2006, there was fevered speculation that Rove would be indicted for perjury for lying to Pat Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Valerie Plame affair. Rove initially did not tell the grand jury about his conversation about Plame with Time’s Matt Cooper (now at TPM!), claiming he forgot about it.
A New York Times story from 2006 lays out the details:
In his February 2004 testimony, Mr. Rove acknowledged talking to the columnist Robert D. Novak about Ms. Wilson, but he did not tell the grand jury about a second conversation he had about her with Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter. Mr. Novak revealed her name and C.I.A. employment in a column on July 14, 2003.Critics of the Bush administration have asserted that the revelation was retaliation against her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting some of the intelligence used to justify going to war with Iraq.
Mr. Rove later voluntarily told the grand jury about the conversation with Mr. Cooper, and said that he had forgotten about it in the rush of his daily business. But Mr. Fitzgerald has long been skeptical of Mr. Rove’s account of his forgetfulness, lawyers in the case say.
So it wouldn’t run counter to precedent if Rove again walked right up to the line of inviting a perjury charge when he testifies.
Something for Conyers and his team to be aware of, perhaps.