Rove Refuses to Apologize For or Admit Role in CIA Leak [VIDEO]

Posted by Adam Howard at 8:55 AM on August 19, 2007.

How irritating and typical was it that the man who was supposed to grill Karl Rove today in his first post-resignation in depth interview was NBC White House reporter David Gregory, who may be most famous for his goofy dancing onstage with "MC" Rove at a press event a couple years ago. It just cemented how incestuous the relationship between much of the mainstream press is with the Bush administration but Rove in particular. Rove's performance was pretty predictable. He managed to put a sunny spin on every policy and political failure of George W. Bush and continued to predict vindication for his party and ideals in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. One interesting moment, was when "Turd Blossom" was confronted yet again, on his role in the Valerie Plame leak.

Now, of course, Rove isn't under oath. And as Dick Cheney has proved consistently, boldly lying on Meet the Press doesn't seem to have any long term political consequences. That said, he really has gone out on a limb with his answer here, where's he pleading complete ignorance to Plame's identity at the time of leak and is basically pushing all blame off onto Armitage. A few minutes later Matt Cooper, a journalist who was called to testify in the Plame case because Rove leaked Plame's name to him flat out said Rove was deceiving the audience.

UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler of FireDogLake has this point to add:

David Gregory was himself a recipient of a Plame leak. He actually covers the substance of Rove's appearance in really crappy fashion, letting Rove claim Joe's op-ed said things it didn't say and letting Rove repeat an error made about Joe's report. As I've pointed out recently, both Ari Fleischer and John Dickerson maintain that their conversation was background, with no promise of confidentiality asked for or granted. So there is absolutely no reason why Gregory shouldn't come clean with his version of the story. But he refused to even give a deposition to the Prosecution. Once again (as they did with Russert interviewing Novak), NBC is having a "journalist" thoroughly implicated in this leak covering it.

Check out the video to your right for more.

Tagged as: rove, plame, wilson, novak, cia leak, cooper

Adam Howard is the editor of PEEK.