Liberal groups and blogs are calling for Rove's resignation:

• Digby
• America Blog
• MoveOn. Pac
• Timothy Noah at Slate: Turd Blossom Must Go

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid just released this statement (received via e-mail)

Washington, DC – “I agree with the President when he said he expects the people who work for him to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration. I trust they will follow through on this pledge. If these allegations are true this rises above politics and is about our national security.”

The ethics watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW)has written a letter to President Bush asking him to direct that Karl Rove's security clearances be revoked as a result of the Plame leak:

Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) sent a letter today to President George Bush requesting that he immediately direct Karl Rove's security clearances be suspended pending the outcome of the government's investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

As grounds, the group asserted:

"Considering that it is a federal crime to identify covert agents, and that President Bush signed executive orders identifying the vital role the President plays in protecting national security secrets from unauthorized disclosure, it is appropriate for the President to suspend Mr. Rove's clearance pending the investigation's outcome," Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today.

In April, 1999, former President Herbert Walker Bush, the 11th director of central intelligence, said at the opening of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va, named the George Bush Center for Intelligence:

"I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are in my view the most insidious of traitors."

Source: Associated Press, April 26, 1999; Houston Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1999.

White House Press Secretary played cat and mouse today at the press briefing on Newseek's disclosure that Karl Rove was a source of Matthew Cooper in the Valerie Plame leak. Think Progress has the transcript.

McClellan may be clamming up, but read what former CIA agent Larry Marcinkowski had to say (pdf) about the senior official of the White House who leaked the information:

The BBC reports that a manhunt is on as four Arab prisoners in U.S. custody at the Baghram Air Force Base prison in Afhanistan have escaped.

The US military said the men who escaped were militants from Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

Finally, someone addresses the MSM's excessive coverage of stories like the Runaway Bride, Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise at the expense of coverage of important issues, like genocide in Darfur.

Watch this 30 second powerful message to the media. Then go here.

I don't believe President Bush will fire Karl Rove. But, David Corn makes a good argument for why he should.

He leaked national security information as part of a fierce campaign to undermine Wilson, who had criticized the White House on the war on Iraq. Rove's overworked attorney, Robert Luskin, defends his client by arguing that Rove never revealed the name of Valerie Plame/Wilson to Cooper and that he only referred to her as Wilson's wife. This is not much of a defense. If Cooper or any other journalist had written that "Wilson's wife works for the CIA"--without mentioning her name--such a disclosure could have been expected to have the same effect as if her name had been used: Valerie Wilson would have been compromised, her anti-WMD work placed at risk, and national security potentially harmed.

Either Rove knew that he was revealing an undercover officer to a reporter or he was identifying a CIA officer without bothering to check on her status and without considering the consequences of outing her. Take your pick: in both scenarios Rove is acting in a reckless and cavalier fashion, ignoring the national security interests of the nation to score a political point against a policy foe.

I don't think that whether Plame was undercover at the time of the leak is the determinative issue. I think the question is whether the U.S. would have wanted to protect her identity because of her past or present covert status. At this hearing (pdf) of the Democratic Policy Committee in October, 2003, three current and former CIA Agents emphatically and repeatedly answer that question in the affirmative.

As Corn says, at best, Rove was reckless or cavalier. Others have said Rove probably didn't know about the law prohibiting disclosure. If true, that in itself suggests he shouldn't be privy to classified information or occupy such a senior position in the Administration.

by TChris

Update: Kar discusses his confinement:

"I don't hold anything against them for holding us," he said. "What I hold against them is they put us in a cell and forgot us."

*****

Cyrus Kar, the filmmaker who has been detained in a military prison in Bahgdad for seven weeks, was released Sunday. (TalkLeft background here.) Justifying the detention, military officials claim that Kar represented "an imperative security threat to Iraq" which had been resolved "appropriately." In other words, there was no evidence that Kar was a threat at all, and unfavorable publicity forced the military to release him.

While the military claims that Kar was given a meaningful hearing, and that his release shows how well detention review panels work, Kar's lawyers cut through the spin:

"He was never told what if any charges were being made against him," said one of the lawyers, Mark D. Rosenbaum. "He never had access to a lawyer. He was never told that he passed a lie-detector test. He was virtually incommunicado. That's not a model detention policy. And that was for 50 days - for a guy who got into the wrong cab."

Kar's ordeal is not quite over.

The news is reporting that Karl Rove's lawyer's said Sunday that Rove mentioned Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA to Matthew Cooper before the Novak article was published.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.

Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.

I don't think Rove has admitted a crime. This is nothing different than what Luskin has been saying for the past week. As I wrote here on July 5:

Happy Blogiversary to Skippy and we wish him many, many more.

He brings a smile on every visit.

(Thanks to Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged for making the picture)

by TChris

One of many reasons a felony conviction shouldn't disqualify a citizen from voting:

"Felony disenfranchisement laws are the last vestiges of Jim Crow," said Catherine Weiss, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who is working on the issue. "They disenfranchise African Americans way out of proportion to their numbers in the population."

As of 2000, almost 5 million Americans couldn't vote because of laws that restrict those convicted of a felony from casting ballots -- in some cases even after their sentences and parole are complete, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that favors alternatives to prison. Four in 10 of those disenfranchised were black.

Racial disenfranchisement comes at a high cost to a democratic society.

"This marginalizes people," said Ronald Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association. "If they can't participate politically, they tend to care less and less about other things that go along with voting."

Fortunately, voters' rights advocates are making progress.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) reacts to today's Newseek column confirming that Karl Rove was one of Matthew Cooper's sources.

David Corn's thoughts are here. Josh Marshall's here. Here's Hunter at Daily Kos.

The most important statements of the Bush officials may be those they made to investigators before they appeared at the grand jury. Don't forget, many were interviewed with and without lawyers in their offices, even in bars. Making a false statement to a federal official is a five year offense under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001. From the International Herald Tribune, April 3, 2004: