Mercury Rising

It appears from several reports including this one that on this week's edition of The McLaughlin Group, Lawrence O'Donnell claims that the Time documents reveal that Karl Rove was the leaker in the Valerie Plame/CIA case. From the E&P report of the transcript of the show:

What we're going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper's e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury, the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

And I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury.

When Rove spoke about "the motives of liberals" on June 22, my first thought was that sort of incendiary comment from someone like Rove does not happen in a vacuum when there's no election at stake. It's a table setter that indicates something's coming. And if he is indeed about to be fingered as the Plame leaker, obviously it would qualify as a classic preemptive Rovian strike.

But if this is true, it's going to take more than a ham-handed comment about Dick Durbin to save Rove's bacon. We already know what George H.W. Bush thinks of all this. From a speech he gave at the CIA in 1999:

Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, 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.

Of course we've already seen what the strategy will be to defend what the former president calls treason: everyone "already knew" about Plame. But there would be lots of juicy questions, like who told Rove about Plame in the first place? And maybe it's appropriate that Watergate was just in the news; the question about what the president knew and when he knew it would certainly come up, particularly since Bush is on the record with public statements about the Plame leak. Oh, and by the way---does anyone still think that the recent trashing of Mark Felt was in any way about Mark Felt?

If this plays out as it appears it might, it has important implications beyond politics. It could seriously affect the stock market, for example; market volatility is at a ten year low right now, which means essentially that most investors are extremely complacent and place very little premium on downside protection. Right now it would not take much to pop that psychology bubble, and a major scandal in the White House's inner circle---with so much at stake politically and geopolitically---could do it. We're entering a seasonally weak period on Wall Street anyway and a blockbuster like this, which would increase both the stakes and the rancor of the battle over a SCOTUS nominee, would exacerbate that.

It feels like things are about to get interesting, doesn't it?


Update: O'Donnell has now posted some additional comments here.

Update 2: Newsweek now has a piece out that provides more color.