Evil Genius

There are so many questions.  

Why did we really invade Iraq? Do Republicans really think the media is out to get them? What’s really going on at Guantanamo Bay? Who really outed secret CIA operative Valerie Plame? And, really, what’s with all the secrets?

Students of Loyola Marymount University, who gathered by the hundreds in a campus gymnasium last Tuesday to hear a paid lecture on First Amend  ment rights by Karl Rove — architect of former President George W. Bush’s repeat election victories and marketing guru who sold America its War on Terror — seemed to ask them all.

It was a chance even members of Congress may never get, at least when it comes to what Rove knows about politically motivated hiring and firing of federal prosecutors under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and whether Rove or others pulled strings to bring corruption charges against former Democratic Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.

Rove was subpoenaed Jan. 26 to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about what he knew of such practices, an order similar to ones he has previously ducked by citing executive privilege as White House deputy chief of staff. A federal judge recently rejected Bush’s claims to “absolute immunity” for his aides, even after he’s left office, and the matter is expected to go before a Washington DC appeals court later this month. 

But, “I will not comply with the subpoena,” Rove emphatically told students. He justified his position — and later, support for invading Iraq — with precedents established under President Bill Clinton, reading a decade-old opinion by former Attorney General Janet Reno stating: “The president and his immediate advisers are absolutely immune from testimony compulsion by congressional committee.”

Whether for his obstinate refusal to comply or simply the ability to drag Clinton into all of this, many cheered Rove from their seats. The bipolar crowd — an odd mix of students who leaned left and older, better-dressed Republican hardliners who were affiliated with LMU or had won tickets through a raffle — alternately applauded and heckled Rove’s defense of Bush administration policies. Some praised and others shouted down a man who called Rove a traitor, and the same went for antiwar documentary filmmaker Patricia Foulkrod, who offered him a set of handcuffs to wear for his role in the invasion of Iraq. Security appeared not to be taking any chances, confiscating water bottles that would have made sturdy projectiles from as far away as the back of the room.

“I want to be clear. I have no personal ability, no personal right that I’m exerting here. I’m not saying I have any privilege whatsoever, but the president of the United States has privilege with regard to compelled testimony from members of his immediate staff. Five times, now a sixth time, we have told the Congress we would be happy to provide them the information that they want, as long as it’s done in a way that protects the form of the president’s privilege, and six times they’ve refused to take us up on our offer of providing info to them on these questions,” said Rove, 58.

“I’m going to obviously abide by whatever the DC circuit court does,” he continued, “but Congress, in my opinion, made the mistake of turning this into a political free-for-all and not taking advantage of the offers that they have had for better than two years to provide this information to ’em [Rove grew up in Colorado and Nevada but can turn on the charm with a disarming, Bush-style Texas drawl] in a way that protects the president’s rights not to have his staff compelled by congressional subpoena to testify.”

He’s one of the most polarizing figures in the world, and Congress is to blame? A judge doesn’t stand a chance.

When asked by a student why the White House set its sights on Iraq, Rove also shifted responsibility away from the Bush administration, citing numerous official claims of Saddam Hussein’s sinister weapons plans and affiliation with terrorists, only to reveal the authors as, once again, Clinton administration officials.

“In the aftermath of 9-11, it would have been irresponsible for the United States, knowing what we thought we knew, to leave this man in power,” said Rove. “Now the entire world got it wrong. But I would remind you of this: It was in part because [Hussein] wanted us to get it wrong. He wanted us to think he had this stuff,” he continued, later crediting the Bush Doctrine of preemptive invasion with scaring Libya’s Omar Khadafi into giving up on weapons-making programs. Though some observers question whether invading Iraq is solely responsible for disarming Libya, let there be no doubt about Rove’s ability to spin mistakes into blessings, to justify means with even unexpected ends.

After all, this is a guy who started a speech about the First Amendment (part of LMU’s annual First Amendment week speaker series, organized by Associated Students and the campus newspaper, the Los Angeles Loyolan) by stumping for the importance of defending government secrecy while attacking America’s third-largest newspaper.

“Secrecy and confidentiality are necessary for every government, especially when you’re at war. Most citizens don’t want our plans for stopping an enemy attack splashed on the front page of the newspaper. So when The New York Times  took it upon itself [in 2005] to describe an intelligence program that used electronic means of communications and information gathering and described a program by which we listened in to the electronic communication of our enemy abroad — their satellite phones, their internet messages, anything of an electronic nature — when The New York Times let it be known that we were doing this, it put America and our allies at risk,” said Rove, who is now a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a commentator for right-leaning FOX News.

“There’s a conflict between a free press that collects information and has a right to publish it and the safety and sanctity of a society.”

Rove also said the Bush administration should actually be applauded for its tight-lipped nature, arguing that the American people are best served when the president’s advisers don’t hold back frank advice or criticism for fear their comments will end up in a newspaper. He described the Oval Office as a nearly majestic place, so intimidating to speaking freely that even stone-faced former Russian President Vladimir Putin — “This guy exudes toughness. You’re around this guy and you think this is a really tough mafia guy. … He was KGB. He was there pullin’ out fingernails, you know, and putting those battery cables on,” said Rove — was awestruck by it.

Rove, meanwhile, refuted one student interrogator’s claims that Rove had changed his story about whether he played a role in leaking to the press the identity of secret CIA operative Valerie Plame, spinning it around into an attack on Plame’s husband Joe Wilson, a member of the diplomatic corps who in 2002 publicly alleged the Bush administration was trumping up intelligence about Iraq.

“To get the answer [about Plame], you’re going to have to by my book this fall for $29.95,” joked Rove of his upcoming memoir, to be published by Simon & Schuster, before denying that notes about a conversation he had with TIME magazine correspondent Matt Cooper connected him to the Plame scandal.

“What Matt Cooper said is that I said to him, in essence, ‘Don’t be writin’ anything about Joe Wilson.’ Joe Wilson misled people in his op-ed. He was not sent by the vice president to Niger. Joe Wilson did not confirm, did not find out that Iraqis were not trying to acquire uranium,” said Rove. “He lied in virtually everything he said.”

According to a report by Newsweek, internal notes between Cooper and his bureau chief at TIME about a conversation with Rove before Plame’s identity was leaked by columnist Bob Novak spell out that Rove said Wilson’s trip to Iraq was authorized by “Wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues.”

Rove also asserted last week that Novak had already known about Plame’s secret identity by the time they had talked. “Here’s what I said to Bob Novak, according to my memory: ‘I heard that too.’ According to Bob Novak’s memory, I said: ‘So you’ve heard that too.’”

With all those secrets floating around, should it be any surprise that even details surrounding the LMU speech — namely, what Rove was paid for his appearance that evening — remain secret?

Some three dozen students and a few faculty members, most of them from the school’s Communications Department, demonstrated outside the event in protest of both Bush administration failures and the fact that Rove was being paid to appear.

With $30,000 believed to be the going rate for 90 minutes with Rove, “That’s tuition for one of us,” argued Amanda Mester, a senior majoring in communications and the daughter of Pasadena Symphony Music Director Jorge Mester.

As it turns out, Rove didn’t get the full $30,000, but the fee he did negotiate is classified — at least by college officials. “Karl Rove cut us a deal. They don’t want to say exactly how much it was, but it was less than $30,000. He flew Southwest,” said LMU Communications Director Celeste Durant.

Before the event, Mester said she hoped for “an honest shouldering of responsibility” from Rove, “accepting the fact that mistakes have been made that are going to take a long time to clean up.”

Later, Mester was able to ask Rove about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, but the only regrets Rove would state were that President Obama plans to close the facility and that the Bush administration didn’t keep more prisoners locked up there.

“I think this is a grave mistake. With all due respect to our new president, he’s wingin’ it on this,” said Rove, who spelled out a complex scenario whereby secrets could be compromised and terrorists potentially set free on US soil if detainees are held inside the country and tried in federal court.

“Look, we have systematically gone through the people in Gitmo and tried to make a logical decision about who we should return to their country and who we should keep because they are too dangerous to let loose. Three-hundred people were let go, and 64 of them were caught again on the battlefield trying to kill Americans. And those were the people we didn’t think were serious.”

The evening’s conversation also involved criticism of the media for liberal bias, particularly Obama-related, and stories of encounters with injured American troops or the families of some who didn’t make it home. But it was fear that what we don’t know can hurt us that Rove seemed quick to invoke as a way to justify not only his own actions but everything the administration he helped to create stood for these past eight years.

“I’ve read the reports,” said Rove of a supposed myriad of terrorist schemes aimed at citizens of the United States. “I used to have hair. Some of it used to have a color to it other than gray. You read these reports and you see what’s going on. You’ve heard about some of the plots. You haven’t heard about all of them. You haven’t heard about most of them. You haven’t even heard of some of them,” he said.

And, in the interest of your own safety, you may never really know what your elected — and, in Rove’s case, appointed — leaders are actually doing that warrants keeping it all secret from you.

“You haven’t heard about the plots that have been stopped, and largely they’ve been stopped because our intelligence agencies are good at collecting information electronically, and they are good at collecting information from the high-value targets that we get. You stop collecting that kind of information and you make America more at risk,” he said.