Robert Novak’s Not Talking
A “fight for the soul of America”? So what was that Bush-Kerry 15-rounder that just had us all whooping and hollering? The undercard?
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Anyway, “if disgruntled government workers cannot pass along evidence…the entire system collapses.” You might suppose from this distress call that gallant government workers in a high state of disgruntlement gave Novak evidence of perfidy at the highest levels, and now ruthless satraps demanding names have lashed him to the rack and are twisting, twisting.
But I digress. What Novak did in July of last year was write a column outing Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent. He said his sources were two “senior administration officials.” Since it’s not only reprehensible but illegal for government officials to betray intelligence agents, a Justice Department investigation was launched. Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, had just written an op-ed piece for the New York Times attacking one of the prime justifications for the Iraq war, and it looked for all the world as if the White House used Novak to get back at Wilson through his wife–and broke the law to do it.
Or was the actual point of the Sun-Times editorial to stand up for poor Jim Taricani? He’s a reporter for TV station WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island, and he could be sentenced to six months in jail after being convicted of criminal contempt on November 18 for refusing to say who gave him a tape that showed an FBI informant passing an envelope stuffed with cash to a former mayor of Providence. Airing the tape wasn’t illegal, but whoever gave it to Taricani to air violated a judge’s gag order. Taricani was subpoenaed to find out who that was.
Whitewashing the Elephant
Did the Tribune ever endorse Simon for the Senate? Of course not. When he ran for reelection in 1990, the editorial declaring the Tribune’s choice began, “For more than a year Rep. Lynn Martin has tried to make the case for a change in the U.S. Senate, and, frankly, she hasn’t done a very good job of it. Her message has been twisted by dubious attempts to mix Sen. Paul Simon into the S&L crisis, by suggestions that there’s something un-American about running for president, and by the ridiculous charge from her media wizard that Simon is ‘slimy.’ Nobody believes that, including Lynn Martin.”
