“Are you suggesting that when Rove gets indicted, they’ll keep him at the White House in his still current title, Deputy Chief of Staff? That’s what I don’t get, . . .
If you’re going to pre-empt having to resign in response to a [indictment ?], you get all the way out now, and into a position above question while you can still do so.”

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I don’t get it either, emptywheel.

I think people like you and I – rational people – can go astray, though, attempting to discern why irrational people – and these people are profoundly irrational – do what they do by applying rational analysis to their actions. For instance, three years after starting a war which had “DISASTER” written all over it from Day One, can any of us say for certain why they REALLY started this war? Rational analysis of their starting the war leads to no reasonable explanation of why they did it.

For that matter, if Rove has no policy duties, only duties relating to the November election, then what logical justification for his being on the public payroll, rather than the RNC payroll, can there be?

The only things I can suggest regarding what comes next with Rove, given that he has one foot in and one foot out of the White House, will make no sense to reasonable people. But the true test is whether they make sense to the unreasonable people who are taking the actions.

With that test in mind, I offer the following suggestions, none of which make sense, and some of which can work in conjunction with some of the others:

1. When an indictment becomes inevitable, Karl resigns his remaining position, explaining that his political duties are overwhelming, given the weakness of the Republicans in the polls, and he just can’t remain at the White House.

2. Hope that the indictments come late enough in the year so that the Christmas pardons will clean everything up, permitting Karl to stay on and help America fight the war it has started in Iran.

3. Rove keeps his nominal post in hopes of pulling a Spiro Agnew – plea bargain down the felonies he’s committed to a couple of misdemeanors (and no jail time) by, among other things, agreeing to surrender his White House post and to never accept another such appointment.

4. Some people at the White House wanted Rove all the way out. He wanted to stay all the way in. The people at the White House were scared of him, of his knowledge of where the bodies are buried and all, and of his willingness to do ANYTHING to ANYONE. So the two sides compromised on the one foot in, one foot out result.

This list is clearly not comprehensive.

Again, I can explain to you things wrong with each of these scenarios as easily as you can explain the same to me. But that is NOT the test of their validity. Rather, the test is, could the delusional people who decided that Rove could stay on in a reduced capacity at the White House, in the rather desperate circumstances they find themselves in these days, be persuaded that one or more of these ideas, or ideas like them, justified keeping Rove on?

For the record, I most certainly am not. Furthermore, I’m not sure what I’ve written that would suggest that I am.

“Luskin says his client returned to the grand jury to “explore a matter raised since Mr. Rove’s last appearance in October 2005.” That would suggest that Rove testified today about news that broke at the end of last year: the revelation that a Bush administration official leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to Bob Woodward in June 2003 or the word that Time’s Viveca Novak tipped off Luskin in early 2004 to the fact that Rove had leaked Plame’s identity to Matthew Cooper.”

If that Luskin quote is all he said, testimony re VN isn’t all that could be suggested as a topic for the GJ. All those e-mails were also recovered since Rove’s last appearance, weren’t they?

What that means in realworld terms is less clear, but in neither case does it bode well for Rove, who appears between a rock and a hard place. As his story becomes more entangled, the more his chances of becoming a target of the GJ go up, and so does the pressure to rat on his colleagues…to go the Information route, as TalkLeft suggests.

He is a bit of a porker ain’t he? And we know pigs squeal don’t we?

http://talkleft.com

Uh, he would be what we call a “snitch.” (See also, rat, cooperating witness, canary, etc.)

Earlier today, Fitzgerald met with the grand jury for the second time since it was empaneled following the expiration of an original grand jury investigating the leak.

WP

Not much news that I can find- this note that Fitz met with the GJ earlier today before Rover showed up may be significant.

The law and custom may well require that Rove’s security clearance be removed if he’s indicted. But that matters not one bit in this case.

He will still remain Bush’s “brain, regardless (how else could Bush function?) – and therefore continue to have full access to whatever information is needed for him to exercise that role.

Furthermore, Bush has already positioned himself, under the “unitary executive†theory, as having the constitutional authority to act outside the law in other matters (e.g. domestic surveillance, torture, suspension of habeas corpus, etc.). So there is nothing to prevent him from granting full access to Rove on security matters.

My question: could it be possible that the GOP in congress will turn on the admin in order to save itself?