Stepping on His Dick

 Karl Rove is a brilliant (and brutal) political tactician. Whether or not you accept that Bush won the 2000 election, it was Rove who made a mediocre governor with a second-rate policy mind president of the United States. Rove is also a self-taught American-history scholar (he never finished college). He is a self-made multimillionaire, earning every cent he ever made gaming the American political system. And he is a master of the complex public-policy issues that bore and bewilder Bush.

None of these qualities makes Rove a good defendant or prudently self-interested subject of a criminal investigation. In Washington, until he was caught up in Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name, Rove avoided being put under oath — until his four appearances before the federal grand jury handling the Plame case. Grand-jury proceedings are secret, so little is known about how Rove fared in the questioning that resulted in the indictment of Dick Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby. Yet Rove’s performance under oath in Texas is revealing, and suggests that while testifying before Fitzgerald and the grand jury, Rove might have stepped on his dick (to use a legal term of art from the state of Texas).

In August 1997, Rove responded to a subpoena by attorneys representing five private trial lawyers the state hired to force tobacco companies to pay tobacco-related medical costs incurred by the state. Rove was subpoenaed because while he was working for Governor Bush, he was also receiving a monthly paycheck for consulting work for tobacco giant Philip Morris. The trial attorneys were all Democrats and took on the hugely expensive case on a contingency agreement by which they would be paid only if they prevailed. They suspected Rove was secretly trying to queer the lawsuit, which had been undertaken by a Democratic attorney general.

It was a valid theory. By bringing in more than $17 billion for the state, the five law firms earned more than $3 billion in payments structured over several decades. Rove was Big Tobacco’s guy in Austin — mostly because of his Bush connection. And some of the billions the trial lawyers were paid would undoubtedly be used to rebuild a state Democratic Party that was and remains deader than the political future of Scooter Libby.

Rove was a dreadful deponent, at times arrogant, at times hostile, and ultimately dishonest. With his lawyer at his side, he allowed himself to be caught in a lie that pertained to a critical fact regarding Rove, Bush and the tobacco companies. (In the end, the billions paid by the tobacco companies caused Democratic Attorney General Dan Morales to lose his sometimes slippery grip on reality, as he worked to get a cut of the money, married a topless dancer from Abilene, and was ultimately sent to the Big Rodeo by a federal judge who said he wished “there was an additional sentence for stupidity.”)

In the course of questioning, Rove told the attorney representing the trial lawyers that he had a firm agreement with the governor to recuse himself from anything having to do with tobacco. A “Chinese wall” separated his tobacco consulting from his work for Bush. The lawyers knew the answers to some of the questions before they asked them. They knew that Rove had been involved in polling funded by the tobacco lobby. One of the polls was a piece of political trash, a push poll asking respondents how they would vote if they knew the Democratic attorney general had provided financial support to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — which he never had. The day the results were released, Rove attended a tobacco-lobby meeting and immediately took the poll to Bush chief of staff Joe Allbaugh.

Caught in a lie about keeping Bush and Big Tobacco separate, Rove retreated. Rather than give it to Bush, he delivered the poll to Allbaugh, he said, knowing Allbaugh would throw it away without looking at it. The answer didn’t wash. Rove was not a party to the lawsuit, so he faced little immediate risk. But the trial lawyers had what they wanted. When Bush, acting in his capacity as governor, set out to take their fees away from them, they could stand before federal Judge David Folsom in Texarkana and point to the intellectual author of a lawsuit that would ultimately embarrass Bush.

The tobacco suit was Rove’s second failure under oath. In 1990, Republican Governor Bill Clements appointed Rove to a state university-board of regents. Appearing before the Senate Nominations Committee, Rove again was both unprepared and dishonest. Since 1986, Rove had been providing tips and information to an FBI agent named Greg Rampton, who was conducting serial investigations of the finances of statewide Democratic officeholders. On one occasion Rove even announced in Washington the coming indictments of two lieutenants of Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower in Austin — more than a week before the Department of Justice unsealed the indictments.

Rove had met Rampton under unusual circumstances. In 1986, as a Democratic opponent was closing in on Rove’s candidate, the incumbent governor, Rove held a press conference to announce that a bug had been planted in his office. It was a brilliant tactic, pointing to the Democratic challenger’s desperation. Special Agent Greg Rampton investigated the bugging and no charges were filed. A source close to the Travis County district attorney told me they investigated before the FBI and concluded it was a political stunt. Rove or someone working for him had had his own office bugged. Five years later, stumbling under questioning from a Democratic senator, Rove said he didn’t exactly know Rampton. When pressed, he resorted to a Clintonesque parsing of terms: “Ah, senator, it depends. Would you define ‘know’ for me?” He then qualified his response, saying he wouldn’t recognize Rampton “if he walked in the door.” His dishonest response provided Senate Democrats a sufficient pretext to deny Rove his university board position.