It's no surprise that people leak and spin to reporters they know and trust. I have mentioned before that I think former Republican National Committee counsel Ben Ginsberg is a likely source of the Rove camp's agenda. He is a partner at Patton Boggs with Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin. It was Ginsberg that referred Rove to Luskin in the first instance. The Recorder (subscription required)reported:
Luskin met Rove through a referral from Patton Boggs partner Benjamin Ginsberg, a legal adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign who in August 2004 resigned after revealing that he had also advised the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that sought to discredit John Kerry's military record.
Ginsberg also represented the Bush campaign in the 2000 Florida election recount battle. My post on his resignation due to his involvement with the Swift Boaters is here.
In August, 2004, when Ginsberg resigned as outside counsel to the Bush campaign, Rove came to Ginsberg's defense. On August 25, 2004, in an interview with Fox New's Brit Hume, Rove said (available on lexis.com):
What Ben Ginsberg, he's a great friend to this president and has been with him since he began to run for president in 1999, did was resigned from the Bush campaign in order to remove any possibility of being a distraction to his friend. He wants to see the president reelected.
He knows that there's a hypocritical double standard on the part of some in the media, where a lawyer for the Bush campaign who is also the lawyer for a 527 is somehow suspect, where a lawyer for the Kerry campaign or the Democratic National Committee, who's also a lawyer for a 527 group is not. And he accepted that reality and decided he wanted to help his friend. And the best way he could help his friend is resign.
In 2000, Peter Wallsten was a reporter in Florida for the Miami Herald who covered the election story. He left the Herald in 2004 to become a White House correspondent for the LA Times. Hotline reported on April 13, 2004:
One of the Miami Herald's chief political reporters, Peter
Wallsten, has left the Miami Herald to become one of the L.A.
Times' three WH correspondents, where he'll be focusing mostly
on politics. Sadly for him, his personal dateline moves from
South Beach to DC. Taking over many of Wallsten's political
reporting duties at the Herald will be Lesley Clark (Hotline
reporting, 4/13).
Wallsten is an excellent, award winning reporter. And assuming I'm correct, there's nothing wrong with Ginsberg promoting Karl Rove's versions anonymously to Wallsten or other reporters. But since bloggers are parsing every word we see in the MSM about RoveGate, and the public accepts much of what it reads as fact, even when the source is anonymous, I think it's worth pointing out that Ginsberg might be a source of the information.
Especially when I see a sentence like this:
Rove associates said Friday there was never any talk of plea deals, and that his lawyers remained convinced that he broke no laws.
I remain skeptical of that claim, to say the least.