TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Mr. O'Donnell's Huffington Post blog
• MSNBC
• Mr. O'Donnell's bio
• Article on Mr. O'Donnell

E-mail a friend

Tavis: Lawrence O'Donnell is a senior political analyst for MSNBC and a regular contributor to "The McLaughlin Group." It was during a recent appearance on "The McLaughlin Group" that he first named Karl Rove as a source in the leak of the identity of a CIA agent. In his spare time, as if he has any, he's also an Emmy-winning producer and writer for "The West Wing." Last week, the hit NBC drama was once again nominated for several Emmy awards. Lawrence, congratulations again. Glad to have you back.

Lawrence O'Donnell: Thanks, Tavis.

Tavis: Nice to see you again. I've been dying to ask you this for a few days since I knew that you were connected to this. What did Lawrence O'Donnell know and when did he know it?

O'Donnell: Well, he knew what was in the "Time" magazine emails that were under subpoena by the special prosecutor. That subpoena was being defied for a year and a half, as was, as we all know, the two reporters were defying their subpoenas and appealing all the way up to the United States Supreme Court to try to be excused from answering...-

Tavis: The two reporters: Judith Miller of the "New York Times--"

O'Donnell: Judith Miller and Matt Cooper of "Time" magazine. The press took their eye off the ball of the most important subpoena, which was the documents subpoena. It was my feeling for a very long time that "Time" magazine, once they exhausted their appeals and if the case went against them, would turn over those documents. And what I knew for months was in those documents, it will be revealed to the prosecutor that Karl Rove was indeed the source that Matt Cooper had been protecting for two years and willing to go to jail for two years. And so that's what I revealed on July 1 on "The McLaughlin Group" that kind of got this end of the controversy started again. It had been a quiet controversy for almost a year at that point.

Tavis: All right, two things: one, how did you know what others did not know?

O'Donnell: Then I have to play my secret source game.

Tavis: I had to ask. You know I had to ask.

O'Donnell: I got it from some secret sources, and after I went public with it, I got it reconfirmed twice by two more highly authoritative sources after the thing had cracked publicly.

Tavis: This is my own sense, and, you know, I don't even try to hide behind it. I think personally "Time" magazine caved. That's my own personal opinion. People are entitled to their own. I think they caved. You intimated a moment ago that you felt that at the appropriate time, if they lost all appeals, that they would cave as well. What made you feel--I didn't think they would, but I think they did. What made you think that they in fact would?

O'Donnell: Well, first of all, it's a publicly traded corporation. This is a federal court order. I'm not sure that you could survive FCC scrutiny if, as a public ally traded corporation, you're defying a federal court order that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. There's no doubt left in it. And listen, the document subpoena I always thought they would regard differently from the individual reporters being forced to testify, and I was right about that. And I actually think, you know, "The New York Times" takes the position that they're very critical of "Time" magazine in this, but technically, legally they did the same thing, because "The New York Times" had its documents subpoenaed in this case. Judy Miller never wrote an article. So "The New York Times"' response was we don't have any documents. Now, "The New York Times" could have said to the prosecutor we won't tell you if we have any documents. That's really kind of where Judy Miller is on this. She's an absolutist. "The Times" responded to the subpoena by saying we don't have any. That was a completely responsive attitude taken by "The New York Times" when it got hit with a subpoena at the corporate level. So "Time" magazine was completely responsive, too. It's just that it had documents, really hot ones that had some very big names in them.

Tavis: All right, so what's your sense, speaking of the big names, what's your sense of the news today that one of the other sources was another White House aide? This one happens to be Mr. Libby, Mr. Cheney's, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff.

O'Donnell: We're at the stage now where the daily revelations are completely unsurprising. This is the general sense of the case that people who understood the White House, understood the way it worked, understood this subject in the White House, we all kind of understood this was how it would be treated. I always knew that Karl Rove was involved without having the actual facts. I just know that's the one that likely talked to Cooper. I mean, I didn't know it for a fact until this year, several months ago, but there's nothing surprising about the Libby involvement and the Rove involvement. So now we're in a series of unsurprising elements of the story being locked into place in a way that fits the expectation of most journalists who were following the case for two years.

Tavis: Speaking of those expectations, I want to come back to that in two minutes and get your feeling on the expectations are about what will happen later in the summer. Before we advance to that, though, the other news of the day, President Bush of course has a press conference and now, I'm not the only one who picked up on this. You don't got to be a rocket scientist to see this dichotomy, this distinction. First he says back in the day, repeatedly, anybody in my administration connected to these leaks will be fired. Today he says anybody found to have done anything illegal where these leaks are concerned will be fired. Now, I said to Michael Isikoff on this program I guess last week, I asked him, rather, whether or not he thought Rove had gotten just close enough to the line but not stepped over. In other words, there might be chalk on his shoes, but he didn't step across the line. Is that the spin we're going to get? And lo and behold, as I read it that's the spin we're getting from the president today, or the position we're getting from him. How do you read this change?

O'Donnell: Yeah, there's been a shifting of the goal posts, and I've been talking about that for a couple of weeks. What we haven't heard until today was has the president changed the goal posts. And indeed he has. Now the standard for maintaining employment in his White House is that you don't commit a crime. Now, just to go back to his original presidential campaign, which had a very strong theme of restoring honor and dignity to the White House--

Tavis: Following Bill Clinton's administration.

O'Donnell: Following the Clinton White House, which you could expect to treat these things that way. The Clinton White House was terrible in terms of its ethical standard that it maintained. This White House was going to be higher. So now the president is saying, well, no, as long as you're not convicted of a crime, you can work here. That's about the lowest standard you could possibly have not only for working in the White House, but for maintaining a security clearance, which Karl Rove has.

Tavis: As they say in Texas, or they ask in Texas, is that dog going to hunt?

O'Donnell: I don't think it is. I think ultimately the original frame of the case is the thing that's going to work politically. And once it is revealed exactly how involved Rove is and the prosecutor has revealed it, we're not just working with press leaks from people like me or printing of the "Time" magazine emails and Matt Cooper's own testimony, which he's revealed, once we have the full prosecutor's view of the case, I think the president is going to realize that Karl Rove absolutely, as Karl Rove said to Matt Cooper, said too much. That's Karl Rove's line to Matt Cooper. "I think I said too much." Well, he did and I think he did by any ethical standard and by any reasonable standard of how you handle classified information. You know, those guys, when they get those security clearances, are given a manual about classified information, how to handle it. That's been violated in this situation.

Tavis: All right, what's the price for what he did--Mr. Rove, that is? What's the price of what Mr. Libby did? I was reading--speaking of "The "New York Times," reading Frank Rich yesterday, Rich seemed to suggest in his piece that this is just a matter of time, just a matter of time before we see the perfectly timed resignation of Mr. Rove. But he made it very clear, Rove is going. It's just a matter when. They're going to time his resignation to the right moment. I'm not so sure I believe that. I'm not so sure that Rove or Libby are going anywhere. This White House is so good at avoiding stuff that the rest of us thought would kill them off. They're pretty good at this. What is your sense of what's going to happen here?

O'Donnell: Well, politically, there's no good choice here. I mean, politically, once you let Rove go, you've admitted that something serious has happened that Rove's responsible for. The longer you keeping him on, you're keeping on someone who I think most of the public is going to conclude did something wrong.

Tavis: But you ain't running for office again. So what?

O'Donnell: Well, Bush's approval rating is now down in the low 40s. It only gets worse with this kind of thing. The president needs an approval rating in order to legislate things like social security reform, tax reform, all these very important agenda items of his that are dying on the vine while this controversy has everybody's attention.

Tavis: But, that said, there's no one like Karl Rove in the White House. And you know this better than I do, covering these stories everyday, by all accounts-- somebody did a documentary and called him Bush's brain. I don't want to give him that much credit, but he is an invaluable...

O'Donnell: I don't believe that. I don't believe there's a single invaluable person in the White House other than the president. That's the person who's elected; who the public thinks is invaluable to do the job. I think everyone in the White House personnel is replaceable, and administrations have proved that constantly.

Tavis: I'm playing devil's advocate here, though. It's also harder to find a closer friend than the president in the White House. Long-term friend.

O'Donnell: It doesn't matter that much. It's not a job that depends on friendship. Look, everybody said when Karen Hughes left, oh, boy, how are they going to survive with Karen Hughes gone?

Tavis: But she didn't leave under controversy. She didn't get forced out by her friend.

O'Donnell: No, but everyone thought she's irreplaceable in the White House. She was replaceable. There's no one working in the White House who isn't replaceable. The president knows that. The president is not afraid of how are we going to get through the day if Karl's not working here? The president's just afraid of how do we manage this situation in the way that works for us in the best possible way. It's really tricky, because the truth of this presidency is, they don't have much experience with scandal management. I mean, the Clinton presidency had scandal management starting in their campaign and going all the way through every year of their presidency. This White House is not good at this at all. They're not practiced at it.

Tavis: Before I let you get out of here, just in case between now and the next time I see you President Bush, as many expect, names a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor, perhaps as early as later this week, your thoughts on that appointment?

O'Donnell: Well, I think they really do now want to rush the appointment in order to have the Supreme Court vacancy reclaim the front page and try to take it away from this Rove story. I have no idea. I have no secret sources on that one. I have no idea which way he's going to go. It's the toughest decision of his presidency. He knows that. And it really is going to be a giant story when it comes out. But most confirmations, after the first two days of an announcement, become a quiet story until you have a hearing. And the newspapers need more stuff. And the Rove story is going to come right back up after about 48 hours of quiet when he names the Supreme Court justice.

Tavis: So as they say back east, this thing has legs.

O'Donnell: Oh, this has a lot. This prosecutor is on to a very serious crime. That's what all the judges have talked about. And the appeals court judges wrote very solid opinions talking about how serious the crime is that the prosecutor is after. One of the judges actually said if the violation of national security was less harmful, he would have not required the reporters to testify. So the judges examining this case have publicly declared how serious it is and just how serious a crime they firmly believe this prosecutor is chasing.

Tavis: It is serious. I'm glad to have you here, Lawrence.

O'Donnell: Thanks, Tavis.

Tavis: Good to see you. Up next on this program, actress Jane Seymour. Stay with us.