Security risk in the White House?

Gene Lyons in the 1990s became very familiar with the Whitewater scandal through his reporting.  Through his familiarity with Arkansas politics, he was one of the first reporters to become aware of how badly mainstream media giants like the New York Times were being scammed by some of the sleaziest operators in the state.  He has a good sense for how to tell a real scandal from a pseudo-scandal.

In Too clever by half Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 11/02/05, Lyons takes a look at Scooter's legal problems.

Opening with a caustic comment about Scooter's novel The Apprentice (1996), Lyons observes:

Libby's present dilemma is less subjective. It should be obvious to anybody who’s seen three episodes of "Law & Order." Basically, Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's got him by the - well, Scooter's in an extremely vulnerable position, and the prosecutor's squeezing him. Either he rolls over and tells the unvarnished truth about the White House scheme to leak the covert identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame or he's looking at serious time in a federal penitentiary.

Commenting on the Bushistas desperate line that Fitzgerald didn't find that anyone had outed a covert agent, Lyons quotes Fitzgerald's baseball metaphor about throwing sand in the eyes of the umpire.  Using former Nixon speechwriter who became a pundit and Republican flak for the New York Times as an example of someone pushing this silly line, he writes:

Safire’s anything but dumb. He and other pundits mouthing the same line are merely hoping you are. In reality, the Libby indictment alleges anything but a technical offense. ...

He didn’t need to add that Libby was lying for a reason. Without saying so, the indictment spells out in far more detail than is really necessary the broad outlines of what a White House conspiracy to punish Plame’s husband, Iraq war critic Joe Wilson, by revealing her secret identity might look like if Libby would tell all.

A lot of people have noticed that Libby's claim to have heard of Valerie Plame's identity from reporters had so many potentials ways it could fall apart that it's hard to imagine why an experiencede operatorlike Scooter would have tried it.  Lyons advises us to "remember, these are the same geniuses who believed their own propaganda about a cakewalk into Iraq."

Finally, one of the biggest questions right now is whether Libby and his former colleagues in inciting a war based on lies and forged documents can risk a public trial.  Lyons take on it at this point is:

The White House simply cannot afford to let Libby go on trial. Nor could Bush get away with pardoning him before the 2006 congressional elections at the very earliest. So look for Libby’s lawyers to employ every imaginable stalling tactic to postpone his day of reckoning as long as possible. Or he might roll over. Much tougher guys have flipped. As for Karl Rove, identified as the so far unindicted “Official A,” who also spoke to the media about Plame, here’s the question : Did Rove lie if he told Bush he had nothing to do with it, or was Bush deceiving the American people when he denied knowing the guilty party ? Either way, why is Rove still working at the White House?

The latter question would be about much more than politics if the Bush Republican Party didn't have such an authoritarian outlook that Party considerations dominate all others.  We know know, and Bush has known for at least a couple of years, that Rove committed a very serious security breach, amounting to what most people - including Old Man Bush, at least in his much-quoted remark about those who expose undercover CIA agents' identities - would view as an act of treason.

At the most benign, Rove was guilty of a "loose lips sink ships" kind of failing.  Yet he is still working in the White House as one of the most senior government officials.  And he is presumably operating with a high security clearance.  Isn't there some procedure independent of the president's whims for reviewing the security clearances of someone known have been involved in something like this?  The standard for granting security clearances is definitely not the same as the proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard required for a criminal conviction.