This morning on ABC, George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) about the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement (a.k.a. SF 312), which was signed by Karl Rove and every other member of the administration with a security clearance. McCain argued that Rove may not have violated the agreement because when he leaked Valerie Plame’s identity it could have been an “honest mistake”:

STEPHANOPOULOS: …Do you believe that this [Classified Information Nondisclosure] agreement should be abided by?

MCCAIN: I do, but that also implies that someone knowingly revealed…

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: No, this covers negligent disclosures.

MCCAIN: Again, I don’t know what the definition of negligent — if you make an honest mistake, that’s one thing, if you do something without knowledge that you’re violating or being negligent, et cetera.

Actually, the nondisclosure agreement makes no exceptions for “honest mistakes.” Rather, Karl Rove had an affirmative obligation to find out whether Plame’s identity was classified or not. From the agreement Rove signed:

I understand that if I am uncertain about the classification status of information, I am required to confirm from an authorized official that the information is unclassified before I may disclose it…

Rove is required to abide by this provision whether learned Plame’s identity from a secret government document or a journalist.

(Crooks and Liars has the video)

Writing in the New York Times, Frank Rich highlights a troubling issue that arose from early on in the leak investigation:

As White House counsel, [Alberto Gonzales] was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson’s wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must “preserve all materials” relevant to the investigation.

On CBS’s Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer noted that this time gap would have “give[n] people time to shred documents and do any number of things.” Gonzales argued that he asked for and received permission from the Justice Department to wait until the next morning to order White House staff to preserve all documents regarding their contacts with journalists about Valerie Plame. But he did tell one person the night before

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you the obvious question, Mr. Attorney General. Did you tell anybody at the White House, get ready for this, here it comes?

GONZALES: I, I told one person, ah, in, in the White House of, of the notification, and, and —

SCHIEFFER: Who?

GONZALES: and immediately — ah, I told the chief of staff. And immediately the next morning, I told the President and, shortly thereafter, there was a notification sent out to all the members of the White House staff.

Check out the video of this at Crooks and Liars.

So the one person who knew that an investigation was underway was Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who also happened to be aboard Air Force One in July 2003 with Ari Fleischer, Colin Powell, and the top secret State Department document that contained the identity of Valerie Wilson. So, did Card tell Rove or Libby or anyone for that matter the night before Alberto Gonzales sent out the email to staff that they would soon be asked to preserve all documents?

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