Special Report Roundtable - August 28

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ROBERT NOVAK, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I do not identify my sources on any subject if they`re on a confidential basis until they identify themselves. I don`t say somebody was or wasn`t. I`m going to say one thing though, I haven`t said before, and that is I believe the time is way past for my source to identify himself.

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HUME: Bob Novak on "Meet the Press" yesterday. This after a new book released an excerpt from it appeared in "Newsweek" magazine, the book by Michael Isikoff a reporter for "Newsweek" for many years, and by David Corn, Washington editor and reporter for "The Nation" magazine and a FOX news contributor, which said that the man who originally gave Novak the name of Valerie Plame or at least the identity of Joe Wilson`s wife as a CIA operative, was none other than that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who was, like his boss Colin Powell, a doubter and critic of the administration war policy. Of course this whole episode of the leak, which Wilson himself laid at the door of Karl Rove initially and still continues to blame Rove for, and others blamed on the White House in general, turns to have first come from the State Department, which, it should be noted, did not ever tell the White House or the president that the man who leaked the name that caused the scandal that swirled around the White House for years was actually a senior official at the State Department.

Some authorities on this from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the "Weekly Standard"; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of "Roll Call", and Nina Easton, Washington bureau chief of "Fortune" magazine, FOX NEWS contributors all.

Well what to make of this new revelation? A lot of people suspected Armitage. This appears with enough detail that it`s credible to name him.

MORT KONDRACKE, "ROLL CALL": I mean, if this is all right, then this whole conspiracy theory of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney masterminding this entire plot to out Valerie Plame and reveal -- and violate the intelligence agent`s identity`s act and all this stuff, which, by the way, David Corn, who helped right this book -- David Corn of "The Nation" magazine is one of the co-authors of this, he`s the one who started this whole thing.

When this column came out, he`s the one who said, ah-ha, the Bush administration is violating this law that was designed to protect agents overseas who were being outed and then killed during the 1970s and `80s. Anyway, so it`s empty. There is a hole here, there`s nothing there, but countless people have been put through hell over this -- as a result of this. They`ve been -- Scooter Libby is under indictment. He lost his job, Cheney`s chief of staff. I don`t know, hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal expenses people have had to shell out for lawyers and the government has wasted a lot of money with the special prosecutor.

HUME: Well, what to make, though, Nina, of the special prosecutor who came to this job with the fact of Armitage having been the leaker of the Novak column already known to the Justice Department, the FBI, and therefore to him? What was he investigating?

NINA EASTON, "FORTUNE": It does raise some serious questions because this was clearly a case of -- it was not a conspiracy if we were to believe the facts, it was the case of bureaucratically defending yourself. Let`s step back a second. Armitage was very involved in that U.N. speech that Colin Powell gave a few months prior in which he stakes his reputation on the fact that Iraq had chemical weapons stockpiles, biological weapons and was looking for nuclear weapons. This was a searing moment in Colin Powell`s political career and suddenly, Armitage is forced to defend that and I think he -- and this was not -- again, as Mort points out, this was not a Rove-directed, Libby-directed conspiracy, which comes out also when - - from what we heard from them, it sounds like it was an almost beside the point, it wasn`t a directed matter, even from them.

HUME: Which is what the journalists have been kind of saying all along that it was mentioned to them or they brought it up and asked about it, but nobody made a big point of calling them up giving them the information, not even Armitage, it came up in passing which is what`s been said all along.

FRED BARNES, "WEEKLY STANDARD": So, the Bush White House, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and others were hung out to dry and the charge grew and was widely proclaimed in the press and among Democrats and among critics of the White House, that the White House had smeared an innocent man, Joe Wilson, who merely told the truth. And it turns out that was wrong from the beginning.

Obviously, there was no coordination between Richard Armitage and Karl Rove at the White House. And all Rove did was when asked about -- when told by Robert Novak that Novak had heard this, well, he`d heard it too. Mort`s right, I mean this conspiracy theory.

HUME: So what are we.

BARNES: But , you know, the only explanation for what Fitzgerald was doing is that somehow he bought the left-wing conspiracy theory, that there was this coordinated effort in the Bush administration to smear Joe Wilson, you know, because he`d written that Bush had said something untrue in his State of the Union Address.

HUME: We know also from what -- this has been reported, if it can be believed, that the counsel at the State Department thought he`d best notify the White House when this information -- when it came to light that Armitage realized he was the guy who had leaked to Novak. So, he called Gonzales and said "we`ve given information to the Justice Department on this matter" and Gonzales said, "well, good, I`m glad you did that" or words to that effect. "Do you don`t want to know what all the information is?" Gonzales said, "No."

BARNES: Well, he should have said no, I mean -- I mean, you don`t want the White House`s finger on this.

HUME: Right. So he says no. What to make then of Armitage and Powell`s silence on this, low these many years?

BARNES: Very harmful to the White House. I mean it really affected the White House certainly in the media`s mind perhaps in the public mind as well of what this White House was up to and steps they would take wrongly.

KONDRACKE: This is supposed to be team play, you`re part of this administration. There`s this huge scandal going on, your president is being shredded and nobody calls up and says -- and gives anybody the head`s up. The only thing that I can think is that they wanted to protect Armitage because they were afraid that his leak of classified information would lead to his being prosecuted.

HUME: I know, but all of that was known to the counsel. What I want to know is, Armitage is thought to be -- he`s a tough, gruff, savvy, strong physically guy, Vietnam vet, thought to be a man of honor. How does emerge from this?

KONDRACKE: Not very good. Not very good.

EASTON: I agree. I mean, I think, you know, watching him, this whole thing blow up, and again, these special prosecutors and where they take these investigations, regardless of what side of the political aisle we`re talking about is frightening. What it does to people`s personal lives.

BARNES: You know, it`s like standing by and watching innocent people get executed, not literally, when he knew better.

HUME: When we come back with our panel, one year after Hurricane Katrina, what`s the verdict on the Bush administration response? He was down there trying to get the verdict changed or perhaps updated, today. That`s next.

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GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There are still challenges. There`s still more to be done. You can see it with the temporary trailers. I feel a quiet sense of determination that`s going to shape the future of Mississippi and so I have come back on this anniversary to thank you for your courage and to let you know the federal government stands with you, still.

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HUME: Yes, to the tune of more than $11 on billion, it stands with them, a lot of that money spent, a lot of it unspent. The president`s back down there for the 13th time since Hurricane Katrina which haunts him and his administration, as what, books of many people, at least, was a tremendous failure. Panel, what about it?

KONDRACKE: Well, you know, all the attention, or almost all the press attention to this anniversary has been about the failures of the Bush administration and it`s been ceaseless, you know, and there`s been a lot of buildup to it and the a consequence to that is that president`s polls on handling Katrina is even worse now than after the immediate aftermath when he was, you know, pictured flying over the devastated area from Air Force One and not landing.

There is, however -- "Newsweek" has another great story this week and that is a perfectly devastating piece about Mayor Nagin and his failures since then to get a plan together to rebuild the city. They`ve been through one hoop after another to come up with some kind of a plan and there still isn`t one. I mean, he`s got something called the 100-Day Plan and the 100-Day Plan, most critics down there say, is in his head and it seems to consist of, every neighborhood gets to do its own thing, to decide what it wants to do on its own, because he can`t coordinate the town and get one plan for the entire city, put together. And he`s, you know, even though he got 80 percent of the African-American vote in the last election, which he was really going after, even the African-Americans don`t trust him because they think he is going to sell him to the white interests downtown. So things are really miserable down there.

EASTON: The think is there`s on the ground reality and there`s political reality. And yes, the on the ground reality is there is lots of blame to go around at the local Democratic level, whether it`s failing to evacuate people, they can`t get their act together to put a plan together, you got these neighborhoods fighting to -- about how to rebuild. But the political reality is real. It really did hurt this administration, it opened a window on what people had -- enough people had suspected were failings of this administration to take hold, whether it was appointing people that looked like they were, you know, more like loyalists than competent and so forth.

But, I think that the problem is now is that the White House is engaged in damage control that looks like damage control. You go back to that -- the speech back September 15 where we was going to the -- the president was going to do this big huge conservative showcase on how to solve poverty. Well, we didn`t hear much about that afterwards. A lot of the stuff didn`t go forward.

HUME: Just looks like (INAUDIBLE) just moving all the poor people to Texas.

EASTON: Right.

BARNES: Look, the White House -- President Bush would have, knowing what he knows well, would have handled things differently. His plain, you know, when he -- when Air Force One flew over the day after the levee broke, he would have landed. He didn`t land because the airport had one runway opened and he`d have to be choppered into downtown, of course, in New Orleans, the airport`s about 10 miles away, and all the coppers were being used for rescues. I mean, he wouldn`t have been so nice to Nagin and the governor who balked at a mandatory evacuation. The president would have -- they would have insisted on that, and you know, the governor also.

HUME: OK.

BARNES: .balked about getting U.S. troops in there because she had to ask for them, that`s the only way they could come. It took her days to do that. The president was, in fact, too nice to Nagin and the governor.