… In his fat and highly skewed new memoir out today, Karl Rove portrays himself as an improbable Jean Valjean—an innocent man who, like the persecuted hero of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables , is relentlessly hounded by an obsessed lawman determined to put him behind bars. As the former White House senior adviser tells it in Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight , he was forced to drain his personal savings and watch his family subjected to “countless hours of abuse and fear”—all because special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was supposedly seeking any way possible to indict him for lying about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Rove maintained a brave public face throughout. But behind the scenes, “the whole thing was scaring the hell out of me,” he writes. And it turns out that he was far closer to getting indicted than most people knew. After Rove’s fourth grand-jury appearance in October 2005, Fitzgerald phoned Rove’s lawyer, Bob Luskin, and told him: “All things being equal, we are inclined to indict your client.” Luskin ultimately talked Fitzgerald out of it during a marathon session at the special counsel’s Chicago office on Oct. 20.
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Karl Rove as Jean Valjean: An Upside-Down Look at the Plame Affair
