Karl Rove's Consigliere
When Karl Rove emerged after four grueling hours before a federal grand jury in Washington last Friday, his lawyer Robert Luskin made one more attempt to figure out just where his client stood. He approached special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald outside the hearing room and asked if Rove's fortunes had changed in the two-year-old inquiry of who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame. But Fitzgerald, ever tight-lipped, wasn't giving anything up. He curtly told the lawyer that "no decisions" had been made, Luskin says.
That left Luskin, the brainy battle-tested Washington litigator hired to represent the most powerful of the president's men, in a bind. All over Washington, impatient reporters were waiting to be fed. So Luskin--whose shaved head, gold earring and Ducati Monster motorcycle make him something of an odd duck among Washington's A-list attorneys--did what any savvy trial lawyer would do: he tried to spin Fitzgerald's nonanswer to Rove's advantage. In a carefully worded statement, Luskin said, "The special prosecutor has not advised Mr. Rove that he is a target of the investigation." The part he glided over: Fitzgerald hadn't ruled out indicting Rove, either.
It was Rove's fourth appearance before the grand jury, and will almost certainly be his last. The investigation expires at the end of the month, and Fitzgerald is widely expected to announce his decisions in the next two weeks. Republicans fear that Fitzgerald may end up charging a number of senior White House aides, possibly including Rove and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, with disclosing classified information or making false statements. (Rove and Libby deny any wrongdoing.)
On its Web site on Saturday, The New York Times published a long-awaited story detailing Libby's murky relationship with Judith Miller, the Times reporter who at first refused to disclose her secret source in the case, but named Libby after serving 85 days in jail for contempt of court. It was the latest twist in a story that has had more than its share of odd turns. At times, Luskin himself has seemed to add to the confusion. In July, Luskin flatly stated that Rove had not been the secret source who talked to Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. Soon after, NEWSWEEK revealed an internal Time e-mail showing that Rove was indeed Cooper's source. Luskin's response: that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" with Rove's testimony.
A Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar who vacations on Martha's Vineyard, Luskin appears the antithesis of Rove and the Bush culture. After working as a Justice Department prosecutor and (briefly) as a speechwriter for Geraldine Ferraro, he's spent much of his career as a white-collar defense lawyer specializing in high-profile political investigations. He represented several Clinton administration officials caught up in White House scandals. "He was the go-to person in the Clinton White House," says Lanny Davis, a Luskin friend and former Clinton adviser.
In 1997, Luskin ran afoul of the Feds when one of his clients, a precious-metals dealer convicted of money laundering for Colombian drug cartels, paid his fees in gold bars worth $505,000. When the Feds moved in to seize the gold, Luskin struck a deal to turn over a portion of the proceeds. He says his conduct was proper, but admits now that he should have known better. "I was completely obtuse about the optics of the situation," he says.
But when Rove went shopping for a lawyer, Ben Ginsburg, a top Republican lawyer, recommended Luskin, who is one of his partners at the powerhouse firm of Patton Boggs. At their first meeting, Luskin told Rove about his Democratic pedigree. Rove didn't seem to care. "He made it clear that the most important thing is relevant experience, not politics," Luskin says. For Rove, a man who sees everything in political terms, that may have been the ultimate compliment.
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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