With everything coming out today about Karl Rove, it's worth stepping to bring a few things into focus. It's been pretty clear since fall of 2003 that Karl Rove did this. It's been a near certainty since then that if it wasn't Rove than


it was someone in a very similar position. After all, Bob Novak said in his now-notorious column that "senior administration officials" had told him about her.

We don't know that the president knew about the decision to use Plame's work at CIA against Wilson in advance, though given the high-level working group assembled at the White House to go to war with Wilson, it's reasonable to suspect that he did. But at a minimum the president has known about this as long as the rest of us -- that is, almost exactly two years.

And he -- unlike anyone else in the country -- had the power to call Rove into his office and ask him whether he did this or knew who did?

Whether he knew before or after, he's known for a very long time. And pretty clearly he didn't want Rove held to any account. Indeed, he's gone to great lengths to prevent this from happening. And of course few reporters in DC have cared to press this essential point.

--Josh Marshall