Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Isikoff

A sentence like this is journalism in the key of legal self-protection: everything is routed through a spokesman, every verb is padded with deniability, every claim is framed as someone else's. "Mr. Luskin also says" matters as much as the substance. Isikoff is staging a procedural drama where the primary actor is not Karl Rove but Robert Luskin, his lawyer, whose job is to turn a potential scandal into a series of carefully qualified non-events.

The phrase "did not knowingly disclose classified information" is a masterclass in intent laundering. "Knowingly" is the hinge: it concedes the possibility of disclosure while insulating the motive. It's less a defense of facts than a defense of mens rea, the mental state prosecutors need. The second clause tightens the bolt: Rove "did not tell any reporters that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A". Not "did not discuss Plame", not "did not contribute to the outing", but a narrow, quote-friendly denial about a specific proposition. It anticipates the way scandals are litigated in public: by slicing the narrative into technically refutable statements.

Context does the rest. In the Plame affair, the question wasn't only whether classified information moved from government to press, but whether it was moved as punishment and intimidation after Joseph Wilson challenged the Iraq war case. Isikoff's choice to foreground Luskin's phrasing shows how political accountability gets rerouted into semantics. The subtext: in Washington, truth often isn't argued; it's scoped.