Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean is telling reporters that there's no doubt top White House aide Karl Rove is guilty in the Valerie Plame Leakgate case.
Three years ago, however, Dean urged caution when it came to assessing the guilt of Osama bin Laden, whose role in the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, should not be prejudged.
"There's no question that Rove was the one that leaked the information about the CIA agent's name," Dean told MSNBC's Nora O'Donnell on Friday.
But when it came to the Al Qaida terror chief, Dean insisted that bin Laden was innocent until proven guilty.
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"I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials," he told the Concord Monitor in Dec. 2003.
The guiltier-than-bin Laden Rove, said Dean, is "a big liability for the administration," since he "continually reminds the American people that the president wasn't truthful about firing leakers, in addition to not being truthful about a number of other things."
He pledged that if Democrats win back Congress in November, they'll launch a new round of investigations into supposed White House corruption.
"No doubt there will be investigations because there's been so much corruption in the White House and the vice president's office, even the Republican Senate president is under investigation for insider trading."
Asked whether Democrats would try to impeach President Bush, Dean told O'Donnell: "It's possible."