FILE PHOTO: Scott Pelley, anchor and managing editor CBS Evening News, speaks at the CBS Television Network's 2011 Summer Television Critics Association Press Tour in Beverly Hills, California August 3, 2011. REUTERS/Fred Prouser/File Photo
Karl Rove took delight in veteran newsman Scott Pelley's firing from CBS News' "60 Minutes" and recounted his long-standing grudge against him.
The Republican architect of George W. Bush's presidency published a column Thursday in the Wall Street Journal recalling an incident from nearly 20 years ago that earned his lasting disdain for Pelley, who was pushed out after 37 years for challenging what he described as conservative political interference by CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and her lieutenants.
"Did Mr. Pelley really think he could keep his job after telling the new leadership they were incompetent boobs with no right to tinker with the perfectly running machine he and his colleagues created and maintained?" Rove wondered.
"Mr. Pelley, like many others in the elite media, is out of touch," he added.
The veteran GOP operative recalled that in February 2008 Pelley interviewed small-town Alabama lawyer Jill Simpson, who claimed that Rove had asked her to gather evidence against the state’s then-governor Don Siegelman, and the newsman specifically asked if Rove had tasked her with taking compromising photos of the governor with one of his aides.
"This was sheer nonsense," Rove wrote. "I’d never met Ms. Simpson and never asked her or anyone else to snoop into the governor’s activities. As far as I know, Mr. Siegelman has never been credibly accused of adultery. But there was Mr. Pelley, on camera, expressing amazement at this alleged dastardly deed."
Rove remains furious about the episode, saying Pelley had no reason to ask those questions because no evidence of the scheme ever existed.
"If Mr. Pelley had undertaken due diligence and ideology or partisanship hadn’t entered into his decision-making, he would have concluded her story was suspect," Rove wrote. "But the Jill Simpson tale was just too juicy. If the details were identical except that it involved a Democratic rather than a Republican president, I can’t imagine Mr. Pelley pursuing it. If he’s honest with himself, I think he’d agree."
Rove compared that situation to former CBS News anchor Dan Rather accusing Bush of using his political connections to join the National Guard in 1973 to avoid the Vietnam War, and he eventually resigned for citing a document that turned out to be fake.
"As a target of Mr. Pelley’s slipshod journalism, I can say with certainty that at CBS News and '60 Minutes,' there’s long been a thumb on the scale for one political party — and it isn’t the Republicans," Rove concluded.