Good grief. Why do the big blog stories always break when I’m busy being a dad and a husband? I step away from the computer to go to a Rainbow Families picnic with the hubby and kid, and all hell breaks lose on the blogs. Now it’s everywhere, but just in case you haven’t read it in half a dozen places already, here goes.
Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source on Valerie Plame.
It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation …" Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don’t source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.
…In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson’s criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time’s editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine’s corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson’s trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson’s wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger … "
Or, as David Corn put it:
Reporter Michael Isikoff has obtained a copy of an email that Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper sent his bureau chief, Michael Duffy, on July 11, 2003–three days before conservative columnist Bob Novak first published the leak that outed CIA officer Valerie Wilson/Plame. In that email, Cooper wrote that he had spoken to Rove on "double super secret background" and that Rove had told him that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s "wife…apparently works at the agency on wmd issues." … There now is clear-cut evidence that Rove was involved in–if not the chief architect of–the actions that led to the outing of Plame/Wilson. If he’s not in severe legal trouble, he ought to be in political peril.
But apparently that’s not all. John, at AmericaBlog has some very good questions, about just how Rove couched his statements related to Plame — and whether there’s just enough wiggle room for him to get off the hook legally — and just who told Rove of Plame’s identity. There may well be a second source out there.
TalkLeft has a pretty good chronology of reporting on the case, including a suggestion that Rove may be the second source, with the suggestion that Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis Libby may have been the first source.
Either way, it implicates Rove in something pretty serious: making the identity of a CIA counter-proliferation WMD operative in the war on terror known to the enemy. And it’s my understanding that Plame and Rove go to the same church. Nice.
Here’s what I’m wondering about. Who is the source that Judy Miller is going to jail to protect? Both Cooper’s and Miller’s sources gave the reporters permission to speak up and identify them, with Cooper taking the opportunity and Miller believing that her source was coerced into giving that consent.
Could Rove have been the source for both? If so was Miller’s decision to go to jail rather than reveal her source motivated by loyalty to the administration, cloaked as a principled stand for freedom of the press. And if Rove wasn’t the source for both, could Libby have been Miller’s source? Could the coersion that Miller suspected her source was under have been coming from the White House?
I don’t pretend to have studied this case in depth, but it’s clear that even those who have done so are finding plenty of things to question here. We’ll have to wait for furher revelations I guess. But for now, there are a few drops of blood in the water.
