Rove Confirms Meeting, Denies "Outing" Plame

The Houston Chronicle reports that:

Karl Rove, one of President Bush's closest advisers, spoke with a Time magazine reporter days before the name of a CIA operative surfaced in the media but did not leak the information, a lawyer for Rove said Saturday in a new admission in the case.

And the Washington Times reports that Newsweek

... reported on its Web site Saturday that e-mails surrendered by Time Inc. show Rove was one of Cooper's sources. Newsweek based its report on information from lawyers for witnesses "sympathetic to the White House."

Department of Justice Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is investigating "the alleged outing of Plame by syndicated columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003." Rove has testified before the grand jury three times, most recently in October 2004. Fitzgerald's reach has been broad, including both President Bush and Vice President Cheney,

Matt Cooper, the Time reporter, and Judith Miller, of the New York Times, could be jailed on Wednesday for refusing to cooperate with the grand jury investigation. Neither journalist broke the story naming Valerie Plame as a CIA agent; that was Robert Novak, a conservative columnist. Time subsequently published a story naming Plame; theh NY Times did not. The Guardian reports that "Novak has refused to say whether he has testified or been subpoenaed."

According to Newsweek:

Novak appears to have made some kind of arrangement with the special prosecutor, and other journalists who reported on the Plame story have talked to prosecutors with the permission of their sources...

In early October 2003, NEWSWEEK reported that immediately after Novak's column appeared in July, Rove called MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews and told him that Wilson's wife was "fair game." But White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters at the time that any suggestion that Rove had played a role in outing Plame was "totally ridiculous."

Writing in Salon in October 2003, John Dean says that the Bush Administration actions trump former President Nixon:

I thought I had seen political dirty tricks as foul as they could get, but I was wrong. In blowing the cover of CIA agent Valerie Plame to take political revenge on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for telling the truth, Bush's people have out-Nixoned Nixon's people. And my former colleagues were not amateurs by any means.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court refused to hear the reporters' case. In October, a federal judge held Cooper and Miller in contempt of court for failure to cooperate with Fitzgerald. An appeals court upheld that ruling. There is no federal law protecting reporters from having to identify sources, but do exist in most state law.

Tags: Plame, Politics, Rove,

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