'Newsweek' Says It Has First Word on What Karl Rove Told Matt Cooper

By E&P Staff

Published: July 10, 2005 5:30 PM ET

NEW YORKThe first break in the case of what Karl Rove actually told Time magazine's Matt Cooper two years ago about Valerie Plame, if anything, appeared Sunday with a report in Newsweek by Michael Isikoff. He revealed the contents of an e-mail from Cooper to his bureau chief Michael Duffy on the morning of July 11, 2003, three days before columnist Robert Novak infamously outed Plame, the CIA operative.

"Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ...." Cooper typed. According to Isikoff, the e-mail describes Cooper's brief conversation with Rove, in which the reporter asked what to make of the controversy over former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's criticisms in an op ed piece about the Bush administration overstating the Saddam-nuclear link. (The e-mail was "authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story," Isikoff writes.)

Cooper wrote, according to Newsweek, that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson," whose trip to Africa to study the nuclear link was at the center of the dispute. Rove told Cooper that, surprisingly, it was "wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife, of course, is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA. Rove in the e-mail then went on to call Wilson's trip to Africa and his report flawed.

But Isikoff adds: "Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's [actual] name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. [Speical Prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well."

A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified, told Isikoff that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case.

Rove's words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen, Isikoff notes. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak.

Time magazine, meanwhile, on its Web site Sunday, wrote: "And who was Cooper's source? A number of news organizations named Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political adviser. Time's editors have decided not to reveal the source at this time."




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E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)

Bush aide Rove was Time reporter's source-Newsweek

(via Reuters)

Top White House advisor Karl Rove was one of the secret sources that spoke to reporters about a covert CIA operative whose identity was leaked to the media, Newsweek magazine reported in its latest edition.

The magazine said Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed that Rove talked to Time magazine about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Luskin said Rove recently gave Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper permission to testify about the conversation to a grand jury investigating the leak in 2003, according to Newsweek.

A U.S. federal judge ordered Cooper, along with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, to testify and reveal their confidential sources.

Last week Cooper avoided a jail sentence for contempt of court by agreeing to testify in the case. Miller refused to testify and was jailed.

The case has become an important test involving freedom of the press and has pitting the media's traditional use of anonymous sources against the efforts of a federal government prosecutor to investigate a possible crime.

It is illegal to knowingly reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent.

Although Rove has made statements about the Plame leak, he has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about the CIA agent.

Rove has carefully chosen his words when questioned about the leak. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," he told CNN last year when asked if he had had anything to do with it.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been leading a two year investigation into the leak amid questions about whether it came from White House as part of an attempt to discredit Wilson after he contradicted President Bush's assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Wilson wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times saying he had been sent by the CIA in 2002 to investigate the Bush administration's claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa -- a claim that the administration used to justify going to war in Iraq. Wilson said he found no evidence to support the claim.

The Newsweek article said an e-mail Cooper sent his bureau chief after briefly talking with Rove stated that "it was, KR said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd (weapons of mass destruction) issues who authorized the trip."

The e-mail did not suggest that Rove used Plame's name or that he knew she was a covert agent, the article said.

"Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told Newsweek

Matt Cooper's Source

What Karl Rove told Time magazine's reporter

By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek


July 18 issue - 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.

Last week, after Time turned over that e-mail, among other notes and e-mails, Cooper agreed to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case. Explaining that he had obtained last-minute "personal consent" from his source, Cooper was able to avoid a jail sentence for contempt of court. Another reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, refused to identify her source and chose to go to jail instead.

For two years, a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating the leak of Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent. The leak was first reported by columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak apparently made some arrangement with the prosecutor, but Fitzgerald continued to press other reporters for their sources, possibly to show a pattern (to prove intent) or to make a perjury case. (It is illegal to knowingly identify an undercover CIA officer.) Rove's words on the Plame case have always been carefully chosen. "I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name," Rove told CNN last year when asked if he had anything to do with the Plame leak. Rove has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. But last week, his lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Rove did—and that Rove was the secret source who, at the request of both Cooper's lawyer and the prosecutor, gave Cooper permission to testify.

The controversy arose when Wilson wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times saying that he had been sent by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate charges that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson said he had found no evidence to support the claim. Wilson's column was an early attack on the evidence used by the Bush administration to justify going to war in Iraq. The White House wished to discredit Wilson and his attacks. The question for the prosecutor is whether someone in the administration, in an effort to undermine Wilson's credibility, intentionally revealed the covert identity of his wife.


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... "

Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.

A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false," the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.

Fitzgerald is known as a tenacious, thorough prosecutor. He refused to comment, and it is not clear whether he is pursuing evidence that will result in indictments, or just tying up loose ends in a messy case. But the Cooper e-mail offers one new clue to the mystery of what Fitzgerald is probing—and provides a glimpse of what was unfolding at the highest levels as the administration defended a part of its case for going to war in Iraq.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Karl Rove and the Valerie Plame Leak

Newsweek's latest weekly feature of the Karl Rove and Valerie Plame story is up. This time it’s a bit more interesting than last week's breathless Larry O'Donnell promise of the "It's Rove" revelation.

Newsweek reports that Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper sent an e-mail at 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003 to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy.
Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential)
"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 [R]ove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA.
Cooper is free from jail as he turned over this e-mail [and others] and has agreed to testify in the Valerie Plame case and disclose his source to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Cooper's source gave him permission to testify.

So is Rove ready to be "frog marched" out of the White House as Bush-hater and Valerie Plame's hubby Joe Wilson has fantasized about?
David Corn warns the Bush haters to be cautious:

To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it's only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I'm told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove -- despite his lawyers claim that Rove "did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA" -- did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson's wife was in the CIA.

Timeline

Valerie Plame's name first appeared in a July 14, 2003, syndicated column by Robert Novak. But that column was written before July 11th, and was distributed by Creators Syndicate over the Associated Press wire on July 11th. [It appears that Rove spoke to Cooper sometime in the morning on July 11th.] The column is also e-mailed to those publications that syndicate the column.

Novak was chasing the story as early as July 7 according to the transcript of "CNN WOLF BLITZER REPORTS"

ROBERT NOVAK, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": Former Ambassador Wilson broke the secrecy that a retired diplomat, unknown, had gone to Niger in the year 2002 to investigate whether the Iraqis tried to buy yellow cake, uranium from Niger.

BLITZER: You mean when he wrote that op-ed page article in "The New York Times"?

NOVAK: "New York Times." That was on a Sunday morning.

On Monday, [July 7] I began to report on something that I thought was very curious. Why was it that Ambassador Wilson, who had no particular experience in weapons of mass destruction, and was a sharp critic of the Iraqi policy of President Bush and, also, had been a high-ranking official in the Clinton White House, who had contributed politically to Democrats -- some Republicans, but mostly Democrats -- why was he being selected?

I asked this question to a senior Bush administration official, and he said that he believed that the assignment was suggested by an employee at the CIA in the Counterproliferation Office who happened to be ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.

I then called another senior official of the Bush administration, and he said, Oh, you know about that? And he confirmed that that was an accurate story. I then called the CIA. They said that, to their knowledge, he did not -- that the mission was not suggested by Ambassador Wilson's wife, but that she had been asked by her colleagues in the Counterproliferation Office, to contact her husband. So she was involved.

BLITZER: Because he was a former ambassador in Gabon, he knew that part of Africa, and that's, presumably, why they wanted to send him on this mission.

NOVAK: I'm not going into motives. I thought it was strange because he is not an expert in counterproliferation. He had not been ambassador to Niger, he had served in Niger at one time.
BLITZER: But he was a senior on African affairs at the NFC under Clinton?
NOVAK: Under Clinton, that's correct.

So that was the story I wrote, was about the details of Ambassador Wilson's mission, which created a great storm. And in the sixth paragraph of a ten-paragraph story I mentioned that two senior administration officials had said it was suggested by his wife, who worked at the CIA.

Intelligence Identities Protection Act

Also take note: To constitute a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that "the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States.

Karl Rove may not be in legal trouble, but there's no question this will get very interesting soon.
--By CK Rairden

Fearing court sanctions, Ohio paper holds 2 stories based on leaks

July 10, 2005/Chigaco Sun Times






CLEVELAND -- The Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, is withholding two investigative stories based on leaked documents because they could result in the type of court showdown that led to a New York Times reporter being jailed.

The Plain Dealer is trying to find a way to publish the stories without relying on the documents, editor Doug Clifton said Friday.

''It was documentation that would have been illegal to share, so there wasn't any ambiguity about what we had,'' Clifton said.

Clifton said he had never before withheld a story because of such concerns.

''The climate has always been different,'' Clifton said. ''Let's face it: During the Watergate years with Deep Throat, it was never even thought of. It wasn't even a remote possibility that someone was going to get subpoenaed because of Deep Throat squealing. That has changed so dramatically in the last few years.''

The stories dealt with local and state government. Clifton told the New York Times in Saturday's edition that ''the material was under seal or something along those lines.''

Says public could lose out



Wednesday, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to divulge a confidential source to a grand jury investigating the leak of an undercover CIA operative's name. Another reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, agreed to talk and avoided jail. CIA agent Valerie Plame's name was disclosed by Chicago Sun-Times syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

Clifton said the Plain Dealer had decided several weeks ago -- before Miller was sent to jail -- to withhold the stories because the leaked documents could result in subpoenas and court sanctions, including jail.

He wrote a column June 30 explaining to readers why it's important to protect sources and how the public would suffer if reporters' ability to gather news is compromised. He mentioned the potential consequences if the newspaper published the two investigative stories.

''I wanted the public to understand that this isn't an abstraction, that this is a real issue,'' he said Friday. ''Things that are important for the public stand in jeopardy of not getting reported because of the state of the law.''

The Plain Dealer, owned by Advance Publications Inc., has a circulation of about 370,000 weekdays and 480,000 on Sundays.

Focus renewed on role of Rove in CIA leak

By Dan Balz

WASHINGTON POST


WASHINGTON - The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller on Wednesday put the issue of press freedom and the confidentiality of sources on front pages across the country, but the heart of the case remains what it has been from the outset: whether senior Bush officials broke the law in the disclosure of a CIA covert operative's identity.

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has spent the better part of two years trying to answer that question, in a case that grew out of the angry debate over whether President Bush and his advisers hyped or falsified intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify going to war with Iraq in spring 2003. At issue is whether administration officials misused classified information to try to discredit one of their potentially most damaging critics.

Now, a fast-moving series of decisions over the past week involving Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper has brought a renewed public focus on what role White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove might have played in disclosing the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

A White House spokesman long ago asserted Rove was "not involved" in disclosing Plame's identity. Rove, who has testified before a grand jury investigating the case, likewise has maintained he did not break the law, saying in a television interview, "I didn't know her name and I didn't leak her name."

But Fitzgerald still appears to want more answers about Rove's role. The prosecutor is apparently focused on Rove's conversations with Cooper.

The debate two summers ago over why the United States went to war engaged some of the most senior officials in the government and included an incendiary accusation by former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, who had challenged the administration over claims that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Africa. Wilson based his claim on information gathered on a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger.

At the height of the fury over Wilson's charges, in a column published July 14, 2003, Robert Novak wrote that Wilson was married to Plame, and cited two senior administration officials saying she was behind the decision to send her husband on the trip. The outcry over the revelation eventually forced the administration to turn to Fitzgerald to investigate, with Bush saying he was eager to get to the bottom of the case. The president and a number of top administration officials have been called to testify.

After Time turned over its documents late last week, Newsweek reported that e-mail records showed Rove was one of the sources for Cooper on Plame and Wilson. That story led Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, to say in an interview last weekend that his client had spoken to Cooper around the time Novak's column appeared in July 2003. But he added that Rove had testified fully in the case and had been assured by Fitzgerald that he is not a target in the investigation.

More evidence points to Rove as the source Cooper was seeking to protect -- although what information was provided is not clear. Rove and Cooper spoke once before the Novak column was available, but the interview did not involve the Iraq controversy, according to a person close to the investigation.

Cooper on Wednesday agreed to testify in the case, reversing his long-standing refusal after saying he had been released from his pledge of confidentiality just hours before he expected to be sent to jail for contempt of court. In an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday, Luskin denied Cooper had received a call from Rove releasing him from his confidentiality pledge. Thursday, however, Luskin declined to comment on a New York Times report that the release came as a result of negotiations involving Rove's and Cooper's attorneys, nor would he engage speculation that Cooper was released from his pledge in some other fashion than a direct conversation with Rove. "I'm not going to comment any further," Luskin said.