[Mb-civic] An Unlikely Story

[Linda Hassler]

 An Unlikely Story
    By Murray Waas
      The American Prospect

      Tuesday 19 July 2005

Karl Rove's alibi would be easier to believe if he hadn't hidden it 
from FBI investigators in 2003.

      White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that 
he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine 
reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove's first interview with the FBI, 
according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

      The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, 
almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked 
Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was 
withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading 
or lying to them, the sources said.

      Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove's accounts was the 
claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a 
journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, 
the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at 
all where he first heard the information.

      Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has said that Rove never knew that 
Plame was a covert officer when he discussed her CIA employment with 
reporters, and that he only first learned of her clandestine status 
when he read about it in the newspaper. Luskin did not return a 
telephone call today seeking comment for this story.

      If recently disclosed press accounts of conversations that Rove 
had with reporters are correct, Novak and Rove first spoke about Plame 
on July 8, 2003. It was three days later, on July 11, that Rove also 
spoke about Plame to Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper. Three 
days after that, on July 14, Novak's column appeared in which he 
identified Plame as an "agency operative." According to Novak's 
account, it was he, not Rove, who first broached the issue of Plame's 
employment with the CIA, and that Rove at most simply said that he, 
too, had heard much the same information.

      Novak's column came during a period of time when senior White 
House officials were attempting to discredit Plame's husband, former 
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was then asserting that the Bush 
administration had relied on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to 
go to war with Iraq. Wilson had only recently led a CIA-sponsored 
mission to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was covertly 
attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a 
nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back that the claims were most likely 
the result of a hoax. But President Bush had still cited them during a 
State of the Union address as evidence that Hussein had an aggressive 
program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

      In the column, Novak called Plame an "agency operative," thus 
identifying her as a covert CIA agent. But Novak has since claimed that 
his use of the phrase "agency operative" was a formulation of his own, 
and that he did not know, or mean to tell his readers, that she had a 
covert status with the agency.

      Rove, too, has told federal investigators he did not know that 
Plame had a covert status with the CIA when he spoke with Novak, and 
Cooper, about Plame.

      The distinction as to whether Rove specifically knew Plame's 
status has been central to the investigation of U.S. Attorney Patrick 
Fitzgerald; under the law, a government official can only be prosecuted 
if he or she knew of a person's covert status and "that the information 
disclosed so identifies such covert agent."

      But investigators were also skeptical of Novak's claim that his 
use of the term "operative" was a journalistic miscue because it 
appeared to provide legal protection for whoever his source or sources 
were. And although Novak's and Rove's accounts of their conversations 
regarding Plame were largely consistent, they appeared to be 
self-serving.

      It has been, in large part, for all of these reasons that 
Fitzgerald so zealously sought the testimony of reporters Cooper and 
Judith Miller of The New York Times, according to sources sympathetic 
to Fitzgerald. Cooper testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury last week, 
after earlier having been found in civil contempt for refusing to do 
so. In contrast, Miller has refused to testify, and is currently 
serving a sentence in an Alexandria, Virginia, jail.

      Finally, also driving Fitzgerald's investigation has been Rove's 
assertions that he only found out about Plame's status with the CIA 
from a journalist -- and one whose name he does not recall. But as The 
New York Times first disclosed on July 16, senior Bush administration 
officials first learned that Plame worked for the CIA from a classified 
briefing paper on July 7, 2003, exactly a week before Novak's column 
naming Plame appeared and at the time that senior Bush administration 
officials were devising a strategy to discredit Wilson.

      The classified memorandum, dated June 10, 2003, was written by 
Marc Grossman, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs, 
and reportedly made claims similar to those made by Wilson: that the 
Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to exaggerate the 
threat posed by Hussein to make the case to go to war with Iraq. The 
report was circulated to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and a 
slew of other senior administration officials who were then traveling 
with President Bush to Africa.

      Fitzgerald has focused on whether Rove might have learned of 
Plame's identity from one of the many senior White House officials who 
read the memo, according to the Times account and attorneys whose 
clients have testified before the federal grand jury.

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      Murray Waas is an investigative reporter. He will be reporting 
further about the Plame grand jury on his blog, Whatever Already.

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