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

By: E&P Staff The 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. The Washington Post and The New York Times also filed major stories on the Rove link on Monday.

Isikoff 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.

The Washington Post reports Monday, in covering this latest news, that "Rove's conversation with Cooper could be significant because it indicates a White House official was discussing Plame prior to her being publicly named and could lead to evidence of how Novak learned her name.

"While the information is revelatory, it is still unknown whether Rove is a focus of the investigation. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, has said that Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has told him that Rove is not a target of the probe. Luskin said yesterday that Rove did not know Plame's name and was not actively trying to push the information into the public realm."

Here's the assessment of Adam Liptak of The New York Times' on Monday: "While Mr. Rove did identify the operative in a conversation with Mr. Cooper, Mr. Rove did not use her name - Valerie Plame, as she has been called in news accounts, or Valerie Wilson, as she prefers - or refer to her covert status....Lawyers involved in the negotiations did not dispute the accuracy of the document Newsweek cited.

"The information may bear on whether Mr. Rove violated the 1982 law forbidding the knowing identification of covert agents - the basis of Mr. Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation.

"'A fair reading of the e-mail as well as the context in which the conversation took place makes it clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity,' Mr. Luskin said."

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."