Pearlstine: Rove Never 'Merited' Confidential Source Status In Plame Case

By: Mark Fitzgerald Norman Pearlstine, who was editor in chief of Time Inc. when Time magazine writer Matt Cooper faced jail time in the Valerie Plame case, told a Medill School of Journalism audience Tuesday evening that he doesn't think White House advisor Karl Rove really deserved his status as a "confidential source" of Cooper's.

"Outing Valerie Plame, exposing a valuable (CIA) agent for no particular reason, didn't, in my mind, merit protecting confidentiality," Pearlstine said.

Pearlstine revisited the tangled case of Plame's outing -- and its repercussions for journalists -- in an hour-long lecture at Northwestern University. His book on the subject, "Off The Record: The Press, The Government, And The War Over Anonymous Sources," was recently published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

For all the aggravation that Patrick Fitzgerald caused him and Time Inc., Pearlstine said he came away with enormous respect for the special prosecutor. "When I consider all the things that happened when Alberto Gonzales was attorney general -- I really considered him an outpost of sanity," Pearlstine said.

In fact, he said, he sent Fitzgerald a copy of his book with the inscription: "I couldn't have written this without you."

He told the audience that when the controversy first arose -- when a furor erupted over the disclosure that Plame was a covert agent and the suggestion was made she had somehow arranged to have her husband Joseph Wilson sent to Niger where he discredited a White House suggestion Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear-grade uranium in Africa -- that he "didn't pay as much attention to it" as he should have.

At the same time, he said, he thought that the landmark press-rights cases from the 1970s, the Pentagon Papers Supreme Court decision and the various Watergate rulings, would protect Cooper and other journalists who were subpoenaed by "Plamegate" special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

That, alas, was not the case, Pearlstine said. Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg never considered himself a "confidential source," figuring the FBI and CIA knew very well he had given the documents to newspapers. And in the Watergate criminal cases, neither the judge nor prosecutors sought the sources of the many leaks to journalists.

Pearlstine was criticized mightily in some quarters because Cooper ultimately cooperated with prosecutors. But the many details of the case put Time in a difficult position, he argued. For one thing, Cooper had disclosed the fact that Rove was his source in two e-mails -- which could easily have opened up many more Time Inc. employees to questioning by the Plamegate grand jury, he noted.

"What people should know is the 'e' in e-mail should stand for evidence," Pearlstine said. If reporters are going to share their sources with editors -- and they should, he said -- the disclosure should be made orally.

Pearlstine's experience in Plamegate got him thinking about the many distinctions between the often-blurred terms of "off the record," "on background," and "not for attribution."

Journalists should distinguish between anonymous sources -- people who will be protected only to a certain legal point -- and confidential sources, those journalists will be willing to go to jail to protect.

In his book, he notes that a 500-word report in People magazine on some friction between pop star Brittney Spears and her then-husband included 15 assertions or quotations ascribed to anonymous sources. "If a publicist tells you, 'Brittney's having a bad hair day,' I don't think that' something you're going to go to jail for," Pearlstine said.