Rove Told Bush He Did Not Leak to Reporters in Plame Case

By: E&P Staff The plot continued to thicken this afternoon in the Plamegate scandal, as veteran investigative reporter Murray Waas wrote in the National Journal online that Karl Rove had ?personally assured President Bush in the early fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a CIA employee, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the accounts that both Rove and Bush independently provided to federal prosecutors.?

Waas, who has been researching and writing about the Plame case for months, continued: ?During the same conversation in the White House two years ago--occurring just days after the Justice Department launched a criminal probe into the unmasking of Plame as a covert agency operative--Rove also assured the president that he had not leaked any information to the media in an effort to discredit Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. Rove also did not tell the president about his July 2003 a phone call with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, a conversation that touched on the issue of Wilson and Plame.?

According to Waas, Rove also did not disclose the Cooper chat to FBI agents in his first interview with. He subsequently changed his account.

?Sources close to the leak investigation being run by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald say it was the discovery of one of Rove's White House e-mails--in which the senior Bush adviser referred to his July 2003 conversation with Cooper--that prompted Rove to contact prosecutors and to revise his account to include the Cooper conversation,? Waas writes.