A little backgroung info. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me knows if this is a "partisan" website.
en.wikipedia.org
On 29 August 2003, retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson alleged that Rove leaked the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. Wilson, who in February 2002 investigated claims of attempted uranium ore purchases by Iraq from Niger, wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times, published 6 July 2003,[7] which suggested that the U.S. government and President Bush made false allegations of completed uranium sales to justify war against Iraq.
Eight days after Wilson published his article, commentator Robert Novak identified Plame as Wilson's wife in his syndicated column, writing that "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."[8]
Me confused - why are they going after Time journalists when its Novak that published the illegal-to-publish information?
Novak suggested that it was Plame's position with the CIA which prompted Wilson's investigation, and that the choice to use Wilson "was made routinely at a low level without [CIA] Director George Tenet's knowledge." Novak questioned the accuracy of Wilson's findings, and despite Wilson's assertion that his findings were circulated both within the CIA and beyond the agency, questioned whether Wilson's report was important enough for Tenet even to read it. (In his New York Times editorial on July 14, 2003, Wilson suggested that his African diplomatic experience — he is the former ambassador to Gabon and was once posted in the 1970s to Niamey, Niger's capital — led to his selection for the mission. Wilson, who did not hide the fact that the CIA had sponsored his trip, wrote that he had been "informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report" relating to the sale of yellowcake from Niger. Nearly a year after his editorial was published, The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Committee's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, reported on 12 July 2004 that Plame "offered up [Wilson's] name" for the trip. See also Yellowcake Forgery.)
The White House denied any involvement in the leak of Plame's name, which Wilson claims ruined her career, and which arguably endangered or ruined the viability of many other CIA agents who worked abroad like Plame under nonoffical cover (as "NOCs"), passing as private citizens. Plame was identified as an NOC by New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller on 5 October 2003. Articles in the The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications have pointed to Plame's association with Brewster Jennings & Associates, a CIA front (now defunct) working with Saudi and other oil interests. Under certain circumstances, disclosure of the identity of a covert agent is illegal under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, though the language of the statute raises the issue of whether Rove is within the class of persons to whom the statute applies.[9]
Days after Novak's initial column appeared, several other journalists, notably Matt Cooper of Time Magazine, published Plame's name, citing unnamed government officials as sources. Two Newsday reporters who confirmed and expanded upon Novak's account, Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce, were also mentioned in October 2003 in connection to an ongoing judicial inquiry.[10]
Oh. I see.
Early on, Rove was identified by the New York Times in connection to the Plame leak on 2 October 2003, in an article highlighting Attorney General John Ashcroft's employment of Rove in three previous political campaigns and pointing to Ashcroft's potential conflict of interest in an investigation. After recusing himself from the case, Ashcroft appointed Independent Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald on 31 December 2003 to pursue an investigation into the leak, working from White House telephone records turned over to the FBI in October 2003. On 13 May 2005 Citing "close followers of the case," The Washington Post reported that the length of the investigation, and the particular importance paid to the testimony of reporters, suggested that the counsel's role had expanded to include investigation of perjury charges against witnesses.[11]
New York Times investigative reporter Judith Miller, who met and spoke with (as yet unnamed) White House officials on July 8, 2003, two days after Wilson's editorial was published, never wrote or reported a story on the Wilson/Plame matter,[12] but nevertheless refused (with Cooper) to answer questions before a grand jury in 2004 pertaining to sources. Both reporters were held in contempt of court. As a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on 27 June 2005,[13] Time magazine said it would surrender to Fitzgerald e-mail records and notes taken by Cooper. Miller and Cooper face potential jail terms for failure to cooperate with the independent counsel's investigations.
On 1 July 2005 Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, on the McLaughlin Group stated: "And I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury." It is uncertain when this "document dump" occurred, although a New York Times article on 2 July 2005 suggested that the documents had already been "released" to Fitzgerald.[14]
On 2 July 2005, Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, said that his client spoke to Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper "three or four days" before Plame's identity was first revealed in print by commentator Robert Novak. (Cooper's article in Time, citing unnamed and anonymous "government officials," confirmed Plame to be a "CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." Cooper's article appeared three days after Novak's column was published.) Rove's lawyer, however, asserted that Rove "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA." Furthermore, Luskin said that Rove himself had testified before the grand jury "two or three times" (three times, according to the Los Angeles Times of 3 July 2005 [15]) and signed a waiver authorizing reporters to testify about their conversations with him and that Rove "has answered every question that has been put to him about his conversations with Cooper and anybody else." Rove's lawyer declined to share with Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff the nature or contents of his client's conversations with Cooper. [16] [17] [18][19] |
