The seat of Karl Rove’s pants must be starting to feel warmer than a DC summer — perhaps moister, too. Matt Cooper, the Time Magazine reporter who agreed to testify in the Plame leakage investigation, claimed that Rove tipped him off about Plame’s role with the CIA. The Washington Post reported:
Cooper, according to an internal Time e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine, spoke with Rove before Novak’s column was published. In the conversation, Rove gave Cooper a “big warning” that Wilson’s assertions might not be entirely accurate and that it was not the director of the CIA or the vice president who sent Wilson on his trip. Rove apparently told Cooper that it was “Wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip,” according to a story in Newsweek’s July 18 issue.
In a 2003 article, Wilson wrote that CIA “officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.” He also consulted with State Department officials and the US ambassador to Niger.
Given that officials and other parts of the government were involved, Rove was being manipulative in suggesting that the trip was organized by Wilson’s wife — as if there were no other governmental supporters of a fact-finding trip. Rove clearly wanted no investigation into the administration’s war facts. Not only did he break the law by revealing a federal agent’s identity, but he probably lied to the press as well. It’s high time to bring down Karl Rove — the personification of Bush’s anti-democratic, shady, back-room politics.
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