For Rove, New Testimony, New Problems

By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Friday 09 December 2005

There are unanswered questions about whether Karl Rove was truthful when he was first interviewed by FBI and Justice Department investigators in early October 2003 regarding whether he played a role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. According to sources close to the probe, he was not.

In that very first interview, which took place just three months after Plame Wilson's name was published in a July 14, 2003, story by conservative columnist Robert Novak in an attempt to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, Rove testified that he did speak with a handful of journalists and told them about Plame Wilson and that she worked at the CIA - but only after her identity had already been made public. In fact, Rove had been one of the two "senior administration officials" cited in Novak's column confirming Plame Wilson's identity. Additionally, Rove had also been a source for Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, who also published Plame Wilson's name in a story three days after Novak's column - another fact President Bush's deputy chief of staff allegedly withheld from prosecutors.