(6 of 8)
That means Wilson was also shading the story: "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote in his 2004 book The Politics of Truth. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." When asked last week by TIME if he still denies that she was the origin of his involvement in the trip, he avoided answering. But he has maintained all along that Administration officials conducted a "smear job" on him and outed his wife in revenge.
Not so, insisted Rove's surrogates last week when asked to explain why he was talking about a covert operative at all. His warning to Cooper, Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin told TIME, was not meant to encourage Cooper to write about Plame; it was meant to deter him from writing credulously about Wilson or at least from lending weight to charges that Cheney's office had deliberately ignored Wilson's findings. "What he was trying to do was discourage Cooper from printing allegations about the Vice President that were going to be proven false," Luskin says. While it was true that the Administration ultimately had to retract their claims about yellowcake, Wilson was seen as overstating the importance of his mission; the yellowcake charge should not have been in the President's speech because the evidence remained inconclusive. CIA officials told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Wilson's trip had not resolved the yellowcake question one way or the other. Cheney denied on Meet the Press that he knew of Wilson's mission or had been briefed by him. Furthermore, had Rove intended for Cooper to circulate any information about Wilson's wife, "he certainly would not have extracted a promise that the discussions were super double secret," Luskin notes with a laugh, referring to Cooper's phrase.
What does it matter who put Plame's identity in play? That reporters may have been part of a loop of information, not just receivers of it, has for some time been one of the hypotheses in the case. The Washington Post reported that Libby, who has been interviewed by the grand jury three times, learned Plame's name from a reporter too. NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert spoke with Fitzgerald under oath in August about a call from Libby, who gave Russert clearance to testify about their talk. Russert says he told Fitzgerald that he was not Libby's source.
From legal and political angles, it looks better if Administration officials were leakees, not leakers. If the blame for blowing the cover of a CIA officer can be spread around, so much the better. And it suggests the challenge that Fitzgerald may face in building a case. It is one thing if Rove happened to hear from a reporter that Plame was a CIA officer, casually confirmed that he had already heard that to another reporter (Novak) and incidentally spread the word to a third (Cooper). It's perhaps something else if Administration officials made an effort to gather information on Wilson, discovered that his wife was a CIA officer and carried out a strategy to discredit Wilson that included outing his wife to a number of reporters. It is still another thing to do the second and pretend, under oath, that you had done the first.
HOW MUCH DAMAGE?