If Rove is the culprit, this would mean BIG TROUBLE for the Bush Whitehouse
President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.
But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.
Rove, through an aide, declined to comment for this story. The White House also declined comment, referring any further inquiries to the Department of Justice because of the ongoing criminal investigation.
These revelations come on the heels of a Newsday report that Justice Department officials had subpoenaed the phone records of Air Force One for several days in July before the Novak column ran. In addition, according to Newsday, officials subpoenaed records from the same time period of the White House Iraq Group, an internal task force created to strengthen the case for war made to Congress and the American public. In addition to Rove, prominent members of the task force included National Security Council deputy Stephen J. Hadley; I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney; and former Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs Nicholas E. Calio.
The leak of Plame's name to Novak last July came at a time when Plame's husband was criticizing the Bush administration for using faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Wilson had led an eight-day, CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium to build an atomic weapon. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were contrived and that documents purportedly revealing the scheme were crude forgeries.
