Karl Rove may have lied

By Wilson’s own account, he said he ratcheted up the pressure on the White House to come clean about its error in giving credence to the Niger uranium claims by calling some present and former senior administration officials who knew then National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice, asking his colleagues to tell Rice she was flat wrong in saying on NBC's Meet the Press on June 8 that there may be some intelligence "in the bowels of the agency" but that there was no doubt the uranium story was true.

Wilson said Rice told him through intermediaries that she was uninterested in what he had to say and urged Wilson to tell his story publicly if he wanted to state his case. So he did.

On July 6, 2003 Wilson was interviewed for a story that appeared in the Washington Post and accused the White House of "misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war." That same day he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which said that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat".

The very next day, July 7, 2003, the White House admitted it had erred in including the references about uranium in Bush's State of the Union speech. Two days later, two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists, an administration official told the Post in an article published Sept. 28, 2003.

Those two officials were Karl Rove and Lewis Libby.

On July 12, 2003, two days before Novak wrote his column, a Washington Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction. Plame's name was never mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure did not appear to be to generate an article, but rather to undermine Wilson's report.

That source was Karl Rove and the unidentified reporter was Walter Pincus who covers the White House.

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails show that Rove gave Cooper the same exact information about Plame that he gave to the Post. Moreover, Rove called several other reporters that week in July 2003 and reportedly said that Wilson’s wife was “fair game” because Novak had already blown her undercover status by identifying her in his column.

A few months later, on October 7, 2003, President Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said during a press conference that the White House ruled out three administration officials - Rove, Libby and Elliot Abrams, a senior official on the National Security Council, as sources of the leak - a day before FBI questioned the three of them - based on questions McClellan said he asked the men.

A day later Rove told FBI investigators that he spoke to journalists about Plame for the first time after Novak’s column was published - a lie, it appears - based on Time reporter Matthew Cooper’s emails, the contents of which were reported by Newsweek earlier this month.

That same day in October 2003, in an unusual move, Bush said he doubted that a Justice Department investigation would ever turn up the source of the leak, suggesting that it was a waste of time for lawmakers to question the administration and for reporters to follow up on the story.

"I mean this is a town full of people who like to leak information," Bush told reporters following a meeting with Cabinet members on October 7, 2003. "And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea.”