Rove told Cooper Plame was CIA before Novak published!

David Corn has a solid report that tomorrow Newsweek is going to publish a story that nails Rove as knowing Plame was CIA and telling that to Matt Cooper of Time days before Robert Novak published his story.

From David Corn:

"The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine's Matt Cooper and that Rove--prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official--told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson's now-controversial trip to Niger."

So I wonder what Judith Miller could possibly have?

Read David Corn for more.

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Addendum 07-10-2005
Kevin Drum at Political Animal parses the story in Newsweek and sets the level of threat to Rove in perspective.

Cooper's email makes it clear that Rove did tell Cooper that "wilson's wife" worked at the CIA, that he did it before Robert Novak's original column about the affair appeared on July 14, and that he did it as part of a pushback against Wilson's New York Times op-ed a few days before.

However, much is still murky. It's not clear if Rove ever mentioned the name "Valerie Plame" and it's not clear that Rove knew Plame worked undercover. I doubt that it's useful to try and hyper-parse Cooper's email any further at this point, so for now we'll just have to wait for more clues.

I'd like to see Rove on the way to prison, but the evidence publicly presented doesn't prove yet that he committed a crime when he told Matt Cooper that Valerie Plame was a CIA employee.

Still, we don't know what the CIA told Attorney General Ashcroft when they referred the outing of Plame for prosecution. Nor do we know what is in Judith Miller's notes.

This story has a long run yet ahead of it, and as David Corn commented, there are few pleasant outcomes for the White House and Rove in this story. See also Jeralyn Merrit's analysis at TalkLeft of her Lexis-Nexus sourced material.

The cards have been dealt and the betting is in process. The only question now is how the various players will play out their hands and what the outcome will be. To continue the analogy, I think that Rove tried to bluff a poor hand, pushed too many chips onto the table, and is about to be called on it.