CBC News: Bush administration won't discuss Rove's role in CIA leak
Bush administration won't discuss Rove's role in CIA leak
Last Updated Tue, 12 Jul 2005 15:25:30 EDT
CBC News
U.S. President George W. Bush and his press secretary declined to answer questions again Tuesday on whether senior advisor Karl Rove leaked the name of a CIA agent to the media to get back at an administration critic.
The president promised a year ago to fire anyone found to have leaked the name of Valerie Plame, which appeared in a column by Washington-based reporter Robert Novak.
But Bush declined to answer a direct question Tuesday on Rove's role, and later White House press secretary Scott McClellan refused to comment for the second day in a row as reporters fired questions at him.
"This is a question relating to an ongoing investigation," was all McClellan would say while under the grilling. Reporters wanted to know whether Rove had committed a crime, would resign or had affected the credibility of the White House.
They also asked in vain about Republican party attempts to downplay Rove's alleged conversation with a Time magazine reporter.
However, McClellan did publicly defend Rove in the fall of 2003 after the investigation had started, a discrepancy he also failed to address. "The president knows he's not involved," McClellan said at the time.
FROM JAN. 6, 2005: N.Y. Times reporter jailed for refusing to divulge source's name
An e-mail from July 2003 by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper says Rove told him that the woman "apparently works" for the CIA. Federal prosecutors are investigating who in the Bush administration leaked the name of Valerie Plame to the media.
A U.S. law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, forbids naming undercover agents. It is punishable by a $50,000 US fine and 10 years in jail.
Cooper avoided going to jail recently after a judge ordered two reporters to divulge who had told them about Plame. Judith Miller of the New York Times is in jail for refusing to comply.
Media reports say four other reporters were fed the Plame information before Novak published it, but no one wrote that the administration was using the leak as a revenge tactic.
Niger-Saddam nuclear link sought
Plame's name was released in an apparent backlash against her husband, Joesph Wilson, a former Clinton diplomat the CIA sent to Africa in 2002 to pursue claims by the administration that Saddam Hussein had obtained nuclear material from Niger.
The quest turned up empty after supposedly official documents first discovered by British intelligence were found to be fake.
Wilson wrote an editorial piece published in the New York Times, which criticized Bush for mentioning the Niger-Saddam link in his 2003 state of the union address that ratcheted up the case for invading Iraq.
That fall, the CIA asked the Justice Department to probe the leak and it called a grand jury investigation.
Also Tuesday, senior Democrats waded into the partisan fray with former presidential candidate Senator John Kerry saying: "I believe Karl Rove ought to be fired." Senator Hillary Clinton and Senate minority leader Harry Reid agreed.
"If these allegations are true, this rises above politics and is about our national security," Reid said.
A Senate intelligence report has shown that Plame twice recommended her husband travel to Niger and that the nuclear mission was approved without senior level CIA approval.
