Rove Testifies in CIA Leak

President Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, testified for more than two hours Friday before a grand jury considering charges stemming from the leak of a CIA agent’s identity to the news media, White House officials said.

Rove is the latest White House aide called before the grand jury, which is investigating the disclosure of the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to journalist Robert Novak.

Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, said Rove appeared before the grand jury voluntarily. The White House has denied that Rove leaked Plame’s identity.

“He has been repeatedly assured by the special prosecutor that he is not a target of the investigation,” Luskin said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, traveling with the president in Iowa, referred questions to the Justice Department, which referred questions to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor heading the investigation. He declined to discuss the investigation.

The inquiry stems from a July 2003 column in which Novak cited two government sources as saying that Plame was a CIA operative.

Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, had published an op-ed article in the New York Times casting doubt on the president’s assertion that Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium from the African nation of Niger. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush referred to the alleged uranium purchase attempt as evidence that Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear capability.

Wilson, a former ambassador to Niger, had previously conducted a fact-finding trip on the administration’s behalf and said he could find no firm evidence that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. A government official presumably leaked Plame’s identity to Novak to cast doubt on Wilson’s credibility by suggesting his wife promoted him for the Niger mission.

Several other White House officials have appeared before the grand jury, and investigators have questioned the president and vice president, though not under oath.

Two journalists -- Time Magazine’s Matthew Cooper and the New York Times’ Judith Miller -- have been held in contempt of court for refusing to disclose the identity of sources who may have discussed the case with them. Both face jail and are appealing the ruling.

Wilson has previously suggested that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is a likely source of the leak to Novak.

“We have no reason to believe that [Rove] committed a crime. But clearly, if he has been called before the grand jury ... he has pertinent information. It would have been nice if he had made that information public early on. But they chose not to,” said Christopher Wolf, a Washington lawyer who has been speaking on behalf of Wilson and Plame.

Several journalists who have agreed to be interviewed by Fitzgerald have acknowledged speaking to Libby around the time of the leak, but have said they told the special prosecutor that he did not leak any classified information to them.

It is not known whether Novak has been questioned or whether he has agreed to cooperate with the probe.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe criticized the pace of the investigation, which began more than a year ago.

“The person from the Bush White House who leaked this information is guilty of treason,” McAuliffe said in a statement. “This should have been resolved a long time ago.”

The president has asked his staff to cooperate fully with the investigation, McClellan said.

“No one wants to get to the bottom of this more than the president,” McClellan said.

Times staff writers Richard Schmitt in Washington and Edwin Chen in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, contributed to this report.