Newsweek IDs Rove as Source

Top White House advisor Karl Rove was one of the secret sources who spoke to reporters about a covert CIA operative whose identity was leaked to the media, Newsweek magazine reported in its latest edition.

The magazine said Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed that Rove talked to a Time magazine reporter about former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Luskin said Rove recently gave Time reporter Matthew Cooper permission to testify about the conversation to a grand jury investigating the leak in 2003, Newsweek reported.

A federal judge ordered Cooper, along with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, to testify and reveal their confidential sources.

Last week, Cooper avoided a jail sentence for contempt of court by agreeing to testify in the case. Miller refused to testify and was jailed.

The case has become an important test involving freedom of the press, pitting journalists’ traditional use of anonymous sources against a federal prosecutor’s efforts to investigate a possible crime.

It is illegal to knowingly reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent.

Although Rove has made statements about the Plame leak, he has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about the CIA agent.

Rove has carefully chosen his words when questioned about the leak. “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name,” he told CNN last year.

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has led a two-year investigation into the leak amid questions about whether it came from the White House as part of an attempt to discredit Wilson after he contradicted President Bush’s assertions about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.