Monday, July 18, 2005

In a TIME magazine article, reporter Matthew Cooper claimed he learned that Plame worked with the CIA through a conversation with Karl Rove. However, he denied that Rove directly named Valerie Plame. He also revealed that he discussed Plame with Lewis Libby, the deputy Chief of Staff for the U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The revelation corroborates Rove’s testimony to the grand jury, leaked to several news sources, that he learned of Plame’s name from Robert Novak and another journalist (Rove testified that he cannot remember which one), and that he did tell Cooper in a later discussion that Joseph Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, though he testified he never mentioned Plame by name.

In a Sunday MSNBC Meet the Press broadcast, Cooper said he secured a more specific written waiver from two sources, Rove and Libby, which led him to reverse his earlier refusal to cooperate with the federal grand jury investigation into the CIA disclosure of Plame. This second waiver was signed only hours prior to the contempt of court proceedings that would have put him in jail, the fate of the New York Times reporter Judith Miller who refused to reveal her sources to the same court. He said during the broadcast there were other White House sources as well, but declined during the interview to disclose their names.

The waiver Cooper secured releases him from the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. He wrote a 1st person account of the conversation with Rove that was published Sunday on the TIME Online Edition. In a marketing move made by TIME, they turned the high interest in the story into an online money maker by charging $1.99 for access to the story. 6 print issues of the magazine come with the purchase.