Rove blew it. There are now two totally contradictory defenses of him on the record, and in his testimony.
One is that he never learned of Valerie Plame’s name, her marriage to Wilson, or her CIA status until he read Novak’s July 14th, 2003 column. This is the sworn defense he used with the grand jury.
Today we have his lawyer (anonymously) in both the New York Times and the Washington Post saying that a) Rove was Novak’s source on July 8th 2003 for the July 14th column (and that Novak even used her name in the conversation) and b) that Rove KNEW Plame’s name when leaking her CIA identity to Cooper on July 11th but “chivalrously” withheld it from Cooper, as if her actual name, not her CIA status, was the secret. But Rove testified that he didn’t learn these facts, including the name of the agent, until Novak’s column ran in the Washington Post three days later.
Not only did he switch his stories over time, but his current defense for one action doesn’t jibe with his defense for another, because his leak to Cooper matches a 2002 State Department memo almost word for word (Rove’s lawyer now says Rove got this information FROM Bob Novak, a laughable joke). It’s an utterly confusing defense because it doesn’t absolve him at all of identifying a CIA agent. He clearly did.
But who says that a legal charge for outing a CIA agent is what he is now trying to defend against? I say the new contortions are an impossible attempt to reconcile contradictory stories he told to the grand jury during his three appearances.
In trying to cover up his central role in the leak, Rove perjured himself before the grand jury.
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