Lawyer: Cooper “Burned” Karl Rove

[quaoar]

I guess the new tactic is not only to attack Wilson and Plame, but to attack Cooper as well. Anything to deflect responsibility somewhere else.

http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200507121626.asp

The lawyer for top White House adviser Karl Rove says that Time reporter Matthew Cooper "burned" Rove after a conversation between the two men concerning former ambassador Joseph Wilson's fact-finding mission to Niger and the role Wilson's wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, played in arranging that trip. Nevertheless, attorney Robert Luskin says Rove long ago gave his permission for all reporters, including Cooper, to tell prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about their conversations with Rove.

In an interview with National Review Online, Luskin compared the contents of a July 11, 2003, internal Time e-mail written by Cooper with the wording of a story Cooper co-wrote a few days later. "By any definition, he burned Karl Rove," Luskin said of Cooper. "If you read what Karl said to him and read how Cooper characterizes it in the article, he really spins it in a pretty ugly fashion to make it seem like people in the White House were affirmatively reaching out to reporters to try to get them to them to report negative information about Plame."

First the e-mail. According to a report in Newsweek, Cooper's e-mail to Time Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy said, "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation..." Cooper said that Rove had warned him away from getting "too far out on Wilson," and then passed on Rove's statement that neither Vice President Dick Cheney nor CIA Director George Tenet had picked Wilson for the trip; "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip." Finally — all of this is according to the Newsweek report — Cooper's e-mail said that "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an suspect but so is the report. he implied strongly that there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro Niger..."

A few days after sending the e-mail, Cooper co-wrote an article headlined "A War on Wilson?" that appeared on Time's website. The story began, "Has the Bush administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps."

[natrat]

1. what did rove say "wilson's wife is fair game"

[Gman]

2. Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, MF

He's not only burned, but his ass is hotter than Chernobyl right now!

Rove is radioactive but no one has the common sense to run from him right now. Then again, no one ever accused Bush of common sense anyway.

Re the article, Jonah Goldberg to the rescue.