A quick leak of Cooper's e-mail about what Rove told him about "Joseph Wilson's Wife"
via Atrios, of course.

Michael Isikoff describes a Cooper e-mail which has been handed over to the grand jury

Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson. Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent

I wonder if the e-mail is an illegal insta leak of grand jury evidence or a leak from Time to Newsweek. In either case it is a bit shocking that it got out just now.

I have two serious questions. Is there now proof that Karl Rove committed a felony ?
If not, will this proof of his violation of the spirit of the law be seriously politically damaging ?

I think the answer to the second question is no. People who follow the news already know that Karl Rove is ruthless and unprincipled. Most people don't know who he is. Short of an indictment, I suspect that the new Cooper Rove news will have an impact similar to the first few weeks of impact of the Downing Street minutes. People who like to think they are in the know (as in all reporters) will say that there is nothing new here and so they will not bother the public with vitally important facts which they never bothered the public much about before.

Thus I focus on whether Rove can now be indicted.

Can the e-mail be authenticated ?

An un authenticated e-mail might actually be too little to enable a prosecutor to convince a grand jury, since most people assume, as I do, that hackers can do all sorts of things. Isikoff claims that he has a solid source who authenticates the e-mail and Cooper is talking. I assume for the sake of speculation, that Isikoff got this one right and that the e-mail will be confirmed by Cooper.

Is the e-mail proof that Rove violated the letter of the "Stop Phillip Agee forever" act ?

Clearly no. As noted by Isikoff there is no proof that Rove knew that Plame was covert. Nor is there proof that Rove learned about her as part of his official duties (if Rove got the story from Judith Miller he did not violate that particular law).

It is even possible that Rove did not deliberately violate the spirit of that law. He might have been attempting to undermine Wilson's credibility (clearly legal) not get Valery Plame's true occupation reported in order to intimidate and retaliate.

I'm sure Rove violated the spirit of the law. I am working partly on prejudice, but I guess that Rove carefully stayed just inside the letter of the law, while trying to make sure that Plame's cover was blown. Rove told Cooper not to identify him even as a White House source. He suggested that Cooper check with the CIA (therefore making trouble not only for Plame and Wilson but also for innocent CIA officials who might slip and end up sentenced to 10 years in prison). Rove talked to Cooper very briefly while leaving town. I suspect that Rove scheduled a very brief interview so that Cooper would not have time to ask questions the answers to which would be felonies.

The defence of Rove (by an anonymous source) is absurdly implausible.

A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false," the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.

Come on guy, you can do better than that. The idea is that Rove was concerned that reporters might write that Richard Cheney came up with the name Joseph Wilson ? The relatively innocent explanations for blowing Plame's cover have always been absurd. If Rove's defence were that an unpaid trip to gabarone was a junket and that Wilson is not qualified to investigate, then he would be spending time in prison. However, his real defence is that he was playing hardest of hard ball but was clever enough to stay inside the letter of the law.

I'm sure he did when leaking. It is still possible that he committed perjury in front of the grand jury. In particular there have been many reports that he claimed he talked about Plame only after July 14 2003 when Novak's story was published. Given the memo, he would have to have phrased his claims very carefully to avoid a perjury charge. These claims were in front of the grand jury where he could be cross examined and couldn't run off to catch a plane. Rove might have decided his best option was to count on Time and Cooper to keep secrets.

I have one alarming thought as to how Fitzgerald might hope to nail Rove (hence his extreme act of asking a judge to jail Miller) and might find nabbing Rove as hard as nabbign a greased pig. Rove might have claimed that he learned about "Wilson's wife" from journalist(s). This might seem to be a claim that he learned about it reading the Novak, but it would be true if Miller told him.

A journalist leaking to a White House political operative is so strange so totally against journalistic tradition that Fitzgerald might not have thought of the possibility. That this possible slip would lead to the un-necessary incarceration of that journalist would be poetic justice, but, sad to say, Karl Rove is not going to be frog marched out of the White House by poets.

update: name corrected

Update 2: An administration source told this to Walter Pincus on On July 12, 2003. I'm glad that Pincus has already reached a compromise with the grand jury, since this means that Paul Lukasiak has not gotten him into trouble. Pincus has just reported the conversation in Nieman Watchdog. Oddly Pincus writes "I wrote my October story because I did not think the person who spoke to me was committing a criminal act, but only practicing damage control by trying to get me to stop writing about Wilson." I see no contradiction between trying to get him to stop writing about Wilson by saying that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee and committing a criminal act by saying that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee. Damage control can be attempted via criminal means, as it was in this case.

The Niemanwatchdog site uses a microscopic font. It appears that Lukasiak misread the number 2003 as 2002 and concluded that efforts to undermine Wilson started a year earlier than has been reported. In fact, the conversation with Pincus took place the day after Cooper wrote his e-mail. Lukasiak writes (all in readable font)

ALthough most of us have been following the Cooper revelations with regard to Karl Rove, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post has also spilled some beans. And the beans he spilled strongly suggest that the effort to discredit Wilson via his wife was not the result of Wilson's disclosing his trip in a NY Times column, but was being done in 2002 in order to discredit his reporting, and "fix the facts and intelligence" around the policy.
[...]
Here is the key quote from the Pincus piece in Niemanwatch...

On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.