Ice Cream On a Hot Summer Day

You really have to hand it to Captain Ed, who has been on the Rove-Plame situation like blowflies on a rotting corpse. The latest revelation in the controversy (Ed: can we really call it that anymore?) is Matt Cooper's verification of the NYT story from last week, in which Cooper was reported to have called Rove, not the other way around.

In his 2 1/2 hour testimony last Wednesday before the grand jury investigating the CIA leak case, TIME White House correspondent Matthew Cooper testified that when he called White House political advisor Karl Rove the week of July 6, 2003, Rove did not reveal Joe Wilson’s wife’s name and did not reveal her covert status to Cooper. But he did say that Wilson’s wife works at the “Agency on WMD.” This was the first time Cooper had ever heard of Wilson’s wife...

Cooper writes that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald “asked me several different ways if Rove indicated how he had heard that (Valerie) Plame worked at the CIA.” Cooper says he testified that Rove did not.

Cooper also writes about his August 2004 testimony before the grand jury relating to his conversation with Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Cooper writes that, like Rove, Libby never used Plame’s name or indicated that her status was covert and he never told Cooper that he had heard about Plame from other reporters, as some press accounts have indicated. On background, Cooper had asked Libby if he had heard anything about Wilson’s wife sending him to Niger. Libby answered with words to the effect of “Yeah, I’ve heard that too.”

I would agree with the Captain that this episode grows increasingly embarrassing for the media. In fact, when you strip away every thing else from the story, the media and the left still had that tenuous "revenge factor" from which to conclude that this is a power hungry administration bent on destroying all political enemies. That theory, like all the others in this case, seem to be melting away like ice cream on a hot summer day.

In other Rove-Plame news, Cooper is framing his use of the term "double super secret background" as a "bit of humor" based on Animal House.

AP is publishing e-mails between Rove and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that would seem to bolster claims by the White House that Rove was simply warning Cooper and Time Magazine from swallowing Wilson's op-ed whole.

"Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming," Rove wrote in the e-mail to Hadley.

"When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."