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White House Denies Rove
Leaked Secret Info

By Steve Holland
9-29-3


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House denied on Monday that President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, was behind a leak of secret information apparently aimed at discrediting a vocal critic of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
 
The controversy centers on the public disclosure that the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction.
 
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had spoken to Rove about the allegations and was assured that it was "simply not true" that Rove had anything to do with the leak.
 
McClellan pledged the White House would cooperate with the Justice Department if it investigated the leak, even as some Democrats called for a special counsel to be appointed to lead the probe.
 
"This administration has played politics with national security for a long time, but this is going too far," retired Gen. Wesley Clark told Reuters. The Democratic presidential hopeful suggested an independent commission look into the allegations.
 
The Justice Department would not say whether it would investigate the matter.
 
But a senior Bush administration official said the Justice Department was conducting a preliminary inquiry to determine whether it needed to carry out a full investigation.
 
The official said part of the inquiry was to determine whether the leak was a violation of law, whether it was a violation of national security or if it caused any damage.
 
Then the department will determine whether to go into a full investigation, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
 
Wilson, a long-time State Department veteran and former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, has been a sharp critic of the Bush administration, accusing it of exaggerating the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
 
Wilson wrote in an article for The New York Times in July that he went to Niger in February 2002 at the request of the CIA to assess a report that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger, a charge later dismissed by the International Atomic Energy Agency as based on forged documents.
 
The Niger uranium charge found its way into Bush's State of the Union speech last January as part of the U.S. case against Saddam, and only after Wilson went public did the White House admit Bush should not have included it in the speech.
 
CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility for not persuading the White House to drop the Niger charge from the speech, a controversy that consumed part of the summer.
 
Now, Tenet reportedly has asked the Justice Department to look into whether one or more Bush administration officials leaked information to the news media exposing the secret identity of Wilson's wife.
 
Wilson said he did not have any knowledge that Rove was the leaker or authorized the leak. "But I have great confidence that at a minimum he (Rove) condoned it and certainly did nothing to shut it down," he told ABC's "Good Morning America."
 
The fact that Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA operative was published by a columnist, Robert Novak, shortly after Wilson's article in The New York Times.
 
Under the Intelligence Identities and Protection Act, the unauthorized identification of a CIA operative is a criminal act punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison.
 
McClellan said Bush had no patience for such activities and suggested anyone involved would be fired.
 
"If anyone has information related to this, they need to report it to the Department of Justice," he said.
 
Would Bush want someone like this working on his staff?
 
"I think I answered that question earlier. No. The president expects his administration, everyone in his administration, to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, and that would not be," McClellan told reporters.

 

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