Getting Your Story Straight

© 2005 Com•Log•ic

**According to news stories reported recently there seems to be an interesting tidbit about email conversations dated July 11, 2003.

The emails occured after Matt Cooper and Karl Rove.**

According to Matt Cooper's email he sent to his bureau chief Michael Duffy, (after speaking to Rove)
Email: Subject Rove/P&C, "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ...
(The email was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) 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 working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The email characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed and suspect but so is the report. He [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger ... "

Newsweek

On that very same day, Rove was emailing Stephen Hadley to report on his conversation he had with Cooper.

Rove told then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in the July 11, 2003, email that he had spoken with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and tried to caution him away from some allegations that CIA operative Valerie Plame's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.

"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in the message, disclosed to The Associated Press. In the memo, Rove recounted how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been making.

SF Gate

**It's very interesting that they both had to discuss their conversation through emails much less. Of course this was even before Bob Novak's column appeared. But it had probably been preapproved before printing.

Matt Cooper has stated that he was lavished gifts from his sources, it would be interesting to see where he took his family's on vacations, and who paid for them.**