If Newsweek’s report is right, Karl Rove is about to be frog-marched — um, liberty-marched — out of the White House. In fact, possibly he will not pass Go and will go straight to jail. This is from Salon:

Rove never said publicly that he had nothing to do with leaking Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, but he sure managed to give people that impression. When CNN asked him about the Plame case last summer, Rove said: “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name.”

Maybe that was technically correct, but it’s now clear that it was something less than the whole truth. As Newsweek is reporting, Karl Rove may not have referred to Plame by name when he spoke with Time’s Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003. But the email messages Time has turned over to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald show that, in a phone call with Cooper that day, Rove tried to discredit Joseph Wilson’s conclusion that Iraq hadn’t tried to buy uranium from Niger by claiming that Wilson had been assigned to look into the Iraq-Niger connection not by the vice president or by the director of the CIA but by Wilson’s wife. And Wilson’s wife, Rove told Cooper, was a CIA analyst working on WMD issues.

Tim Grieve at Salon thinks this “no-name defense” may protect Rove from perjury charges. But it’s still a crime to rat out a covert CIA agent. Well, what’s one traitorous act when you’re playing hardball, eh Karl? [Technorati tags: KarlRove plame politics]

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