TIME REPORTER MATT COOPER first mentioned the name of Joseph Wilson's wife in an
online article posted July 17, 2003. In that article Cooper asked, "Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium?" Almost three years later public anger over the leaking of Valerie Plame's name continues. Read our complete coverage in the TIME Archive:
Some government officials have noted to TIME in interviews, (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
From A War on Wilson?
By Matthew Cooper, Massimo Calabresi and John Dickerson
Jul. 17, 2003
The reverberations of the latest scandal to rattle a presidency go far beyond the destruction of one covert officer's career. The charge on the table is that the White House leaked her name as an act of revenge, to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for suggesting in public that the Bush Administration had stretched the evidence about Saddam Hussein's nuclear arsenal in order to justify a new kind of war.
From Leaking With A Vengeance
By Michael Duffy
Oct. 13, 2003
Photos and Graphics
It sounds like a tough law, but hardly anyone gets charged under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. In fact, only one person is known to have been successfully prosecuted under the statute since Congress passed it in 1982.
From Why Leakers Rarely Do Time
By Daren Fonda
Oct. 13, 2003
Just how aware was Bush of the accuracy of what he was about to say? Deep in his 5,400-word speech was a single sentence that had already been the subject of considerable internal debate for nearly a year.... The line--'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa'--wasn't the Bush team's strongest evidence for the case that Saddam wanted nuclear weapons. It was just the most controversial, since most government experts familiar with the statement believed it to be unsupportable.
From A Question Of Trust
By Michael Duffy and James Carney
Jul. 21, 2003
Photos and Graphics
Since March 2002, CIA officials had known the Niger tale wasn't credible. So why did it resurface?
From Tale Of The Cake
By Mitch Frank
Jul. 21, 2003
The veteran diplomat has spent the eight months since President Bush's speech trying to set the record straight and clear his name. In a rare interview with TIME, al-Zahawie outlined how forgery and circumstantial evidence was used to talk up Iraq's nuclear weapons threat, and leave him holding the smoking gun.
From Saddam's Niger Point-man Speaks
By Hassan Fattah
Oct. 01, 2003
The Washington Post reports that 'two top White House officials' called at least six reporters with the information on Plame before Novak's column ran.
From Anatomy Of A Leak
By Mitch Frank
Oct. 13, 2003
If one theme of the Administration leak scandal concerns political vengeance--did the White House reveal Plame's identity in order to punish Wilson for his public criticism of the case for war with Iraq?--another theme is about damage. What has been lost, and who has been compromised because of the leak of one spy's name?
From NOC, NOC. Who's There? A Special Kind of Agent
By Michael Duffy and Timothy J. Burger
Oct. 27, 2003
FBI investigators looking into the criminal leak of a CIA agent’s identity have asked Bush Administration officials including senior political adviser Karl Rove to release reporters from any confidentiality agreements regarding conversations about the agent.
From The CIA Agent Flap: FBI Asks for Reporters to Talk
By John F. Dickerson and Viveca Novak
Jan. 02, 2004
If there are culprits in the White House who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, they may now be dependent on reporters to protect their identities.
From A Shifting Probe?
By John Dickerson and Viveca Novak
Jan. 12, 2004
A huge unanswered question in this case is whether the leaker or leakers knew that Plame was undercover when they gave her identity away. That is a necessary element for any indictment for leaking the name of a covert agent. However, charges could also be brought for making false statements to the FBI, if a guilty party has falsely claimed innocence in interviews with government agents.
From Grand Jury Hears Plame Case
By John Dickerson and Viveca Novak
Jan. 22, 2004
Nobody has come forward to admit to being a source for Novak's column. Besides Rove, a number of other White House aides, including counsel Alberto Gonzales, have gone before the grand jury. Rove's grand jury appearance comes as Fitzgerald is aggressively pursuing the testimony of two other journalists ensnared in the case, Time's Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller of the New York Times.
From Rove Testifies in Wilson Leak
By Viveca Novak
Oct. 15, 2004
Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has ordered two reporters, including TIME White House correspondent Matthew Cooper, to tell a grand jury who might have disclosed to them the identity of a covert CIA officer during a tangled political dustup in the summer of 2003.
From The Cost of Keeping Mum
Feb. 28, 2005
Time Inc. last week took the unusual step of asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review lower-court decisions and rule that Matt Cooper may not be jailed and Time Inc. may not be fined for refusing to disclose confidential sources to a federal grand jury. Our petition argues that much has changed in the 33 years since the Supreme Court last looked at this issue and ruled against several reporters in a 5-to-4 decision that resulted in murky law.
From A Case for the Supreme Court
By Norman Pearlstine
May 23, 2005
Time Inc. shall deliver the subpoenaed records to the Special Counsel in accordance with its duties under the law. The same Constitution that protects the freedom of the press requires obedience to final decisions of the courts and respect for their rulings and judgments. That Time Inc. strongly disagrees with the courts provides no immunity.
From Statement of Time Inc. on the Matthew Cooper Case
Jun. 30, 2005
After Time Inc. agreed to turn over the requested materials to Fitzgerald's office, speculation quickly surfaced over whose names would be identified. Much of that focused on Karl Rove, senior adviser to President George W. Bush.
From When to Give Up a Source
By Bill Saporito
Jul. 11, 2005
Now it was official: last Wednesday, Cooper had testified to the grand jury investigating the leak that it was indeed Rove who told him Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, though without using her name. That Rove was a secret source was already public knowledge after Newsweek published the contents of one of Cooper's e-mails that Time Inc. had given to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald after resisting all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the company's appeal.
From The Rove Problem
By Nancy Gibbs
Jul. 25, 2005
The Senior House Intelligence Committee Democrat has asked the State Department to hand over copies of a memo that has become a hot potato in the criminal investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA officer said to have been operating under cover.... Which senior Administration officials saw and discussed that memo among themselves is now reportedly a key element of the high-stakes investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald into whether Plame's identity was illegally leaked or whether anyone has interfered with Fitzgerald's probe.
From Plame Case: The Hill Gets Into the Act
By Timothy J. Burger and Massimo Calabresi
Jul. 26, 2005
A chronological look at the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame
From How The Tale Unfolds
By David Bjerklie
Jul. 31, 2005
As the investigation tightens into the leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources tell TIME some White House officials may have learned she was married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson weeks before his July 6, 2003, Op-Ed piece criticizing the Administration.
From When They Knew
By Massimo Calabresi
Aug. 8, 2005
Hardly anyone in Washington could say they were surprised when it turned out that Libby was the long-secret source for New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail this summer rather than tell federal prosecutors exactly to whom she spoke in 2003 about a CIA operative whose diplomat-husband had criticized the President's justifications for the war in Iraq.
From Let's Make A Deal
By Viveca Novak, Michael Duffy
Oct. 10, 2005
Karl Rove has a plan, as always. Even before testifying last week for the fourth time before a grand jury probing the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, Bush senior adviser Rove and others at the White House had concluded that if indicted he would immediately resign or possibly go on unpaid leave, several legal and Administration sources familiar with the thinking told TIME.
From A Contingency Plan
By Viveca Novak, Mike Allen
Oct. 24, 2005
I had no idea that that brief phone call, along with a conversation with Karl Rove the day before, would leave me embroiled in a federal investigation for more than two years and that Libby would end up facing a five-count indictment. I doubt it occurred to Libby either.
From What Scooter Libby And I Talked About
By Matthew Cooper
Nov. 7, 2005
If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is right, Libby spun an intricate--and criminal--web of lies when he spoke to FBI agents and a grand jury last year investigating the disclosure of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters in 2003.
From Fall of a Vulcan
By Michael Duffy
Nov. 7, 2005
The charges against I. Lewis Libby all revolve around alleged lies he told the FBI and a federal grand jury. Here are some of the key discrepancies in the case's testimony.
From Fitzgerald's Case Against Libby
By Unmesh Kher
Nov. 7, 2005
Rather than bringing clarity to the murky case of Who Leaked What to Whom about CIA operative Valerie Plame, the revelations about Woodward's role only added more complexity to both the case and the deepening debate over the rules star journalists get to play by.
From Woodward Unveiled
By Viveca Novak and Nancy Gibbs
Nov. 28, 2005
Fitzgerald has now asked a second reporter in TIME's Washington bureau, Viveca Novak, to testify under oath about conversations she had with Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, starting in May 2004, while she was covering the Plame inquiry for TIME.
From A Second TIME Reporter Cooperates
Dec. 05, 2005
What Fitzgerald wanted to know about was a conversation Novak had had over drinks with Luskin in the first half of last year. In that exchange, Luskin told Novak that Rove had not been Cooper's source for a TIME.com story that Cooper had co-authored in July 2003.... But at the restaurant that night, Novak challenged Luskin, saying she was hearing a different story around TIME's Washington bureau.
From The Roving Investigator
By Richard Lacayo
Dec. 19, 2005
Does what I remembered--or more often, didn't remember--of my interactions with Luskin matter? Will it make the difference between whether Rove gets indicted or not? I have no idea. I didn't find out until this fall that, according to Luskin, my remark led him to do an intensive search for evidence that Rove and Matt had talked.
From What Viveca Novak Told Fitzgerald
By Viveca Novak
Dec. 19, 2005
Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel investigating the leak of former CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity, had sent a fax saying that absent any unexpected developments, he did not anticipate any criminal charges against Rove. The message to Luskin from Fitzgerald[EM]who said nothing publicly[EM]was an unrequired, if welcome, courtesy.
From Rove: Off the Hook, Back to Battle
By Mike Allen
Jun. 18, 2006
Lots of legal experts greeted the Valerie Plame lawsuit against Vice President Cheney and White House senior officials Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby with skepticism, largely because it will have to overcome an almost certain argument that Cheney and company are, as federal officials, immune to being sued for on-the-job behavior. But the argument to dismiss the lawsuit outright isn't so simple to make.
From Does the Plame Lawsuit Have a Chance?
By Reynolds Holding
Jul. 14, 2006
Convicted Tuesday of four counts of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to the FBI, former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in the end, was responsible for his own undoing.
From How Libby Came Undone
By Ana Marie Cox
Mar. 6, 2007
Timeline: How The Tale Unfolds
In deciding not to charge Libby or anyone else in the administration with exposing a covert operative, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald all but proclaimed the act virtually unenforceable. If it had any teeth, Fitzgerald would have used it not only against Libby but also Karl Rove and Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, the two who leaked Plame's name in the first place. Or even possibly Washington Post columnist Bob Novak, who first published it.
From What the CIA Lost in the Libby Case
By Robert Baer
Mar. 7, 2007
Although Fitzgerald says he "was not looking for a First Amendment showdown," that is what he got. By issuing subpoenas that required reporters to betray their sources, Fitzgerald created the showdown. During my tenure as Time Inc.'s editor-in-chief, we spent millions of dollars[EM]on our own behalf and that of Matt Cooper[EM]fighting the special prosecutor's subpoenas in the courts. We lost every round. Only when the Supreme Court refused to hear our plea did I agree to turn over our notes to the grand jury.
From How Libby's Trial Hurt the Press
By Norman Pearlstine
May 31, 2007
When I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was sentenced Tuesday to a surprisingly long term of 30 months in prison for perjury and obstruction of justice, he became a victim of one of the most troubling aspects of federal sentencing laws [EM] allowing harsher sentences for a crime that was never actually proven.
From Why Libby's Sentence Was So Tough
By Reynolds Holding
Jun. 5, 2007
That's the upshot of the move by President George W. Bush to commute Libby's 30-month sentence for lying about having leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Commutation is significantly less sweeping than a pardon, which would have wiped out Libby's conviction and left him in the position of essentially never having been charged.
From The Commutation's Odd Timing
By Reynolds Holding
July 2, 2007
Special Report: The Ten Most Notorious Presidental Pardons
If he let Libby go to jail, his critics still wouldn't love him. And what support he continues to command comes mostly from conservatives who were strongly in favor of his helping Libby.
From Easy Commute
By Richard Lacayo
July 5, 2007
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