Cheney aide another source in CIA story

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The vice president's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was a source along with the president's chief political adviser for a Time story that identified a CIA officer, the magazine reporter said today, further countering White House claims that neither aide was involved in the leak.

In an effort to quell a chorus of calls to fire deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove, Republicans said that Rove originally learned about Valerie Plame's identity from the news media. That exonerates Rove, the Republican Party chairman said, and Democrats should apologize.

But it is not clear that it was a journalist who first revealed the information to Rove.

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When you couple this information with Rove's defense team leak asserting that it was columnist Robert Novak who first told Rove about Plame's identity, and that Rove only confirmed the information, you've got to start wondering about plausible deniability stories. That is, if Rove didn't tell Novak about Plame, who did? Obviously, if this anonymous attorney-leaker is correct, then Libby had to be the one who told Novak in the first place--after all, Novak spoke of two White House sources in his 2003 op-ed outing Plame. But this is just getting too weird and convoluted to follow: it totally reeks of an ill rehearsed cover up story. Sure, it's plausible that Rove only confirmed Plame's identity to Novak, which doesn't even really matter because either way Rove crossed the line, but such thinking invites razor-thin differentiations of minute and irrelevant details. It is just as plausible that Libby and Rove were working together to smear Plame's husband, Bush critic Joseph Wilson, and are now playing a he-said-she-said game to deny involvement. One thing is clear, however: a CIA agent's cover was blown by somebody inside the White House, and Karl Rove, who is right smack dab in the middle of the scandal, seems to have only Clintonian "definition of 'is'" arguments to support his innocence. No matter how much bullshit the right wing spews forth from its fiery orifices, it's looking bad for Rove. And that's good for America.

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