In calling for a hearing, Waxman noted in a letter to the Government Reform Committee's chairman, Rep. Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.), that Republicans would not have hesitated to do the same if there had been a similar allegation against a White House official during the Clinton administration. A Davis spokesman said the chairman was unavailable for comment.
The only Republican to issue a statement on the matter Monday was Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee. "It's disappointing that once again, so many Democrat leaders are taking their political cues from the far-left, MoveOn wing of the party," he said, referring to the online advocacy group MoveOn.org. "The bottom line is the Democrats are engaged in blatant partisan political attacks."
Legal experts said that, whatever the political fallout, Rove did not appear to have violated the federal law protecting covert agents. But they also said that many questions remained unanswered, such as whether Rove knew that Plame, who was working on weapons proliferation issues, was undercover and where he got his information about her.
Under the law, individuals can be prosecuted only if they know that the person they were disclosing was a covert agent, that the disclosure was made "intentionally," and that the CIA was taking steps to protect the operative's identity.
Monday's wrangling concerned an e-mail, reported over the weekend by Newsweek, that Time reporter Matthew Cooper sent to his editors July 11, 2003, summing up a conversation he had that day with Rove.
The conversation came five days after Plame's husband took the administration to task in an op-ed article in the New York Times for faulty intelligence about Iraq. His opinion piece was based on a trip he had taken to Africa at the behest of the CIA to explore whether Iraq was seeking to purchase weapons-grade uranium there.
According to Newsweek, Cooper and Rove discussed Wilson's wife in the context of who at the CIA had been responsible for the trip. Cooper noted in the e-mail that Rove was trying to raise concerns about the credibility of Wilson's report.
Cooper wrote his bosses that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson," saying that the trip had not been authorized by senior officials.
Rather, "it was, KR said, [W]ilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip," the e-mail stated, according to Newsweek.
