WASHINGTON — A former Time magazine reporter said Wednesday that it was President Bush's political advisor, Karl Rove, who first revealed to him that the wife of an administration critic worked for the CIA.
The testimony by Matthew Cooper could help former Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice.
As the White House pushed back in the summer of 2003 against questions that former envoy Joseph C. Wilson IV was raising about the war in Iraq, Rove divulged that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee, Cooper testified. It was a day later that he spoke with Libby about Wilson's wife and that Libby only confirmed information that Rove had already told him, Cooper said.
Libby is charged with lying to investigators about conversations he had with Cooper and two other journalists and thereby obstructing a federal probe into how the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, became public.
Libby's lawyers have portrayed him as a scapegoat caught up in the federal investigation about the outing of Plame, an arms-proliferation specialist for the agency. Rove was never charged with any crimes.
Cooper testified on a day when the defense signaled a broadening attack on the government's media witnesses.
William H. Jeffress Jr., one of Libby's lawyers, told U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton that the defense planned to call the managing editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, to discredit a former Times reporter, Judith Miller, who completed a second day of testimony Wednesday morning.
Miller gave accounts of three discussions with Libby in which he conveyed to her information about Plame. But the defense intends to show that she misled her editors about those conversations.
Jeffress said he anticipated that the newspaper would fight the subpoena for Abramson, which could delay the trial.
Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald said Wednesday that the government expected to finish presenting its case early next week.
The Plame intrigue began to unfold after Wilson wrote an opinion article in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, that attacked the Bush administration for twisting the intelligence it used to go to war in Iraq.
He based his view on a CIA-sponsored trip he had made to Niger to assess whether Iraq had tried to buy weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear weapons program.
