WASHINGTON, 30 September 2003 — The White House denied yesterday that President George W. Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, was behind a leak of secret information apparently aimed at discrediting a vocal critic of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
The controversy centers on the public disclosure that the wife of former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative specializing in weapons of mass destruction.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had spoken to Rove about the allegations and was assured that it was “simply not true” that Rove had anything to do with the leak.
McClellan pledged the White House would cooperate with the Justice Department if it investigated the leak, even as some Democrats called for a special counsel to be appointed to lead the probe.
“This administration has played politics with national security for a long time, but this is going too far,” retired Gen. Wesley Clark told Reuters. The Democratic presidential hopeful suggested an independent commission look into the allegations.
The Justice Department would not say whether it would investigate the matter. But a senior Bush administration official said the Justice Department was conducting a preliminary inquiry to determine whether it needed to carry out a full investigation.
The official said part of the inquiry was to determine whether the leak was a violation of law, whether it was a violation of national security or if it caused any damage.
Then the department will determine whether to go into a full investigation, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Wilson, a long-time State Department veteran and former US ambassador to Gabon, has been a sharp critic of the Bush administration, accusing it of exaggerating the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Wilson wrote in an article for The New York Times in July that he went to Niger in February 2002 at the request of the CIA to assess a report that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger, a charge later dismissed by the International Atomic Energy Agency as based on forged documents.
