NEWSWEEK ROVE ARTICLE DOESN'T DELIVER

The much-anticipated Newsweek article about Karl Rove's involvement with the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame is online and doesn't tell us much more than we already knew.

Here are the salient points:

(1) Rove talked to Time's Matt Cooper about the Wilson/Plame affair three days before Novak's column was published.
(2) Rove's lawyer denies that Rove told any reporter that Plame was a CIA agent and never "knowingly disclosed classified information." He said Rove testified before the grand jury two or three times and signed a waiver authorizing reporters to disclose his contacts with them.

That's it, other than to mention that the White House is "concerned" that special prosecutor Fitzgerald is interested in Rove. We already knew about the incident on July 21 where Rove called Chris Matthews and said Plame was "fair game."

Rove has mastered the art of preemptive disclosure: you make the story seem a bigger scandal than it is, then when the first reports come out, sit back and laugh when they seem to make the opposition seem hysterical and overreactive. After that, the impact of further investigations and disclosures is blunted. It has struck me as odd and almost unbelievable that hosts of journalists are now indicating that they "know" Rove outed Plame after keeping silent for so long. I suspect that the White House has been furiously leaking that fact in recent days so that Rove's true involvement (possibly perjury and a coverup) would seem petty when it came out.