Bush: No comment on Rove during investigation

WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Wednesday that he will withhold judgment about top aide Karl Rove's involvement in leaking the identity of a CIA agent until a federal criminal investigation into the matter is complete.\n"This is a serious investigation," Bush said at the end of a meeting with his Cabinet, with Rove sitting just behind him. "I will be more than happy to comment on this matter once this investigation is complete.\n"I also will not prejudge the investigation based on media reports," he said, when asked whether Rove acted improperly in discussing CIA officer Valerie Plame with a reporter.\nRove talked about Plame -- without using her name -- in a July 11, 2003, conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper. Cooper wrote an article that identified her.\nBush's statement was a surprise for some White House advisers and senior Republicans who had expected the president to deliver a vote of confidence for Rove, his deputy chief of staff. Two Bush advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was poised to speak for himself at the Cabinet meeting, said shortly before his remarks that the president intended to signal his support of Rove -- without prejudging the merits of the case -- during that picture-taking session. Indeed, they said, he was prepared to do so a day earlier but the question was not posed in the question-and-answer session Tuesday.\nBush said last year he would fire anyone found to have leaked Plame's identity.\nBush refused to directly answer questions about whether he had spoken to Rove about his discussion with Cooper.\n"I have instructed every member of my staff to fully cooperate in this investigation," Bush said. Rove sat stoically behind Bush during the questions about his involvement.\nBush spoke shortly after Cooper showed up at U.S. District Court on Wednesday. The grand jury investigating the leak was meeting and it was expected Cooper would testify. Cooper did not comment while entering the courthouse.\nEarlier, first lady Laura Bush, talking to reporters while traveling in Africa, called Rove "a very good friend" but said she did not want to talk about the investigation.\nCooper had refused to reveal his source for the story but agreed to do so after a confidentiality agreement was waived. That came just before Cooper could have been sent to jail for not cooperating with the investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked her name and whether that constituted a crime.\nAnother reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, is in prison after refusing to disclose her source to investigators.\nIn September and October 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had spoken to Rove about the Plame matter and that Rove wasn't involved in the leak. McClellan refused for a third day Wednesday to discuss the denials of two years ago, saying that to do so would impinge on the ongoing criminal investigation of the leak.\nRove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, said Rove did not disclose Valerie Plame's name, a point that Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., called a distinction without a difference.\n"The fact that he didn't give her name, but identified the ambassador's wife ... doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who that is," Biden said on CNN's "Inside Politics." "If that occurred, at a minimum, that was incredibly bad judgment, warranting him being asked to leave."\nSens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said it's time for Rove to leave.\nWhite House allies weighed in, with expressions of support for Rove from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa.\nRepublican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said Rove was the victim of partisan political attacks by Democrats.\nAn e-mail by Cooper that surfaced over the weekend in Newsweek magazine said Rove spoke of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson as being someone who apparently works at the CIA and who arranged a trip for her husband to Africa.\nCooper's e-mail said Rove warned him away from the idea that Wilson's trip had been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney.\nThe RNC chairman said Rove "was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise."\nRove's conversation with Cooper took place five days after Plame's husband suggested in a New York Times op-ed piece that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.\nEight days after the op-ed piece, Plame's name and her connection to the CIA first appeared in a newspaper column by Robert Novak.\nThe column said two administration officials told Novak that Wilson's wife had suggested sending him to investigate whether Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. Cooper's byline appeared on an article a few days later naming Plame.