It was not a headline story and was stuck in the Nation section.
Note another Rove lie (?) in this article and in the Newsweek piece I already posted:
Rove claims it was Wilson's wife that sent Wilson to Niger when in fact it was Cheney who requested the CIA look into the Iraq-Niger connection. Cheney instigated the trip, not Wilson's wife. Rove certainly knew that but was obviously trying to shop a story to the press that discredited Wilson and punished him at the same time.
Rove had 2003 talk with Time reporter
But he didn't name CIA agent, lawyer says
WASHINGTON -- White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.
Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife's identity as a means of retaliation.
The leak of Plame's name to the news media spawned a federal grand jury investigation that has been seeking to discover the origin of the disclosure. Cooper avoided jail time last week by agreeing to testify before the grand jury about conversations with his sources, while New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to discuss her confidential sources.
To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent's identity.
Cooper, according to an internal Time e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine, spoke with Rove before Novak's column was published.
In the conversation, Rove gave Cooper a ''big warning" that Wilson's assertions might not be entirely accurate and that it wasn't the director of the CIA or the vice president who sent Wilson on his trip. Rove apparently told Cooper that it was ''Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip," according to a story in Newsweek's July 18 issue.
Rove's conversation with Cooper could be significant because it indicates a White House official was discussing Plame before she was publicly named and could lead to evidence of how Novak learned her name. Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, has said Rove is not a target of the probe. 
