2d reporter contradicts Libby at trial

WASHINGTON -- Reporter Matt Cooper testified yesterday that he thought I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby had confirmed that a prominent war critic's wife worked at the CIA but acknowledged he never asked the White House aide where he'd heard that.

Cooper, Time magazine's White House reporter at the time, became the second reporter to testify at the CIA leak trial that Libby was a source for their learning that Valerie Plame Wilson, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a CIA operative. Libby claims he only told reporters he had heard that information from other reporters.

Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, is on trial on charges he lied to the FBI and a grand jury about his conversations with reporters about Plame Wilson and obstructed the investigation into how her identity leaked to the public in 2003.

Cooper's appearance allowed defense attorney William Jeffress to ask repeatedly about President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, because Cooper identified Rove as the first official to tell him about Plame Wilson's job at the CIA. Cooper said Rove told him that Wilson's wife, rather than Cheney, was responsible for sending Wilson to Niger in 2002.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson claimed in print and on television that what he learned on the trip debunked a report that Iraq was trying to buy uranium there for nuclear weapons. He said Cheney should have learned of his findings long before Bush used the uranium story in his January 2003 State of Union speech as a justification for war with Iraq.

In his opening statement, defense attorney Theodore Wells claimed the White House was trying in 2003 to blame Libby for the leak in order to protect Rove.

Cooper recalled a July 12, 2003, telephone conversation in which he asked Libby whether Wilson's wife worked at CIA and was behind the Niger trip.

Cooper testified yesterday that Libby responded, "Yeah, I've heard that too," or "Yeah, I've heard something like that, too."

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked whether Libby said where he heard that. "Not in any way," Cooper replied.

Did he say he heard it from other reporters? "No," Cooper said.

Cooper said he didn't take notes and that he had posed the question "off the record."

Libby attorney Jeffress pounded on Cooper's acknowledgments and also drew the jury's attention to the extensive notes and memos to Time editors that Cooper produced after his talk with Rove.

Jeffress asked Cooper if he ever asked Libby where he'd heard about Wilson's wife.

"I did not," Cooper replied.

Jeffress asked Cooper how he could take his exchange with Libby as confirmation.

"I took it as confirmation," Cooper said.

Earlier yesterday, the first journalist to contradict Libby's version, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, acknowledged she could not be "absolutely, absolutely certain" that she first heard about Plame Wilson from Libby. But she added, "I have no memory of a prior discussion with anyone else" and her notes do not reflect any prior discussion.