US:Often in the history of White House scandals it's not the crime but the cover-up that causes the most trouble.
Karl Rove, political adviser to President Bush, may not even have committed a crime when he spoke to a journalist about a covert CIA operative Valerie Plame.
But as proof of Mr Rove's role in a growing controversy over the leak of the CIA agent's job emerged yesterday, reporters assailed White House spokesman Scott McClellan over his earlier denials that Mr Rove had any role in the "outing" of the operative.
Indeed, Mr McClellan had said that any suggestion Mr Rove was involved was "ridiculous".
Newsweek provided evidence yesterday that Mr Rove in fact discussed the CIA operative with a Time magazine reporter shortly before she was first named as a covert agent in a newspaper column on July 14th, 2003.
Newsweek published the text of an e-mail sent by Matthew Cooper of Time to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy, on July 11th, 2003, about a conversation he had with Mr Rove.
The two talked about a controversy over published assertions by retired US ambassador Joseph Wilson that he found no evidence, on a CIA-requested mission to Niger, that Iraq was trying to buy uranium there, contradicting what Mr Bush had subsequently asserted in a speech justifying war with Iraq.
The e-mail said: "Subject: Rove/P&C [ personal and confidential]. Spoke to Rove on double super-secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ... please don't source this to Rove or even WH [ White House]".
Mr Rove, wrote Cooper, offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson", and that Mr Wilson's trip had not been authorised by CIA director George Tenet or vice-president Dick Cheney.
Rather "it was, KR said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [ weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorised the trip".
Mr Wilson's wife is Valerie Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's directorate of operations counter-proliferation division.
The e-mail concluded that Mr Rove asserted "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[ d] suspect but so is the report. He [ Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[ m] Niger ..."
Three days after Mr Rove spoke to Cooper, conservative columnist Robert Novak, citing two administration sources, published Valerie Plame's name, a disclosure that ruined Ms Plame's career as a covert operative and led Mr Wilson to charge that the White House was trying to discredit his Niger mission as some sort of junket.
The leak led to a federal grand jury investigation. Disclosing the secret role of a CIA operative is a crime but only if the official doing so acts deliberately, knowing that the person is a covert agent.
Cooper agreed last week to testify before the grand jury about his sources, but New York Times reporter Judith Miller was imprisoned for refusing to do so.
Mr Rove's conversation with Cooper for the first time links a White House official to a leak about Mr Wilson's wife before she was named publicly.
The involvement of Mr Bush's top political strategist is a political embarrassment for the White House, especially as Mr Bush's spokesman had earlier denied Mr Rove's involvement.
Mr Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, has said he was informed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Mr Rove is not a target of his investigation. He told the Washington Post yesterday that Mr Rove did not know Ms Plame's name and was not actively trying to push the information into the public realm. He had discussed the matter in confidence with Cooper in passing.
"This was not an effort to encourage Time to disclose her identity," he said. "What he was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren't true."
Mr McClellan told White House correspondents yesterday no one wanted to get to the bottom of this more than Mr Bush.
Mr Rove's assertion to Cooper that there was "still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest" in acquiring uranium from Niger came just days before CIA director George Tenet issued a statement taking the blame for a misleading sentence in Mr Bush's 2003 State of the Union address asserting that there was intelligence showing Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium.