White House correspondent Matthew Cooper gives lecture at Princeton University
By: Robert M. Bernstein
Should a journalist threatened with imprisonment violate a court order to testify before a grand jury in order to protect a source?
Time magazine White House correspondent Matthew Cooper woke up on July 6, 2004, prepared to head to jail to honor a confidentiality agreement with his secret source, senior presidential adviser Karl Rove, in the investigation of a leak of a covert CIA agent’s name.
In a Monday lecture at Princeton University, Mr. Cooper chronicled his role in what has become one of the most high-profile political intrigues of the Bush administration.
Mr. Cooper escaped jail time only at the last moment in July, when Mr. Rove faxed him a waiver releasing him from his confidentiality agreement.
His involvement began in July 2003, three months after the fall of Baghdad, when former ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote a column refuting the claim that Saddam Hussein sought to purchase uranium ore in Africa, an impetus for going to war that the president cited in his State of the Union address preceding the U.S. invasion.
Mr. Cooper, who had just been assigned to cover the Bush White House for Time, was eager to find out what had happened after the White House admitted that the president should not have made that assertion in his speech.
"Suddenly, everyone wanted to know how these words got in the State of the Union in the first place," Mr. Cooper said. "This started a huge investigation, a feeding frenzy, if you will."
On July 11, Mr. Cooper said he talked to Mr. Rove on the phone for about two minutes about how the identity of Valerie Plame, the wife of Mr. Wilson, was leaked. "It was not much different from a lot of other phone calls I’ve had in the past it was done on the basis of confidentiality," Mr. Cooper said.
During this phone call, Mr. Cooper said, Mr. Rove told him that it was Mr. Wilson’s wife who had sent him on the Africa trip and that she worked for the agency. Mr. Cooper did not have the opportunity to ask further questions.
"I’ve already said too much. I’ve got to go," Mr. Rove said, and he hung up the phone, Mr. Cooper told the Princeton audience.
Mr. Cooper said he immediately notified his bureau chief through e-mail. "I just spoke to Rove on double-secret background," Mr. Cooper wrote.
Pundits would later try to analyze what this meant and how a journalist should make use of double-secret background information. "It was of course just a reference to ‘Animal House’ and the double-secret probation that John Belushi had been placed on," Mr. Cooper laughed, referring to the movie.
Mr. Cooper said he later spoke on the record with I. Lewis Libby, top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby gave a statement that the vice president had not known about Mr. Wilson’s trip to Africa, Mr. Cooper said.
After heightened calls for a deeper investigation into the White House leak, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as special prosecutor for the case.
Mr. Cooper lived in anticipation of a subpoena, because there is no protection at the federal level for journalistic privilege.
"Like a lot of journalists, I had only a vague idea about what the right of journalists are in avoiding testimony in a grand jury setting," he said.
He received permission to testify about his conversation with Mr. Libby, and Mr. Cooper said he thought his legal troubles were over. Mr. Fitzgerald, though, issued Mr. Cooper another subpoena that was much more sweeping in scope and called for all of his notes, and a joint subpoena was issued for Time magazine to hand over all of Mr. Cooper’s notes.
"Time handed over my notes and among the notes, was this double-secret background e-mail that exposed Rove as my source, and then I’m faced with a very odd decision," Mr. Cooper said. "Do I go to jail to protect a source that’s already been outted?"
On the morning Mr. Cooper was set to go to jail, a Wall Street Journal article quoted Mr. Rove’s lawyer as saying that Mr. Rove didn’t want that for Mr. Cooper. Mr. Rove’s lawyers provided Mr. Cooper with a confidentiality waiver, allowing him to testify before the grand jury.
"Some critics thought I was Neville Chamberlain and succumbed to pressure to turn in a source, and others wondered why I had fretted in the first place since my source had already been exposed," Mr. Cooper said. "I can only say that at the end of the day, I did the right thing from a journalism standpoint."

