Jason Leopold and Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t
Three years ago, Robert Luskin, the attorney who defended White House Political Adviser Karl Rove in the CIA leak case, made a startling discovery: a July 2003 email Rove sent to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that proved Rove was far more involved in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and the campaign to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, than he had let on during interviews with federal investigators and in testimony before a federal grand jury.
Curiously, the email Rove sent to Hadley that Luskin had found never turned up during an exhaustive document search ordered a year earlier, in September 2003, by Alberto Gonzales. At the time, Gonzales, who was White House counsel, enjoined all White House staff members to turn over any communications pertaining to Plame Wilson and her husband, a vocal critic of the Iraq war, who had accused the Bush administration of twisting pre-war Iraq intelligence. Gonzales’s order to turn over documents and emails came 12 hours after former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had informed him that the Justice Department was launching an investigation into the leak.