Rove controversy: No "there" there

Cliff May at The Corner is posting about the Karl Rove/ CIA leak controversy and is concluding that, with regard to Rove, it's nothing more than a tempest in a teapot. May suggests that Rove's comments to Time reporter Matt Cooper were made merely to dispute Joe Wilson's claim that Vice President Cheney sent him on the mission to Niger.

You remember Joe Wilson, right? He's the former U.S. ambassador who tried to discredit Bush's assertion during his state of the union address that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Africa. Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate this and reported publicly that he found evidence of no such attempt to acquire uranium on the part of Saddam and intimated that Bush was lying to the country. Of course, he immediately became the darling of the media until it was proven that Wilson was the liar.

Not only did British and French intelligence find Saddam was seeking uranium in Africa but it was also learned that Wilson had not been sent to Africa by Dick Cheney at all, but rather by his own wife who was a CIA operative. That's where Rove comes in. Rove was merely discrediting Wilson's lie that Cheney had sent him to Africa by telling Cooper that it was his wife that had sent him.

Legal experts agree that Rove broke no laws by revealing this to Cooper. So why all the hoopla? You don't think it's because the liberal media just really, really hates Rove and are frothing at the mouth to besmirch his character in any way possible, do you? Nah.

Remember how the press relentlessly went after Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger when he removed highly classified documents related to the September 11th investigation from the National Archives? Me neither.