WASHINGTON (AFP) - Top White House aide Karl Rove discussed a former US ambassador and his
CIA agent wife with a Time magazine reporter, according to a report.




The Newsweek weekly quoted Rove lawyer Robert Luskin as confirming that Rove was the source who gave information to Time reporter Matt Cooper under a pledge of confidentiality, and last week released him to testify about that conversation to a grand jury.

Cooper had been ordered by a US federal judge to testify before the grand jury investigating whether the agent's identity was illegally leaked.

Rove,
President George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff, has never publicly acknowledged talking to any reporter about former ambassador Joseph Wilson or his wife, Valerie Plame.

And Luskin told Newsweek last week that his client "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA."

Plame's was first published in a column by veteran reporter Robert Novak in 2003, which cited senior administration officials.

Wilson claimed she was outed as punishment for his contradiction of Bush's assertion in the 2003 State of the Union address that
Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Africa.

Miller researched the story, but didn't write it, and Cooper only mentioned it in passing.