It makes no difference for our purposes whether Rove is legally culpable because he did or did not know that Plame was undercover. He was a very, very, very high level official in the White House and he shouldn't have been telling anyone anything about CIA agents for political reasons, particularly ones he knew worked in the field of weapons of mass destruction, period. He may have broken the law; the investigation will proceed apace whether we think he did or not. But regardless, the fact is that Rove conducted a smear operation in which a CIA agent was outed.
ETA: In a related entry from news from me, here's Mark Evanier's thoughts on reporter Judith Miller going to jail as a result of the same leak investigation. I think I agree with him, especially when he says:
the whole notion of Anonymous Sources seems to not mean what it once meant. Once upon a time, they were officials, mostly lower-ranked, risking their careers to make sure the public learned what was really going on in their government. These days, it's more often a matter of higher-ups being able to plant news stories of questionable accuracy without attribution. So much of this went on in The New York Times for a while that the paper felt it necessary to apologize for it and to promise that there would be less reliance on unnamed sources. If they've cut back, I sure haven't noticed...and by the way, though they didn't apologize specifically for her, the Times reporter who was most guilty of this -- of serving as a blind conduit for government smears and fibs -- was Judy Miller.
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