‘Anyone in the Bush administration who knowingly outed an undercover CIA agent should be hunted down and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. In fact, I’d favor … stringing up the culprit from one of those huge trees along the Washington Mall.”

Almost two years later, I still feel this way, and if that anyone includes Karl Rove – well, “The Architect” of Bush’s re-election will have designed his own scaffold. But nothing we’ve seen so far suggests Rove did anything wrong – wrong as in illegal, or even unethical.

Maybe Rove was part of some crafty Team Bush conspiracy to “out” Joe Wilson’s CIA undercover wife. Maybe Rove’s little chat with Time reporter Matt Cooper was a seemingly innocent piece of a malevolent, multipronged plan to punish Wilson for disputing the Bush White House on Iraq. Maybe the fact that Rove talked to Robert Novak before the columnist named Valerie Plame, as the media reported Friday, was, too. Maybe.

We’ll know if, or how, Rove’s words to Cooper or Novak fit into any grand scheme when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald issues his report or makes his case. But right now – after Newsweek’s report on the e-mail Cooper wrote after talking to Rove, after media reports on Rove’s possible conversation with Novak – Rove has nothing to apologize for.

In Cooper’s case, Rove was simply warning a reporter away from a bum story: Wilson’s implication that Vice President Dick Cheney was behind his Niger trip and then ignored his findings. Rove told Cooper that “not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an(d) suspect but so is the report.”

Rove didn’t initiate the call; Cooper called him on welfare reform. The Wilson issue came up at the end of a two-minute conversation. Also, says Rove’s lawyer, it was Cooper who broached the topic. Rove never uttered the name Valerie Plame, but here’s Cooper’s account of what he did say: “It was, KR said, Wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip.”

Rove gets credit for political magic, but here he managed to get a reporter to call him on another issue and changed the subject so he could out Plame in an offhand way without using her name. Cool, Karl, very cool.

Let’s assume Rove talked to Novak before Novak outed Plame. Again, Novak called Rove on another topic. Rove wasn’t leaking a story. Nor was he the one who uttered Plame’s name. As the New York Times reports, Novak told Rove all he knew, and Rove said, “I heard that, too.”

Again, he’s somehow managed to will a journalist to call him to discuss another issue and then willed the journalist to bring up the CIA agent’s name. The left calls Rove “Bush’s Brain.” Apparently he’s “Cooper’s Brain” and “Novak’s Brain,” too.

If he’s this cunning, he ought to be working for the CIA, not the president.

Not only that, but he achieved these conspiratorial feats by resorting to … the truth of the Niger issue.

Wilson has claimed that his wife’s job at the CIA had nothing to do with his Niger assignment. However, a unanimous Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Mrs. Wilson suggested Mr. Wilson for the job. Mr. Wilson further claimed that the White House had to know what he found in Niger. Yet Wilson told committee staff “he had no direct knowledge of how” the CIA handled his findings. According to the intelligence committee, the CIA believed that certain admissions by the government of Niger to Wilson confirmed rather than undercut the Niger-uranium intel: “Because CIA analysts did not believe that the report added any new information to clarify the issue … the CIA’s briefer did not brief (Cheney) on the report.”

As for the 16 Bush words on Iraq, Africa, uranium and the British government that triggered this whole hubbub, the Butler Commission in Great Britain last year made short work of Wilson’s claim that Bush lied: “We conclude,” its report stated, “that … the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister … were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union … was well-founded.”

Maybe the special prosecutor will someday come up with something on Karl Rove, but so far the guy with the explaining to do is Joe Wilson.