Bush mad at Rove in ‘03, sources say

WASHINGTON – An angry President Bush rebuked chief political guru Karl Rove two years ago for his role in the Valerie Plame affair, sources told the New York Daily News.

“He made his displeasure known to Karl,” a presidential counselor told the News. “He made his life miserable about this.”

Bush has nevertheless remained doggedly loyal to Rove, who friends and even political adversaries acknowledge is the architect of the president’s rise from baseball owner to leader of the free world.

As special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald nears a decision on whether to issue indictments in his two-year probe, Bush has already circled the wagons around Rove.

“Karl is fighting for his life,” said a key Bush official, “but anything he did was done to help George W. Bush. The president knows that and appreciates that.”

Other sources confirmed, however, that Bush was initially furious with Rove in 2003 when his deputy chief of staff conceded he had talked to the press about the Plame leak.

Bush has always known that Rove often talks with reporters anonymously and he generally approved of such contacts, one source said. But the president felt Rove and other members of the White House damage-control team did a clumsy job in their campaign to discredit Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, the ex-diplomat who criticized Bush’s claim that Iraq tried to buy weapons-grade uranium in Niger.