Wilson: Bush 'Ought to Keep His Word,' Fire Rove

TAPPER: President Bush said that if anybody was found to have broken the law, they would be fired or dealt with. Do you think that phrasing was purposeful? The idea that he would say if they had broken the law as opposed to just if they had been involved in some sort of contribution to the leak?

WILSON: My understanding is last year he actually said that anybody who was involved in the leak would be fired and now we know that Karl Rove was involved in the leak. But I don't have the transcript of what he may have said or how they may be finessing it. The fact remains, however, that the president has indicated, in my judgment he indicated, that anybody involved in the leak would be fired. And the president who prides himself on being a man of his word really ought to keep his word to the American people and fire Karl Rove.

TAPPER: Well, I think his pledge actually was specifically if the law had been broken.

WILSON: I think we need to go back then and take a look at the transcripts from '04 because I think there's no ambiguity on that. That there are a number of instances where he was specifically asked the question "Would he be fired," and he said yes. And breaking the law was unincluded -- it was leaking the name.

TAPPER: The other thing the Republicans are putting out there is that Karl Rove wasn't leaking, he was trying to dissuade a reporter from writing an inaccurate story based on your op-ed.

WILSON: That's curious because, of course, my opinion piece said that the 16 words should never have been in the [president's 2003] State of the Union address. The day after my opinion piece appeared, the White House said that the 16 words shouldn't rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address. In that e-mail, it says, "You should wait because George Tenet is going to say something." George Tenet did say something later in the week, and what he said was the 16 words should not have been in the State of the Union address. So it's hard to see how you make the argument that they were going to say something that was contradictory to the opinion piece I wrote. And indeed, they've never retracted the fact that the 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union address. If people remember, within a week, Stephen Hadley offered to resign because he had found in his files two faxes and a memorandum of a telephone conversation in which the director of Central Intelligence told him that he did not want the president to be a witness of fact on this case -- the uranium sales from Niger to Iraq -- because, he says, the evidence is weak and he believed that the British had exaggerated the case. That represented the view of the American Intelligence community.

TAPPER: In your op-ed, you state that, "it did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." Is that your belief of how your report or your debriefs were received by the CIA?