Did Rove forge his email to Hadley about Cooper?

Here's the case for forgery - what do you think?

Questions
There are several aspects to the Rove-to-Hadley email about Cooper that seem plain odd to me:

1. Why did the email say Cooper called to talk about welfare reform when Cooper says he called to talk about the disparaging of Wilson?
   
2. Why did Rove send an email to Hadley at all when Cooper says Rove was in a hurry to go on vacation?
   
3. Why was the Rove message, itself, so weirdly worded? What on earth was he trying to say to Hadley: Rove talked to a reporter, but didn't take the bait? He did take the bait. Why lie to Hadley? Did Hadley need to know every time Rove spoke to a reporter about Wilson? Wasn't Libby the point guy on that sort of thing?
   
4. Why did the email turn up when it did? Others have covered this strange aspect in detail.
   

Quotes from Cooper (link)

1. To me this suggested that Rove may have testified that we had talked about welfare reform, and indeed earlier in the week, I may have left a message with his office asking if I could talk to him about welfare reform. But I can't find any record of talking about it with him on July 11, and I don't recall doing so.
   
2. I believe a woman answered the phone and said words to the effect that Rove wasn't there or was busy before going on vacation. But then, I recall, she said something like, "Hang on," and I was transferred to him. I recall saying something like, "I'm writing about Wilson," before he interjected. "Don't get too far out on Wilson," he told me.
   
3. I have a distinct memory of Rove ending the call by saying, "I've already said too much.
   
4. Did Rove say that she worked at the "agency" on "WMD"? Yes. When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible?
   

Email text from AP story (link)
"Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming," Rove wrote in the e-mail to Hadley.

"When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."


Case for forgery outline

1. Rove, Libby et al had a plan to leak Plame's name to the press - through Novak and Miller, for example. Rove and Libby would be available to confirm as in "I heard that, too.'
   
2. Rove violated the plan by leaking the Plame info to Cooper. Rove realized during the call that he messed up.
   
3. Rove thought that getting the information declassified ASAP would help solve his problem.
   
4. Hadley was the point guy to get the information declassified according to their plan.
   
5. Rove's original email to Hadley was an emergency request to declassify the Plame info ASAP.
   
6. Rove had the original email to Hadley changed in the body text to render the email somewhat helpful to his 'I forgot it' defense. The newly forged email would keep the original headers and have the same number of bytes so that the email and the mail logs would look authentic. The newly forged email would look weird because the bytes have to be the same.
   
7. Fitz interviewed Adam Levine and reviewed the email Rove sent to Levine after the Cooper interview but before going on vacation. Is Fitz looking at Levine because of the email tampering?
   
8. Fitz is interviewing Susan Ralston again according to Rawstory. Is it about the forged email?
   

Other links

• billmon
  
• anonymous liberal
  
• tmpcafe
  

his goose is cooked.

It is nearly impossible to generate a fraudulent e-mail because the header is time-stamped and sequenced in multiple servers.

If they just looked at the mail logs and keep the byte counts the same, Rove would be okay.

They have a chance to get a copy from a backup on any of the servers it passed through. In addition, they can get a copy from Hadley's mail server for every day the email sat on his server and they did a backup.

My friend Susan wants to know what Hadley's reply email said.

Nothing would surprise me.