"then informally discussed the information with a Time magazine reporter days before the story broke".
If this is correct, he shouldn't have done that.
Unfortunate for him, and others now, "informally" doesn't work here, and has created predictable results.
His "informal" discussion has already been made public in the Cooper e-mail. It amounted to nothing. Just like the rest of this story...with regard to Rove. Now the real question is...just who will the investigation nail?
Go back to DU.
Wrong. If he learned the info from a non-government source, it was no longer a secret. Passing along info you get from a REPORTER cannot, by definition, constitute revealing "confidential" info.