I'm kind if surprised no one has suggested this yet (though someone may have and I just haven't seen it).
Is it possible that Jason Leopold was set up in much the same way that James Hatfield was set up back in 2000?
Recall that James Hatfield, author of Fortunate Son, came out with the scoop that Bush had been convicted of cocaine possession. It was big news for about 24 hours, until the story collapsed because (1) conclusive refutation of the facts of the allegation were produced and (2) it came out that Hatfield had a prior conviction for contracting a murder.
There has been much speculation ever since that Hatfield's "scoop" (which, btw, Hatfield claimed came from Karl Rove) was actually a set up designed to innoculate Bush against a growing story about his past drug use. If so, it worked pretty well. After Hatfield's scoop collapsed no serious journalist approached the question of Bush's drug use ever again. No one wanted to be accused of being the next James Hatfield.
It's a brilliant political strategy. If you have some embarassing information that you know will eventually come out, you release that information yourself but release it to an easily discredited source. You then pounce on the scoop, rip the scooper to shreds and leave any enterprising scoopster scared to death to even approach the topic again.
Could Jason Leopold's "scoop" be of a similar nature? Could Rove have been hoping that the blogosphere and the media would leap on this leak and thus allow him to tear into it and scare people off the story?
If so, it looks like he failed this time. Virtually no one took the bait and thus no ones credibility is left tattered by this scoop (other than Leopold's and Truthout's). The firestorm didn't come about because a lot of people greeted it with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Nice try Karl.