Rove and Novak

The conventional wisdom at the moment is that if Karl Rove is indicted, the charges will be related to discrepancies between his testimony and that of TIME magazine's Matthew Cooper. There is something else to consider, however. The New York Times reports today something that Murray Waas reported way back in July--that Robert Novak has cooperated with Fitzgerald's investigation. From the Times:

A critical early success for Fitzgerald was
winning the cooperation of Robert D. Novak,
the Chicago Sun-Times columnist who named
Plame in a July 2003 story and attributed
key information to "two senior administration
officials." Legal sources said Novak avoided a
fight and quietly helped the special counsel's
inquiry, although neither the columnist nor
his attorney have said so publicly.

What strikes me as potentially noteworthy about this paragraph is not the fact that Novak has cooperated, but the fact that Novak's cooperation was "a critical early success for Fitzgerald." Remember, Fitzgerald didn't take over the investigation until January 2004. That raises the following seemingly important question: was Novak interviewed by Fitzgerald's predecessors? If so, did he give a different account then than the one he eventually gave to Fitzgerald? In other words, did Novak first provide a cover story and then, under pressure from Fitzgerald, provide an alternate account?

So far, leaks regarding Novak's testimony have closely tracked the story he provided in his column on October 1, 2003. In that column, Novak wrote:

During a long conversation with a senior
administration official, I asked why Wilson
was assigned the mission to Niger. He said
Wilson had been sent by the CIA's
counterproliferation section at the suggestion
of one of its employees, his wife. It was an
offhand revelation from this official, who is no
partisan gunslinger. When I called another
official for confirmation, he said: "Oh, you
know about it." The published report that
somebody in the White House failed to plant
this story with six reporters and finally found
me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.

Novak also added:

How big a secret was it? It was well known
around Washington that Wilson's wife worked
for the CIA. Republican activist Clifford May
wrote Monday, in National Review Online,
that he had been told of her identity by a
non-government source before my column
appeared and that it was common knowledge.
Her name, Valerie Plame, was no secret either,
appearing in Wilson's "Who's Who in America"
entry.

This story always looked suspiciously like a set of White House talking points to me. Especially in light of what Novak told Tim Phelps and Knut Royce in this July 21, 2003 Newsday article.

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had
come to him with the information. "I didn't
dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They
thought it was significant, they gave me the
name and I used it."

Now consider this from Murray Waas:

Also of interest to investigators have been
a series of telephone contacts between Novak
and Rove, and other White House officials, in
the days just after press reports first disclosed
the existence of a federal criminal investigation
as to who leaked Plame's identity. Investigators
have been concerned that Novak and his
sources might have conceived or co-ordinated
a cover story to disguise the nature of their
conversations.

Given the sudden change in Novak's story and the suspicious similarity between Novak's account and that of Cliff May (a similarly partisan hack), it's not surprising that prosecutors were concerned that Novak and the White House may have concocted a cover story.

Given what happend to Judith Miller, we should at least consider the possibility that Fitzgerald managed to poke holes in Novak's original story and eventually got Novak to change his tune. If so, that would be very bad for Rove (and possibly others). It might also explain the near total silence from Novak regarding his role in the investigation.

It's also worth noting that the version of events Novak provides in his Oct. 1 column, if true, should have made it abundantly clear to Rove that he was Novak's confirming source. According to Murray Waas, Rove did not initially admit to investigators or the President that he was one of Novak's sources. Waas wrote:

Then there is the matter of the source-reporter
relationship between Rove and Novak. Rove, in
giving his assurances to the president in the fall
of 2003, did not say he had served as a
corroborating source for Novak's column about
Plame. Sources close to Rove say he simply did
not know at the time that Novak had used him
to corroborate the Plame information published
in the July 14 column. Rove did not discover
that until after his initial interview with the
FBI, sources say.

After October 1, 2003, Rove would have had no excuse for not knowing that he was Novak's confirming source. After all, Novak basically lays out his entire conversation with Rove in his Oct. 1 column. So if Rove's FBI interview took place after Oct. 1, that doesn't bode well for him either. Long story short, if Fitzgerald is considering perjury, false statement, or obstruction charges against Rove, he may have grounds other than Rove's failure to mention his conversation with Matt Cooper.

On an unrelated note, Raw Story is now reporting that Cheney aide David Wurmser provided Valerie Plame's name to Scooter Libby and Stephen Hadley in June 2003. The story claims that within a week of providing this information, Wurmser was ordered by "executives in the office of the vice president" to leak Plame's identity to reporters. Needless to say, if any of this is true, it's terrible news for Libby.