A Rove-Novak-May Trifecta?

In an article in the National Journal, Murray Waas renews a line of speculation that I have long been partial to: that just as the Plame investigation was getting underway, Karl Rove and Robert Novak devised a cover story to minimize Rove's potential legal and political exposure. Here's Waas:

On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known
that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate
who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame,
columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior
adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him
from being harmed by the investigation, according to people
with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony
of both men.

Suspicious that Rove and Novak might have devised a cover
story during that conversation to protect Rove, federal
investigators briefed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft on
the matter in the early stages of the investigation in fall 2003,
according to officials with direct knowledge of those briefings.

Waas explains why investigators were suspicious:

[T]hey believed that after the September 29 call, Novak shifted
his account of his July 9, 2003, conversation with Rove to show
that administration officials had a passive role in leaking Plame's
identity.

On July 22, 2003 -- eight days after the publication of Novak's
column on Plame -- Newsday reporters Timothy Phelps and
Knut Royce quoted Novak as telling them in an interview that
it was White House officials who encouraged him to write about
Plame. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," Newsday quoted
Novak as saying about Plame. "They thought it was significant.
They gave me the name, and I used it." . . .

Novak did not speak publicly on the matter again until
September 29 -- later on the same day as his conversation with
Rove in which he assured the president's chief political aide that
he would protect him in the forthcoming Justice Department
investigation. What Novak said publicly was different from the
earlier account in Newsday:

". . . Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this.
In July, I was interviewing a senior administration official on
Ambassador [Joseph C.] Wilson's report [on his Niger trip],
when [the official] told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a
CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction." . . .

Rove has testified that he simply told the columnist that he had
heard much the same information about Plame, which perhaps
was nothing more than an unsubstantiated rumor. Novak's
account of the July 9 call matched Rove's.

Under Rove's version of events, which was corroborated by Novak, Rove did not leak information he learned from official sources; he merely passed along an unsubstantiated rumor, an idle piece of cocktail chatter he'd heard from a source he could no longer remember.

September 29, 2003 was an eventful day. In his morning press briefing, Scott McClellan was pelted with questions about the rumored criminal referral from the CIA. Novak called up Rove and assured him that "you are not going to get burned." That afternoon, Novak went on national television and made a number of statements that seemed to contradict what he had said previously; he seemingly offered a revised, more benign version of events.

But that wasn't all that happened on September 29. That morning, Cliff May posted an article on the National Review website in which he made the following claim:

On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and
other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame,
as a CIA operative.

That wasn't news to me. I had been told that--but not by
anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from
someone who formerly worked in the government and he
mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it
was something that insiders were well aware of.

Notice how May's story is virtually identical to the one Rove told FBI investigators shortly thereafter. May claimed to have learned about Plame through idle chatter and suggested that it was common knowledge. Indeed, May's story meshed so well with Novak's new and improved story that Novak cited May's article in his column two days later:

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.

Why is this significant? Well, as I've noted before, there is reason to doubt the veracity of May's claim. First, to my knowledge, May has never repeated this claim publicly. Nor, for that matter, have his fellow Cornerites. If this claim were true, I would have expected them to be screaming it from the rooftops for the last three years. Second, May admitted to David Corn last year that he was interviewed by the FBI in this case. Yet in a recent letter to Scooter Libby's defense team, Patrick Fitzgerald wrote the following:

While we do not intend to provide discovery in this regard . . .
we advised you during the Jan. 18 conference call that we were
notaware off any reporters who knew prior to July 14, 2003, that
Valerie Plame,ambassadorr Wilson's wife, worked at the CIA,
other than: Bob Woodward, Judith Miller, Bob Novak, Walter
Pincus and Matthew Cooper.

Notice whose name is conspicuously absent from that list. That's right: Cliff May. A number of bloggers (including myself and Tom Maguire) pointed this out over three months ago, and at least to my knowledge, May has never explained this apparent contradiction or re-affirmed his original story.

Isn't it at least a little interesting that May made this questionable claim--a claim that meshes so well with Rove and Novak's stories--on the very same day that Rove and Novak had their phone conversation and Novak went public with his new and improved version of events? Rove, Novak, and May's stories seem to build off and support one another quite well. Perhaps that's because they're all true. Or perhaps it's just a coincidence. But, given the circumstances, it seems a little fishy to me.