Back on the Stand:Rove's latest trip to the grand jury

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Rove's latest trip to the grand jury leaves his fate in the Plame leak case as mysterious as ever.
It was August 2004, and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was zeroing in on I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby as the leaker in the Valerie Plame case. Fitzgerald had been quizzing reporters, searching for evidence that the vice president's chief of staff had leaked the identity of the CIA covert operative to a news organization in an attempt to undermine her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been an irritant to the Bush administration. Wary of identifying their confidential sources, reporters from big news organizations like The Washington Post and NBC were talking to Fitzgerald under strict ground rules aimed at narrowing the scope of his questions.

Matt Cooper, Time magazine's deputy Washington bureau chief at the time, agreed to tell Fitzgerald about his contacts with Libby—but not about his conversations with anyone else. Given permission to testify by Libby, who waived the usual reporter-source confidentiality agreement, Cooper met with Fitzgerald at the Washington office of Cooper's lawyer, First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams. Yes, Cooper acknowledged to the prosecutor, he had spoken to Libby. And, yes, Libby had confirmed that Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and had played a role in sending Wilson to Africa on a fact-finding trip aimed at discovering whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq was trying to buy uranium from the country of Niger. But according to Cooper, Libby had been offhand, passive—"Yeah, I've heard that, too," Libby allegedly replied when Cooper asked him about the role played by Wilson's wife. In other words, Libby was not Cooper's original source. Well, then, who was?

Fitzgerald seemed to be "surprised," according to a knowledgeable source who declined to be identified discussing a criminal investigation. He broke off the questioning to consult with a colleague, and then began to question Cooper over and over, methodically trying to make sure he wasn't missing something. The prosecutor had to wonder: was someone else in the administration besides Libby a player in this drama? Fitzgerald is the sort of prosecutor whose very being is offended by deception and who will go to great lengths to pursue the truth. Ultimately, Fitzgerald discovered that Cooper's original source was Karl Rove, the president's political adviser who last month stepped down from his job as White House deputy chief of staff to focus on the November elections.

Last October, Fitzgerald indicted Libby for lying to a grand jury. (Libby has mounted an all-out defense against the charges). But the dogged prosecutor is still pursuing Rove. Last week Rove testified before a grand jury for the fifth time in a little more than two years. Rove's lawyer, Bob Luskin, says that Rove is not a "target" of the grand jury—meaning that the prosecutor has not warned him that an indictment is imminent. It is impossible to know if Fitzgerald will make a case against Rove. But it is possible now to trace how Fitzgerald came to suspect Rove of not telling the whole truth. The Bush administration has been particularly quick to trigger leak investigations. Often, these probes in high-profile cases are intended to punish political enemies. But this is one that has boomeranged.




http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12554162/site/newsweek/