War Room - Salon.com

Thursday, Apr 27, 2006 11:46 EDT

Rove and the grand jury: A Bob Novak angle?

The New York Times says that the columnist who outed Plame has been before the grand jury recently.

By Tim Grieve

Maybe it's a lesson on why reporters shouldn't bury their leads. Or maybe it's a lesson on why bloggers should read all the way to the end of a story. Either way, we're embarrassed to admit that Dan Froomkin caught something we didn't in the very last sentence of today's New York Times story on Karl Rove's grand jury testimony.

As we reported Wednesday, Robert Luskin said that his client's latest testimony concerned "a matter raised since Mr. Rove's last appearance in October 2005." We knew about two things that have happened since Rove's October grand jury appearance: Bob Woodward came forward to say that someone had leaked Valerie Plame's identity to him back in 2003, and we all learned about the way in which Viveca Novak apparently tipped off Luskin to Rove's leak of Plame's identity to Time's Matthew Cooper.

Well, it turns out there was at least one more post-October development: In the very last line of her Times story today, Anne Kornblut says that Robert Novak "has testified to the grand jury since Mr. Rove's last appearance in October 2005." Why? When? Kornblut doesn't say; she doesn't even say how she knows that Novak testified.

Novak was the first reporter to put Plame's identity into print. We know the second source for his outing column was Rove; the identity of the first source, described only as a "senior administration official" who isn't a "partisan gunslinger," remains one of the central mysteries of the case. Novak said the other day that Fitzgerald has known the answer "for years," but he wouldnt say much else. "I'm not going to tell you because it's none of your damn business," he said. We can only presume that he was a little more forthcoming under oath.