War Room - Salon.com

Monday, Nov 28, 2005 08:36 EST

From the prosecutor, more questions about Rove in the Plame case

A second Time reporter will testify.

By Tim Grieve

For Karl Rove, Thanksgiving leftovers aren't the only thing that's getting old. Time magazine reported over the weekend that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is talking with another one of its reporters about Rove's role in the Valerie Plame case.

Time says that Fitzgerald will depose Viveca Novak about conversations she had with Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, beginning in May 2004. That would be almost a year after Rove, Scooter Libby and one or more other administration officials leaked Plame's identity to reporters, including Novak's Time colleague Matthew Cooper.

As the New York Times notes this morning, the summer and fall of 2004 were a "significant time" for Rove: It was then, the Times says, that Rove claims to have searched for and found an e-mail message to then Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley that reminded him that he had had talked with Cooper about Plame in July 2003 -- a conversation that Rove failed to mention when he was initially interviewed in the investigation.

Of course, the summer and fall of 2004 were a "significant time" for Rove in other ways, too: He was in the final stretch to Election Day, a day on which voters would go to the polls knowing -- thanks to White House lies and media complicity -- far less than the truth about the role Rove, Libby and others played in revealing the identity of a CIA agent for the president's political gain.