National Journal‘s Murray Waas reports that Karl Rove was in fact columnist Robert Novak’s source for learning Valerie Plame’s identity, and that the two men, upon learning of a federal investigation, spoke and may have created a false cover story to hide the truth.
In other words, there’s mounting evidence that Novak and Rove not only lied to the FBI and grand jury, but they conspired to obstruct justice. Waas explains, with greater finesse:
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. . . .
Rove and Novak, investigators suspect, might have devised a cover story to protect Rove because the grand jury testimony of both men appears to support Rove’s contentions about how he learned about Plame.
Before the conversation, Waas notes, Novak’s story was that White House officials had given him Plame’s name and encouraged him to write about it. After news of the investigation was broken on Sept. 26, Novak’s story flipped. “Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this,” he said on Sept. 29.
Both men told investigators and the grand jury that in July 2003, Novak called Rove and asked him about an “unsubstantiated rumor” about Plame’s identity, and Rove said he had heard the same thing.
According to Waas, the investigators are having a hard time swallowing the story. After all, why would a guy with 46 years’ experience out a CIA operative based on himself and Rove hearing an “unsubstantiated rumor?”
