Slate
http://www.slate.com//id/2132350/The "Out to Lunch" Defense
Karl Rove's story doesn't make sense.
By John Dickerson
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005, at 7:26 PM ET
Another of my former Time magazine colleagues has talked to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. This time it's Viveca Novak, with whom I worked on some stories about the Valerie Plame leak case. According to news reports, Karl Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin has told Fitzgerald that a conversation he had with Novak led his client, Rove, to change his testimony to the grand jury in the CIA leak case.
I'm not buying it.
Rove first testified before the grand jury in February 2004. In that first visit, he said nothing about talking to Time's Matt Cooper. He also didn't mention Cooper in an earlier interview with the FBI. Then, eight months later, in October 2004, Rove returned to the grand jury to alter his earlier account and volunteered that he had talked to Cooper.
According to several witnesses who have been interviewed by Fitzgerald and who have talked to me about their testimony, he appears to be suspicious about that change in Rove's narrative. The special counsel seems to think Rove remembered his conversation with Cooper all along but only testified about it when it became clear that Cooper was going to be forced to give up Rove as his source. If Fitzgerald thinks Rove willfully held back on him, it could be the basis for a perjury or obstruction of justice charge.
Rove's lawyer says there's an innocent explanation. He says it was Viveca Novak's suggestion that Rove might have been her colleague Cooper's source that sent Rove and his lawyer to re-examine Rove's records. In their search, they found an e-mail Rove had sent, shortly after speaking with Cooper, to Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security adviser, telling Hadley about the conversation. After finding the e-mail, Rove revised his account to the grand jury.
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