Rove May Have Been Source for Novak

I have been following the phony WMD story in Iraq and the subsequent outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame for three years and nine months. I was wondering when Bob Novak would reenter the picture.

The bottom line of today's story is that it may turn out that Who's Who won't be much of an alibi for Novak after all, not that any of us following these events ever bought that story (Mrs. Joe Wilson worked under Valerie Plame in her CIA work; believe me, the exact name Novak used is a big deal). I freely admit I've lost track of the multiple stories that have been put out by the White House (probably through Rove himself) and the creative licenses taken by friends of Bush, but I have no doubt a bulldog like Patrick Fitzgerald is chasing down and bagging most of these multiple versions in the course of his investigation (including Rove's and Libby's serial memory lapses). Murray Waas has the story (hat tip to TPMMuckraker):

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.

In the early days of the CIA leak probe, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was briefed on a crucial conversation between Robert Novak and Karl Rove.

Suspicious that Rove and Novak might have devised a cover story during that conversation to protect Rove, federal investigators briefed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft on the matter in the early stages of the investigation in fall 2003, according to officials with direct knowledge of those briefings.

Ashcroft oversaw the CIA-Plame leak probe for three months until he recused himself and allowed Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to be named to take over the investigation on December 30, 2003. Ashcroft received routine briefings about the status of the investigation from October to December of that year.

Sources said that Ashcroft received a special briefing on the highly sensitive issue of the September 29 conversation between Novak and Rove because of the concerns of federal investigators that a well-known journalist might have been involved in an effort to not only protect a source but also work in tandem with the president's chief political adviser to stymie the FBI.

I suspect the above story is reasonably accurate but it's important to take all of this with a grain of salt. One way to look at this is to think of all the multiple versions Bush has given our nation about why we're in Iraq and what is actually happening there. Iraq is easier to see simply because everything is out in the open and there is only so much Bush can say where he won't be laughed out of the room. What Bush says and what the reality is have not often matched in the last five years.

Dirty games behind closed doors in an administration famous for being the most secretive in our lifetime are much more difficult to assess. But I can't deny that the story here has a certain plausibility that matches the arrogance that we have come to expect from Mr. Novak. Now it would be fine by me if Novak is somehow innocent in this affair. The real issue is what happened in the White House in the summer and fall of 2003; and who did what and when. And the issue beyond that is the fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have still not been held accountable for deceiving our nation when making their case for war with Iraq. The intelligence was manipulated. We know that now. And we are still waiting for real investigations of that side of the story.