Remember the other day when a lawyer-source said Rove learned about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity from a reporter? That's changed a bit today.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony said Sunday that Rove learned about the CIA officer either from the media or from someone in government who said the information came from a journalist. The lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because the federal investigation is continuing. (my emphasis.)

Shorter version: Rove heard it from Libby or someone else on Cheney's staff who heard it from Judith Miller.

I think this is consistent with what Libby told Fitzgerald....that he heard it from Judith Miller, maybe on July 8 when they met in D.C. But, is that really true, or did it happen the other way around? [See this Newsday article mentioning Miller's DC meeting with an "unnamed government official, it's my speculation it was Libby.]

And, if Miller told Libby, where did she learn it? Did someone leak a classified document to her that contained the information?

Libby is not only Cheney's Chief of Staff, but his advisor on national security issues as well. It's a little hard to believe he wouldn't have seen a classified document with the Plame information in it. Maybe everyone in the White House Iraq Group saw it. And where's John Hannah been lately?

[Note: Since this source says he's familiar with Rove's testimony, not that he's reviewed Rove's grand jury transcript, I assume this is someone associated with Rove's criminal defense lawyer, Robert Luskin, as opposed to a Government lawyer source.]

Fitzgerald deposed Matthew Cooper about his conversations with Libby ages ago. That Cooper confirmed Libby was a source of Valerie Plame's identity is not news to Fitzgerald. But...now follow the dots. Libby was probably Judith Miller's source. The question is what did he tell her, and did he tell her more than he told Cooper - enough to implicate others in Cheney's office and possibly Cheney himself.

Another question is where and when did Rove and Libby get their information about Valerie Plame Wilson - was it from a classified document, which one, who gave it to them and when did they first see it? And was their leak of it to Cooper and other reporters an intentional attempt to smear Wilson by outing his wife?

I'm keeping my eye on Fitzgerald's bigger picture.

Another read: Richard Sale of UPI in February, 2004: Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe.

More Here:

• Rove-Plame Speculation Update

• Lewis Libby and the Valerie Plame Investigation

• Where Did Karl Rove Get His Information?

Update: Today's Meet the Press transcript of Cooper is here. Video up shortly on Crooks and Liars here.

Matthew Cooper's Time Magazine article is out on his recollection of his call with Karl Rove. [The free press release with many details is here. The full article is subscription only so I will outline first what's in the press release, and then, other items in the full article.

First, from the press release:

Cooper writes in this week’s issue that he testified that, although it’s not reflected in his notes or subsequent emails, he had a distinct memory of Rove ending the call by saying, “I’ve already said too much.” Cooper writes this could have meant he was worried about being indiscreet or just late for a meeting or something else. “I don’t know, but that sign-off has been in my memory for two years,” Cooper writes.

Cooper writes that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald “asked me several different ways if Rove indicated how he had heard that (Valerie) Plame worked at the CIA.” Cooper says he testified that Rove did not.

This Time Magazine article, not by Matthew Cooper, today says it was Valerie Plame Wilson's boss, the deputy chief of the CIA's counterproliferation division, not Valerie Plame who sent Wilson to Africa on the uranium mission:

What was the point of Rove or anyone else bringing up Plame in the first place? Was he saying Wilson was tainted by his close association with the CIA, whose analysts had generally been too skeptical of the Iraqi threat for the Administration's taste?

The tensions between the White House and the CIA had been rising steadily in the months before the Iraq invasion, as CIA analysts complained about evidence being distorted or ignored and the White House pushed back with complaints about the quality of the intel they were getting.

"I know the analyst who was subjected to withering questioning on the Iraq- al-Qaeda links by Libby with the Vice President sitting there," says a CIA analyst. "So I think there was an anger at the CIA for not getting it and not being on board. The political side of the Administration was pissed at the CIA. So I can see how they responded to that--and Wilson--by implying he couldn't be trusted because, 'well, just look where his wife works.'"

Back to Judith Miller and who she is protecting. The Washington Post today says her source is Lewis Libby.

...two sources say Miller spoke with Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, during the key period in July 2003 that is the focus of Fitzgerald's investigation.

The two sources, one who is familiar with Libby's version of events and the other with Miller's, said the previously undisclosed conversation occurred a few days before Plame's name appeared in Robert D. Novak's syndicated column on July 14, 2003. Miller and Libby discussed former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame's husband, who had recently alleged that the Bush administration twisted intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, according to the source familiar with Libby's version.

It's not that Libby didn't give Miller a waiver, he gave all the reporters he spoke to a waiver. Miller isn't sure the waiver isn't coerced.

"Judy's view is that any purported waiver she got from anyone was not on the face of it sufficiently broad, clear and uncoerced," [laywer Floyd] Abrams said.

Frank Rich has a column in Sunday's New York Times in which he writes that Iraq, not the Wilsons, is the real issue in RoveGate. And,

Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king.

While I tend to follow the subpoenas in analyzing the story, Rich advises you to follow the uranium.

Update: This article in Sunday's New York Times asks:

Is there a tipping point where the presence of Karl Rove would simply not be worth the unwanted attention that goes with it?

The Washington Post has an article today detailing the mechanics of the Rove-Cooper waiver that Cooper relied on to avoid going to jail.

Cooper's wife, Democratic strategist Mandy Grunwald, who is also the grandaughter of Time founder Henry Grunwald, says that there really was no point in him going to jail once Time Magazine made the decision to turn over his e-mails which included Rove's name as Cooper's source.

The article is more interesting for its description of a volatile meeting between Time Magazine's Normal Pearlstein and the mag's reporter's yesterday.

The reporters claim that Pearlstein's decision has resulted in their sources drying up on them and putting Time at the bottom of their media lists.

The Washington Post reports today that Judith Miller may be charged with criminal contempt which would lengthen her jail stay. This has been reported several times before, but Atrios asks a good question: What's the difference between criminal contempt and civil contempt?

In a nutshell, civil contempt is a coercive measure - it is used to try and get the person to talk. If Judith Miller were to change her mind and testify while jailed for civil contempt, she would be considered to have purged herself of the contempt.

Criminal contempt is a punitive measure, used when it is clear that the person is not going to talk. It's meant to punish someone for violating a court order, to vindicate the dignity of the court and to deter others from doing so.

Second, civil contempt has a penalty limit in the grand jury context: the life of the grand jury (or any successive grand jury) investigating the matter. Grand juries serve for 18 months.

Believe it or not, a criminal contempt charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. There is no maximum penalty set by the statute, which makes any sentence up to life a possibility. However, the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines apply to criminal contempt, and while the offense does not have its own guideline penalty, the directions are to use the penalty for the crime that is most analagous to it. I think in Miller's case, it would be the guideline for obstruction of justice.

The U.S. Attorney's Manual describes the difference this way:

[I wrote this on July 16 and just found it in "draft" status, meaning I didn't hit the "publish" button. For the Rove Gate obsessed, it may have another dot or two.]

I think this UPI article by Richard Sale from February 5, 2004 is right on the money.

Federal law enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned. Hannah and Libby did not return calls.

The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time," as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law enforcement official said.
....On June 12, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus revealed that an unnamed diplomat had "given a negative report" on the claim and then on July 6, as the Bush administration was widely accused of manipulating intelligence to get American public opinion behind a war with Iraq, Wilson published an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post, in which he accused the Bush administration of "misrepresenting the facts," asking, "What else are they lying about?"

Leaks from Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation are coming faster and faster. Now we know that Valerie Wilson's identity as a CIA Agent and the wife of Joseph Wilson was revealed in a June 10, 2003 State Department memo and that Colin Powell had it with him on Air Force One on the July 7 - 12, 2003 Bush trip to Africa - and was seen walking up and down the aisles of the Air Force One with it.

The memo was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memo was written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr. Wilson's wife, according to a government official who reread the memo on Friday.

Here's the catch: It didn't mention Valerie Plame, it mentioned Valerie Wilson. Novak's article mentioned Valerie Plame.

The AP article detailing Rove's e-mail to Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley I just wrote about also has this piece of information:

Rove sent the e-mail shortly before leaving the White House early for a family vacation that weekend, already aware that another journalist he had talked with, syndicated columnist Robert Novak, was planning an article about Plame and Wilson.

Rove also knew that then-CIA Director George Tenet planned later that same day to issue a dramatic statement that took responsibility for some bad Iraq intelligence but that also called into question.

Rove spoke to Novak on July 8 and Cooper on July 11. Tenet's statement was released July 11. Bush left for Africa on July 7, 2003 and returned on July 12. [typo in year corrected]

Fitzgerald supboenaed the telephone records of Air Force One between July 7 and 12 - the period of the Africa trip. So clearly, Rove wasn't on the trip or the plane - and it's not Rove's conversations while he was on board Air Force One that Fitzgerald was after.

Rove's supporters are continuing their leak campaign to support his lack of wrongdoing in the Valerie Plame investigation. The latest leak is the involves an e-mail Rove wrote then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley after Rove spoke with Cooper.

The July 11, 2003, e-mail between Rove and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is the first showing an intelligence official knew Rove had talked to Matthew Cooper just days before the Time magazine reporter wrote an article identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA officer.

"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press, recounting how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations. The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove testified to a grand jury about it last year.

Another item of interest in the article is Robert Luskin's statement:

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said his client answered all the questions prosecutors asked during three grand jury appearances, never invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or the president's executive privilege guaranteeing confidential advice from aides.