In February 2006, Fitzgerald informed Libby's attorneys that the White House had turned over about 250 pages of previously undisclosed e-mails from the Cheney's office, which have no doubt provided hours of interesting reading for the prosecutor's team. 

With his feet to the fire, on October 15, 2004, Rove marched back into the grand jury to change his story and say that he must have discussed Valerie with Cooper after all, because the e-mail established that he had in fact had a conversation with Cooper.

 That day, Viveca Novak wrote a web exclusive for Time and quoted her drinking buddy, Luskin as saying: "My client appeared voluntarily before the grand jury and has cooperated with the investigation since it began."

In the article, Viveca mentions a question to which she knows the answer but doesn't share it with her readers. "Fitzgerald is trying to find out who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative married to former ambassador Joe Wilson, to several journalists in July 2003," she wrote.

In December 2005, Luskin testified that his meeting with Viveca where he learned about the Rove-Cooper connection, took place in late January or early February 2004, the same month in which Rove had reportedly testified twice and Fitzgerald had sought the authority to prosecute officials if they were found to have obstructed his investigation.

However the problem is that Viveca, says she thinks the conversation took place in either March or May 2004.

But a more pressing dilemma for Viveca personally, has turned out to be that she continued to write articles on the leak case without informing her boss at Time Magazine about her insider knowledge of the facts.

According to the April 27, 2006, New York Times, Viveca no longer works for Time. "She left the magazine after a dispute over her role in the case," the NYT's said, "taking a buyout package last month."

So it looks like another journalist bites the dust in the wake of the illegal conduct by the White House. After a 20-some year tenure, Judy Miller got the boot from the New York Times for not revealing her involvement with the Libby to her boss.  Bob Novak got hot under the collar when asked a question about his part in the case and walked of a live broadcast on CNN and got canned, and even Bob Woodward is said to have fallen off his pedestal at the Washington Post. 

Yet as the body-count rises, Karl Rove is always seen smiling like a cat that just ate a canary and knows he got away with it.

Why Rove waited some five or six months to correct his testimony with the grand jury is said to be a mystery but it may simply be that when Luskin gave him the news that he was busted, Cooper was still refusing to identify Rove as his source and so he decided to run out the clock and bet the farm.

What could he lose? The odds were good. The Supreme Court had certainly demonstrated its allegiance to the Bush team in the past. 

When the lower court ordered Cooper to testify, just as expected, Time appealed the decision all the way to the High Court but was unsuccessful. 

But in this case, Rove had the most to lose.

On July 13, 2005, Cooper appeared before the grand jury and informed the panel that Rove was the official who told him that Valerie was employed at the CIA, and the panel already knew that Libby was the other source.

According to Cooper, his conversation with Rove was the first time he had heard anything about Wilson’s wife. In addition, Rove had told Cooper that more information that would discredit Wilson and his findings in Niger would soon be declassified.

In a July 25, 2005, article discussing his testimony, in Time Magazine, Cooper wrote: "Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes."

"Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'W.M.D.'? Yes," he said.

"When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible? I don't know," Cooper wrote.

Cooper also told the grand jury that he had a distinct memory of Rove ending the phone call by saying, “I’ve already said too much.”

Over this time period, Rove got dealt a whole deck of get-out-of-jail-free cards.

After it became known that Rove was indeed Cooper's secret source, on July 15, 2005, ninety-one Democrats in Congress signed a letter to Bush calling for Rove to explain his role in the leak, or to resign and 13 Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee called for hearings on the matter.

When the Libby indictment was issued, and it became known that Rove had definitely participated in blowing Valerie's cover, 16 former CIA and military intelligence officials petitioned Bush to suspend Rove's security clearance and Bush refused to grant their request.

Karl Rove still has security clearance to this very day.

The granting of this free pass becomes all the more obvious when compared to what happened to former Clinton advisor, Sandy Berger, in 2003, when he took classified documents from the National Archives, to prepare to testify before the 9/11 Commission. In order to settle the case, Berger had to plead guilty to mishandling of documents in violation of the Espionage Act, and his security clearance was suspended for 3 years.

In the grand jury sessions, press aides were reportedly confronted with internal White House documents, mainly e-mails and telephone logs, between White House aides and reporters and were questioned about conversations with reporters.
 
According to the New York Times, the set of documents that prosecutors repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White House aides are extensive notes compiled by  none other than Scooter Libby.

The logs indicate that several White House officials talked to Novak shortly before the appearance of his July 14 column, the Washington Post reported.

That said, it should be interesting to see how many more get-out-of-jail-free cards Fitzgerald has up his sleeve and how they get distributed.

=================

Evelyn Pringle is  a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government

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