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.
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.
This is fascinating. If Novak contacted Rove, and the two men actually did devise a cover story to protect Rove, then both Novak and Rove could be charged with obstruction of justice. The timing of this phone call seems especially suspicious--three days after the CIA asked the Justice Department for an investigation into the Valerie Plame leak. Both Novak and Rove would have known that they could have been targets in the investigation. So what did they talk about in that September 29 phone call? There are some very interesting details regarding this story:
Foremost among the reasons that federal investigators harbored suspicions about the September 29 conversation was its timing. Three days earlier, NBC broke the news that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to launch a probe into the leaking of Plame's identity. During the noon news briefing at the White House on September 29, various reporters asked spokesman Scott McClellan repeatedly whether Justice was indeed investigating the Plame leak.
"If someone leaked classified information of the nature that has been reported, absolutely, the president would want it to be looked into," McClellan responded. "And the Justice Department would be the appropriate agency to do so."
In fact, Justice was already preparing to announce such a criminal probe, and the department made the formal announcement the following day, September 30.
A second reason that federal investigators were suspicious, sources said, is that they believed that after the September 29 call, Novak shifted his account of his July 9, 2003, conversation with Rove to show that administration officials had a passive role in leaking Plame's identity.
On July 22, 2003 -- eight days after the publication of Novak's column on Plame -- Newsday reporters Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce quoted Novak as telling them in an interview that it was White House officials who encouraged him to write about Plame. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," Newsday quoted Novak as saying about Plame. "They thought it was significant. They gave me the name, and I used it."
If Novak's interview with Phelps and Royce was accurate, sources said, it suggests that Rove was actively involved in trying to expose Plame's CIA job.
Novak did not speak publicly on the matter again until September 29 -- later on the same day as his conversation with Rove in which he assured the president's chief political aide that he would protect him in the forthcoming Justice Department investigation. What Novak said publicly was different from the earlier account in Newsday:
"I have been beleaguered by television networks around the world, but I am reserving my say for Crossfire," Novak said on his own CNN program, which is no longer on the air. "Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July, I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador [Joseph C.] Wilson's report [on his Niger trip], when [the official] told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing.
"As a professional journalist with 46 years' experience in Washington, I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July, they confirmed Mrs. Wilson's involvement in a mission for her husband on a secondary basis, who is -- he is a former Clinton administration official. They asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else."
In explaining the discrepancy between what he told Newsday a week after he outed Plame and everything he said later regarding Plame, Novak has said that Phelps "badly misquoted" him. Phelps, who is Newsday's Washington bureau chief, denied that, saying he took accurate notes of his interview with Novak and reported exactly what Novak told him.
A third reason that investigators are said to be concerned about a possible cover story was the grand jury testimony of both Novak and Rove about their July 9, 2003, conversation. On that day, Novak was still reporting for his July 14 column.
Novak and Rove have testified that it was Novak, not Rove, who raised the subject of Plame's CIA job and Wilson's trip to Niger, according to people familiar with the testimony of both men.
Rove has testified that he simply told the columnist that he had heard much the same information about Plame, which perhaps was nothing more than an unsubstantiated rumor. Novak's account of the July 9 call matched Rove's. Investigators were suspicious that, if this version was true, the columnist would have relied on Rove as one of his two sources to out Plame as an "agency operative."
Ashcroft was advised during the briefing that investigators had strong reservations about the veracity of the Novak and Rove accounts of the July 9 conversation. If Rove had simply said that he heard the same information that Novak did, investigators wondered why Novak would have relied on such an offhand comment as the basis for writing the column. Investigators also wondered why Novak had not at least asked Rove about what else he knew about Plame, sources said.
There is a lot of contradictions within this story--Rove's contradictory grand jury testimony and Novak's contradictory public statements regarding the Valerie Plame scandal. It is certainly enough for investigators to put some serious heat on both Rove and Novak. There is even some interesting speculation as to why Ashcroft recused himself from this investigation. Did Ashcroft even know that Vice President Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby or even Vice President Cheney himself was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, and thus Ashcroft had to recuse himself? Of that question, I'm not sure. But I do find it interesting that a secret briefing took place between FBI agents and Ashcroft regarding the September 29th phone call between Novak and Rove. I don't think John Ashcroft was involved in the Valerie Plame scandal. But I think that after Ashcroft had his secret briefing on the September 29th phone call between Novak and Rove, Ashcroft knew that Karl Rove was behind a White House campaign to discredit Ambassador Joe Wilson through outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent. And Ashcroft also realized that if he was directly involved in the CIA leak investigation, and if Karl Rove's involvement had been revealed, then the resulting scandal of a White House political operative trying to stop a DOJ investigation could have sunk the hopes of a Bush administration's 2004 re-election. So Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation.
There is so much more in this story that I have not figured out yet. Stay tuned.
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