New Legal Theories
   By David Corn
    The Nation

    Monday 10 October 2005

    The Plame/CIA leak case is getting what all good scandals need:
props.

    We now have the "missing notebook" and the "missing email."
The "missing notebook," as several news reports noted at the end of
last week, belongs to New York Times reporter Judith Miller and
reportedly contains notes of a conversation regarding former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson that she had with Scooter Libby, Dick
Cheney's chief of staff, on June 25, 2003. The date is intriguing,
for this is weeks before Wilson published his now famous New York
Times op-ed piece (in which he revealed that after traveling to Niger
for the CIA he had concluded that the allegation that Iraq had been
uranium shopping there was dubious). And, of course, this was weeks
before Robert Novak wrote a column outing Wilson 's wife as an
undercover CIA officer. So why were the two discussing Wilson at that
point? Why did this notebook go missing within the paper's Washington
bureau? Who found it? Miller or someone else? Why won't the Times
explain to its readers how it came to be discovered? What do the
notes in this notebook say?

    The Case of the Missing Notebook does prompt much pondering. As
Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher listed a set of questions raised
by the missing notebook in his own column:

Did Libby lie to the grand jury about not talking to Miller about
Wilson earlier than July 8? Did Miller lie about that? If so, why?


How did Fitzgerald find out about these notes? Did he know about the
June conversation for quite some time but just recently found out
about the notes? Or did Miller come forward herself? If she did, was
it after someone tipped off Fitzgerald about the June interview?


Does the existence of a Miller chat with Libby two weeks before the
Wilson Op-Ed, and well before Robert Novak outed Wilson 's wife,
Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent, indicate that Libby, indeed, was the
original source of the Plame leak? And/or does it suggest that Miller
herself was a "carrier" of that leak to others in the media and the
administration, well before Novak's bombshell?
    What is frustrating is that the Times could have quickly cleared
up a number of these matters. But it chose not to. So the final
question on this front is, why?

    On to the other new prop. This past weekend, Newsweek's Michael
Isikoff reported that Karl Rove's return to the grand jury (for visit
No. 4) was caused by the "White House's handling of a potentially
crucial e-mail sent by senior aide Karl Rove two years ago."
Apparently, when Rove was first interviewed by FBI agents and when he
first appeared before Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury, he neglected
to mention his July 11, 2003, conversation with Time's Matt Cooper,
in which he told Cooper that Wilson 's wife worked at the CIA. But
after that first grand jury appearance, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin,
according to Isikoff's report, found an email Rove had sent on July
11 that referred to his conversation with Cooper. Rove then went back
to the grand jury to discuss his July 11 chat with Cooper. I suppose
Rove merely needed to have his memory refreshed.

    The Newsweek report doesn't make clear what this missing email
has to do with Rove's latest trip to the grand jury room. But it does
seem that this visit may be connected to possible discrepancies
between Rove's and Cooper's account of their conversation.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_101205I.shtml