Plame: Front-page fronts

The Times and Post are publicizing Rove's version of events. But is his story true?

A little while ago, TAP Online posted a story of mine about what is going on with the Plame grand jury. It is an antidote, hopefully, to the accounts in the New York Times and Washington Post, which have done little more recently than tell Rove's side of the story.

Here is the lede to my story:

A federal criminal investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame's name has in large part focused on the truthfulness of statements made to investigators by White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, and whether he worked with others to devise a cover story to conceal his role, according to government officials familiar with the probe.

Columnist Robert D. Novak, who first disclosed Plame's identity in a July 14, 2001 newspaper column, has also been co-operating with investigators for some time, according to the same sources, as I first reported in my blog earlier in the week. But federal investigators have been highly skeptical of Novak's account-- as they have been of Rove's-- and were concerned that the key participants might have devised a cover story in the days shortly after it became known that a criminal investigation has been commenced of the leak.

Novak and Rove have claimed that they discussed Plame during a July 8, 2003 telephone conversation, only days before Novak's column appeared revealing Plame's status. According to Novak's account, it was he, rather than Rove, who first broached the issue of Plame, and that Rove at best simply said he too had heard the same information.

To read the story in its entirety, click here.