Arianna Huffington: The Cocktail That Saved Karl Rove's Ass

[im10ashus]

It's been a week since Patrick Fitzgerald decided that he couldn't make the case against Karl Rove, and I'm amazed that more hasn't been made of the role Viveca Novak played in Rove's narrow escape from indictment. She was his human stay-out-of-jail-free card.

For those of you who don't remember this blip on the Plamegate radar, Novak was the Time magazine reporter who, over drinks with her old pal attorney Robert Luskin in the summer or early fall of 2004 at Washington's Café Deluxe, let it slip that his client Rove had been one of the sources who'd leaked the lowdown on Valerie Plame to Matt Cooper.

By the time Novak spilled the beans to Luskin, Rove had already appeared before the grand jury once and had told federal investigators he had no recollection of talking to Cooper. Novak's unconscionable blabbing about a colleague's source led Luskin to thank her and to do an email search which turned up a document noting that Cooper and Rove had indeed spoken. As the Wall Street Journal put it earlier this week:

purposely lied wasn't settled. A key sticking point for the prosecutor was how Mr. Luskin could have known that his client was a source for Mr. Cooper if Mr. Rove hadn't told him. Had Mr. Rove lied about not remembering the conversation? Then, last October, Mr. Luskin's media relationships and his rapport with Mr. Fitzgerald bore fruit. During a pair of meetings with the prosecutor just before he was set to seek indictments, Mr. Luskin explained that he heard from Viveca Novak, who then worked at Time magazine, over drinks at a Washington bistro one night that chatter around her newsroom indicated Mr. Cooper considered Mr. Rove a source for information about Ms. Plame.

cont'd...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060619/cm_huffpost/023205;_ylt=Ahz0VGAut5WhqITBSr.ao7n9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTA0cDJlYmhvBHNlYwM-