A Sidestep and a Backtrack

But it's not exactly news.

Here's Susan Schmidt in The Washington Post on Oct. 16, 2004: "During a July 12, 2003, conversation, according to a source involved in the investigation, Time reporter Matthew Cooper told Libby that he had been informed by other reporters that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee. Libby, the source said, replied that he had heard the same thing, also from the press corps."

That said, I guess it's news that Cooper has now publicly confirmed it.

And the Associated Press does a nice job of pulling together previous denials by White House spokesman Scott McClellan that Libby (or Rove, or Elliot Abrams, Bush's deputy national security adviser for the Mideast, for that matter) were involved in the leak.

More to Come?

Doyle McManus writes in the Los Angeles Times: "If Karl Rove was source No. 2, who was source No. 1?. . . .

"The question has some Republicans worried. . . .

" 'There are other shoes to drop here,' warned an advisor to the GOP leadership in Congress, who insisted on anonymity in order to speak freely. 'There are people who haven't come out yet. There could be indictments. And that would cast an entirely different shadow on the matter.' "

Tough Talk from a Tough Prosecutor

Jonathan Darman and Michael Isikoff write in Newsweek that "as new details emerge about White House efforts to discredit Iraq-war critic Joe Wilson and his CIA agent wife, Washington insiders are seeing Fitzgerald in a new light. Maybe his hard-nosed investigation will do more than just punish reporters. Maybe Fitzgerald's leak investigation will actually uncover who leaked."

And here's precisely what you don't want to hear from a federal prosecutor: "Last week, Newsweek has learned, after Time's Matthew Cooper provided grand-jury testimony on his July 11, 2003, conversation with Karl Rove, Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, placed a call to Fitzgerald to make sure he didn't need anything more from Rove in light of Cooper's claims. Fitzgerald didn't bite: 'We'll get back to you,' the prosecutor replied curtly and quickly got off the line."

The Top Secret Memo

Richard Stevenson writes in the New York Times: "Prosecutors in the C.I.A. leak case have shown intense interest in a 2003 State Department memorandum that explained how a former diplomat came to be dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission and the role of his wife, a C.I.A. officer, in the trip, people who have been officially briefed on the case said.

"Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned of the C.I.A. officer's identity from the memorandum. They are seeking to determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists and if officials were truthful in testifying about whether they had read the memo, the people who have been briefed said, asking not to be named because the special prosecutor heading the investigation had requested that no one discuss the case."

The Top Secret Memo . . . And Ari

Richard Keil and William Roberts write for Bloomberg: "On the same day the memo was prepared, White House phone logs show [syndicated columnist Robert] Novak placed a call to White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, according to lawyers familiar with the case and a witness who has testified before the grand jury. Those people say it is not clear whether Fleischer returned the call, and Fleischer has refused to comment.