By Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas
Huffpost summary
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/04/30/newsweek-fitzgera_n_20094.htmlNewsweek subscriber link
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12554162/site/newsweek/<snip>
It is impossible to know if Fitzgerald will make a case against Rove. But it is possible now to trace how Fitzgerald came to suspect Rove of not telling the whole truth. The Bush administration has been particularly quick to trigger leak investigations. Often, these probes in high-profile cases are intended to punish political enemies. But this is one that has boomeranged.
In February 2004, Rove testified before Fitzgerald's grand jury—twice. He told of speaking briefly to columnist Bob Novak about the Wilson trip. But Rove never mentioned any conversation with Time's Cooper. Then, in October 2004, Rove, through his lawyer Luskin, suddenly turned over to the special prosecutor an e-mail, sent to Stephen Hadley, then deputy national-security adviser, that clearly showed that Rove had spoken to Cooper. Reappearing before the grand jury that month, Rove acknowledged that he must have spoken to Cooper, but he still didn't remember doing so. Rove's e-mail to Hadley suggested that Cooper had telephoned him in July 2003 about something else—welfare reform—and then switched the conversation to Wilson. Rove, according to the e-mail, didn't say much more to Cooper other than to warn him that Time shouldn't get "far out front" on the story Ambassador Wilson was telling—that the Bush administration was lying about WMD in Iraq and that, specifically, Wilson, on his trip to Niger, had found no evidence that Saddam was trying to buy uranium for atom-bomb making...
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