Hold the Forks, Nobody's Done
Time Magazine reporter Viveca Novak is being subpoenaed to appear before Fitzgerald's grand jury about her conversations with Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, during a period starting in May of 2004.
It's a hard one to read, because Time Magazine was quite silent on the subject of Traitorgate during that time period -- no article appeared between January 2004 and the Luskin discovery of the email from Rove to Stephen Hadley in October 2004, when Rove again testified. During the time in question, Rove was still "not mentioning" that he had ever spoken with Matt Cooper, presumably during several at-bats with the GJ.
This is the TraitorGate timeline for the period:
May 21, 2004 -- Grand jury issued subpoenas to Matt Cooper and Tim Russert.
June 3, 2004 -- Bush hires Sharp as lawyer
June 5, 2004 -- Stories appear saying that Fitzgerald has interviewed Dick Cheney
June 16 -- Colin Powell testifies
June 24 -- Bush is questioned by Fitzgerald
It is curious to note that even though Viveca Novak was not reporting for Time during that period, according to Newshounds she has appeared on Fox & Friends covering Rove's role in TraitorGate, although when she began is not known. Since cheap-o Fox doesn't have transcripts, nothing is available on Lexis/Nexis. If for some perverse reason someone is cataloging old episodes of Fox news for posterity, we'd love to know.
It's also notable that Woodward was evidently cushy enough with Viveca to give her an interview he would not give his fellow reporters at the WaPo following the acknowledgment that he was the first journalist known to have had Valerie Plame's identity leaked to him.
I'm still combing over old articles trying to fit this into some sort of context, and I'll try to have more later. In the mean time, I'd love to hear your speculation.
Update: Jeralyn has more on Viveca Novak's reporting (I keep wanting to write "Novak" but that would just be too damn confusing).
Emptywheel thinks that Luskin may have been leaking about Rove's conversation with Cooper at a time before Rove "remembered" he had it.
Swopa thinks there's quite probably more people answering Mr. Fitzgerald's questions these days than we know about.
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 11/27/2005 04:21:00 PM
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