Time: Rove's Lawyer Told of Conversation

During much of 2004, Karl Rove's lawyer was on notice that his client, a senior aide to President Bush, might have disclosed Valerie Plame's CIA status to a Time magazine reporter. It wasn't until Time's Matt Cooper was under intense pressure from investigators to reveal his source that Rove, Bush's top political adviser, corrected his grand jury testimony, telling Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald of the conversation he said he'd forgotten. The timeline of the Rove camp's early knowledge emerged Sunday in a first-person account by Time reporter Viveca Novak.

Novak said she passed along the information to Rove attorney Robert Luskin when he said, in effect, that "Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt," Novak wrote. "I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me."
Novak said she told Luskin "something like, 'Are you sure about that? That's not what I hear around Time.' He looked surprised and very serious" and at the end of their discussion that day said, "Thank you. This is important." Novak said the conversation with Luskin occurred anywhere from January 2004 to May 2004; she thinks it was perhaps in March.

It was not until October 2004 — sometime between five and nine months after Novak's conversation with Luskin — that Rove disclosed his conversation with Cooper to the prosecutor.

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