Last night, I spoke to Jason Leopold on the phone for a half hour or so. Here's what he had to say about Byron York's article stating that Karl Rove's spokesman Mark Corallo told him that Jason's article Saturday reporting sources told him Fitzgerald met with Luskin Friday and told him Rove has been indicted is false.

1. Jason says he spoke with Josh Gerstein of the New York Sun and Gerstein told him Corallo called both York and Gerstein, not the other way around. In other words, Corallo reached out to a few select reporters to debunk Jason's article. Corallo told Gerstein, as he told York, Jason's article reporting Rove has been indicted is a baseless lie. A New York Sun article today reports Carollo's comments to the paper.

2. Before Jason published his article, he left messages with both Corallo and Luskin offering an opportunity to respond. Neither returned his calls.

3. Jason spoke to Corallo twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday. The first time they spoke Saturday was after Jason's article was published. Corallo told Jason the article was lies and hung up. As I reported here, I e-mailed with Jason Saturday evening. Jason had provided me with two numbers each for Mark Corallo and Robert Luskin. After my non-conversation with Robert Luskin, I e-mailed Jason that I had also left a message for Corallo at his office, since no one answered at the other number he gave me.

NRO's Byron York reports he spoke to Rove publicist Mark Corallo who stated unequivocally that Fitzgerald did not go to Robert Luskin's law office Friday or tell Luskin Rove has been indicted. He said Jason Leopold's article was false.

Did Patrick Fitzgerald come to Patton Boggs for 15 hours Friday?
No.
Did he come to Patton Boggs for any period of time Friday?
No.
Did he meet anywhere else with Karl Rove's representatives?
No.
Did he communicate in any way with Karl Rove's representatives?
No.
Did he inform Rove or Rove's representatives that Rove had been indicted?
No.

So, is this Corallo spin? Larry Johnson, or someone pretending to be him at Democratic Underground says Joseph Wilson was told the same thing as Leopold. York concludes:

As TalkLeft readers know, I try to stick to analyzing news rather than breaking news. I'm just not that kind of journalist. But Jason Leopold's article today reporting Rove has been indicted was filled with such unique detail (analysis here) I wanted to know if it was true. Who better to ask than Robert Luskin, even though I don't know him from Adam. I got his phone number from Jason, and here's what happened. Shorter version: I doubt I'll ever do this again.

******
7:55 pm. I just got off the phone with Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin. I'm sure I made a new enemy. I called at 7:47 pm my time which is 9:47 his time. In a run-on sentence, I introduced myself as a criminal defense lawyer and said I was calling about Jason Leopold's article because if it wasn't true, I wanted to write that it wasn't true. He said, "Why are you calling me at 10:00 on a Saturday night. It's so inappropriate." I apologized and said because it's an important story and if it's not true I wanted to say so. I looked at the clock on my computer and saw it was 9:48 or so his time.

He said something like "It's completely not true and you shouldn't be calling me at 10:00 on a Saturday night. You should be calling Mark Corallo [Rove's media strategist.]

But here's the thing. I didn't even have a chance to explain which of Jason's articles I was writing about or that Jason had reported Rove was indicted. For all I know, Luskin hasn't seen that article and his denial pertained to an earlier article written by Jason.

Luskin continued to chastise me for calling so late on a Saturday night, saying "This is Washington, you don't call people at 10:00 on a Saturday night." I apologized again and said I was in Denver and it was two hours earlier and it hadn't occurred to me that it would be too late to call Washington. He said "Well it should have occurred to you." I asked if I could call him tomorrow. He said "No" and hung up.

Huge breaking news from Jason Leopold just now at Truthout -- Karl Rove has been indicted.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning. Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment.

Leopold reports the charges include lying to investigators and perjury before the grand jury but it is not yet known if obstruction of justice is one of the charges.

Breaking....Jason Leopold at Truthout reports Karl Rove has told Bush he will be indicted and that he will resign immediately when the charges are announced.

Rove's announcement to President Bush and Bolten comes more than a month after he alerted the new chief of staff to a meeting his attorney had with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in which Fitzgerald told Luskin that his case against Rove would soon be coming to a close and that he was leaning toward charging Rove with perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators, according to sources close to the investigation.

A few weeks after he spoke with Fitzgerald, Luskin arranged for Rove to return to the grand jury for a fifth time to testify in hopes of fending off an indictment related to Rove's role in the CIA leak, sources said. That meeting was followed almost immediately by an announcement by newly-appointed White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten of changes in the responsibilities of some White House officials, including Rove, who was stripped of his policy duties and would no longer hold the title of deputy White House chief of staff.

Jane at Firedoglake reports that according to Hardball, the grand jury is meeting today in the Valerie Plame leaks investigation.

Will Rove be indicted? I think that comes next week. But stay glued to the news, and FDL for updates.

Bump and Update: All of the media Replies to Libby's Response to their motions to quash his subpoenas are now in. Here they are: Andrea Mitchell and NBC News; Matthew Cooper; and Time Magazine. Tim Russert is included in the NBC/Mitchell pleading.

******
Original Post 11:19 am

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller filed this response (pdf) yesterday in her attempt to quash the supboena for her notes issued by Team Libby.

Mr. Libby further maintains he will use such information "to contend that, contrary to the allegations in the indictment, it was Ms. Miller who raised this topic in her discussions with Mr. Libby -if the topic was raised at all."

....He also makes the startlingly baseless claim that it may have been Ms. Miller who mentioned Ms. Plame to him.

How does this match up with her public account of her grand jury testimony?

Firedoglake beat me to it, but I've been pondering contest questions for a few days now. So I'm joining in with a TalkLeft contest. Feel free to enter them both. To win TalkLeft's contest, you need to correctly answer these questions:

1. What date will the Indictment be returned by the Grand Jury?
2. Will the Indictment name only Karl Rove or Karl Rove and others? If others, who will they be?
3. What crimes will be charged for each person you name and how many counts for each? (Example: Only Karl Rove, Three counts of false statements to investigators, two counts of perjury to the grand jury, one count of obstruction of justice, one count of conspiracy)
4. Who, if anyone, will be "Offical A" in the Rove Indictment?

The first commenter with the correct answers wins. The winner will be determined by me and TChris. A tie will be determined by Last Night in Little Rock.

The prizes:

Raw Story has the transcript of MSNBC Reporter David Shuster on Countdown tonight:

....I am convinced that Karl Rove will, in fact, be indicted. And there are a couple of reasons why. First of all, you don't put somebody in front of a grand jury at the end of an investigation or for the fifth time, as Karl Rove testified a couple, a week and a half ago, unless you feel that's your only chance of avoiding indictment. So in other words, the burden starts with Karl Rove to stop the charges.

Secondly, it's now been 13 days since Rove testified. After testifying for three and a half hours, prosecutors refused to give him any indication that he was clear. He has not gotten any indication since then. And the lawyers that I've spoken with outside of this case say that if Rove had gotten himself out of the jam, he would have heard something by now.

by TChris

We've been hearing these reports for some time now, but UPI reports today that "Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald reportedly is close to deciding whether to indict White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove for lying about a CIA leak."

An indictment of Rove could happen this month.

TalkLeft's most recent analysis of the charges that might be filed is here.

It's the e-mails, as Jason Leopold reported previously and reports again today. Those 250 pages of documents that Patrick Fitzgerald told Team Libby about in his January 23 letter (pdf) and turned over to the Libby defense team in February. I thought the e-mails were all from the Office of the Vice President, but Jason reports they are also from the Office of the President, and a review of Fitz's letter (page 7) shows this to be the case.

In February, TruthOut was the first to report the existence of the 250 pages of emails from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Office of the President that were written in mid-2003.

Some of the emails and memos were written by Rove, and are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting he lied to the grand jury and the FBI and may have obstructed justice during the course of the investigation. It was following their disclosure that Fitzgerald advised Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, several weeks ago that he intends to indict Rove for perjury and lying to investigators. The lingering question, sources close to the case said, is whether Fitzgerald will add obstruction of justice to the list of charges that he has already drafted against Rove.

Sure, the Matt Cooper - Karl Rove conversation and Hadley e-mail is also an issue, one that likely will lead to a false statements and/or perjury charge for Rove. But Rove's failure to disclose these other communications is what reportedly has Fitz considering an obstruction of justice charge. Particularly e-mails between Rove and Andrew Card.

Back in February, we wrote about Larisa Alexandrovna's article at Raw Story reporting that at the time Valerie Plame was outed in July, 2003 by Robert Novak, "she was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran." Larisa described the import:

The revelation that Iran was the focal point of Plame's work raises new questions as to possible other motivating factors in the White House's decision to reveal the identity of a CIA officer working on tracking a WMD supply network to Iran, particularly when the very topic of Iran's possible WMD capability is of such concern to the Administration.

Today on Hardball, MSNBC reporter David Schuster confirms that Plame was working on Iran. Crooks and Liars has the video.