I'm back to connecting dots and reading between the lines of recent news reports. The New York Times reported Friday:

A lawyer with knowledge of the case said that Mr. Rove had known for more than a month that he was likely to make another appearance before the grand jury.

It was one month ago on March 28 that Andrew Card resigned, with no plausible reasons given and no future plans announced.

On September 29, 2003, the Justice Department decided to launch a full investigation into the Valerie Plame leak and then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales told White House officials to preserve all e-mails, telephone records and logs-- but gave them a 12 hour heads up.

Bump and Update: Raw Storywrites that MSNBC's David Schuster will report today that Rove's lawyers have been told there will be no announcements for at least ten days. [Raw Story now has the report details here.]

Update: TomPaine cites the MSM party line position today that this is all about Rove's failure to disclose the call with Cooper. I'm not buying it.

This is all coming from sources close to Luskin. Don't forget the 250 pages of e-mails turned over since his last grand jury appearance. That's a new development as well. The e-mails are from the vice-president's office according to what Libby's lawyer told the Court at the Feb. 24 Libby hearing (pdf) and in pleadings. They were being turned over to Libby that day.

Libby's lawyer:

I may say we are also told that there are an additional approximately 250 pages of documents that are emails from the office of the vice president. Your Honor, may recall that in earlier filings it was represented or alluded to that certain e-mails had not been preserved in the White House. That turns out not to be true. There were some e-mails that weren't archived in the normal process but the office of the vice president or the office of administration I guess it is....

Regardless of whether Rove led them to the e-mails, I'd bet he was grilled about some of them Wednesday at the grand jury. The e-mails are critical for all the players, because they could result in an obstruction of justice charge as well as perjury and false statements. And they could bring in new players.

It seems inescapable to me that Karl Rove will be charged with making at least one false statement to federal officials under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1001.

Rove was interviewed by the FBI in October, 2003. This was before Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel and before a grand jury was convened.

Rove did not tell the agents that that he had spoken with Robert Novak prior to his column being published on July 14, 2003, or that he had been one of the two "senior administration officials" cited in Novak's column as having confirmed Valerie Plame Wilson's identity and CIA employment.

But we know now that Rove spoke to Robert Novak on July 8. In that conversation, they discussed Wilson's wife's employment with the CIA. Novak's version is that Rove reportedly replied that he had heard this too.

MSNBC's David Schuster will report on Keith Olbermann's show tonight that Karl Rove described his grand jury appearance yesterday as "hell" and is more worried he will be indicted. Crooks and Liars has the video of the Schuster report.

Raw Story has the transcript of Schuster's report.

Schuster reports the grand jury meets again tomorrow. Any bets charges will be filed against Rove or others?

Also check out Jason Leopold's Truthout article from March 28, reporting indictments would be coming in about one month and Prose of Sharon at Daily Kos on the whole target letter issue. You may also want to re-read my earlier post on Rove, Luskin, Novak and Fitz--explaining why Karl Rove has a lot to fear if he's charged with both perjury and making a false statement to investigators -- as opposed to simply a false statements charge.

Continuing from my earlier post with differing reports about whether Karl Rove received a target letter: Let's not get sidetracked. Luskin could have an agreement with Fitzgerald that Rove will plead to an Information charging lesser offenses, and avoid an Indictment. If the grand jury is not going to be asked to indict Karl Rove, there's no reason to send him a target letter. He may not be a target of the grand jury, but he could still be a target of the investigation.

Example: Fitzgerald agrees to charge Rove by Information for false statements and/or perjury and forego obstruction of justice. Rove agrees to waive his right to be charged by indictment to guilty to the charge(s) in the Information, in exchange for an as-yet unspecified sentence reduction that's contingent upon Fitzgerald's determination of the value of Rove's cooperation when all is said and done.

Think Tony Rudy.

More about that here. Jason Leopold has supplemented his article on Rove's target status on the Truthout Forums:

Karl Rove testified for the 5th time before the Plame grand jury today. Is he still trying to save himself or is he shoring up Fitzgerald's case against someone else? Is he singing about the belatedly turned over e-mails from Dick Cheney's office? Or about who provided the information to Bob Woodward's source about Valerie Plame Wilson?

I don't trust the MSM accounts today about the subject matter of his testimony -- they appear to be coming from Rove's camp. Naturally, they want us to believe Rove merely is clearing up details about his own involvement to show Fitz he did nothing wrong. I think it's too late for that. So does Jason Leopold, who writes today that Rove did receive a target letter from the grand jury. [Update: Sample target letter to grand jury witnesses here, background on target letter terminology here and here. Luskin has released a statement denying Rove was advised he is a target.]

by TChris

Think Progress summarizes an MSNBC report (with a link to the video) that adds more fuel to the speculation that Karl Rove will soon be indicted. There's not much new to TalkLeft readers in the report (TalkLeft covered some of this ground here and here), but this tidbit, while perhaps entitled to little weight (the past is not always a reliable predictor of the future), is intriguing:

[W]e've known for months that in the Scooter Libby indictment when they refer to Official A, Official A is Karl Rove. ... But we've looked at prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's record as far as designating people as Official A or Official B, and in every single case we have found, Keith, that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald when he designates somebody as Official A in an indictment, that person eventually does get indicted themselves.

Crooks and Liars also has the video and a transcript.

Update (TL): We wrote about Fitz always going for the top dog here and his pattern with respect to Official A's in his indictments, such as in the case of Ill. Gov. George Ryan here.

Jason Leopold reports Fitzgerald met with the PlameGate grand jury yesterday and told them he is preparing mulitple charges against Karl Rove.

Jason also interviewed Rove lawyer Robert Luskin yesterday.

"Mr. Rove is still a subject of the investigation," Luskin said. In a previous interview, Luskin asserted that Rove would not be indicted by Fitzgerald, but he was unwilling to make that prediction again Wednesday.

"Mr. Fitzgerald hasn't made any decision on the charges and I can't speculate what the outcome will be," Luskin said. "Mr. Rove has cooperated completely with the investigation."

Does Luskin's refusal to continue to maintain Rove won't be indicted mean he isn't sure or that he's resigned to an Indictment? I don't know, but Jason seems certain an Indictment is looming.

I'm hearing rumors that Fitz met with the Valerie Plame grand jury this morning. and Rove was the topic of discussion. Perhaps as Jason Leopold reported a few weeks ago, the paperwork for charges is being prepared. More on that here.

I'll be out at Markos' book signing and Drinking Liberally with the TL kid, so if there's any news in the meantime, please update in the comments.

Sidney Blumenthal also reports the investigation is turning towards Karl Rove.

Jason Leopold and Truthout have published a June 10 recently declassified State Department Memo (pdf) from Carl Ford to Marc Grossman on Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger. The New York Sun earlier today posted a copy of the July 7 version of the memo. Jason writes:

Monday's declassified State Department memo was obtained over the weekend by The New York Sun under a Freedom of Information Act request the newspaper filed last July. The Sun's story Monday morning, however, did not say anything about the State Department's warnings more than a week before Bush's State of the Union address about the bogus Niger documents.

The memo was drafted by Carl Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in response to questions posed in June 2003 by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, about a February 2002 fact-finding trip to Niger that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson undertook to investigate the uranium claims on behalf of the CIA.

Here is the declassified June 9 INR Memo (pdf) on Joseph Wilson and his trip to Niger. It discusses the February 19, 2002 meeting "convened by Valerie Wilson, a CIA WMD manager."

The Sun's headline is that the memo does not say Plame's status was secret, meaning classified or covert. Wilson says the memo's account of the meeting is inaccurate:

Mr. Wilson told the Sun yesterday that the State Department's account of how his trip was arranged was "absolutely inaccurate." The meeting was not convened by my wife," the former ambassador said. "She had, as it now turns out, the misfortune of having escorted me into the building. ... She left before the meeting started." He also said that the subject of his going to Niger did not arise until halfway through the session.

Mr. Wilson acknowledged that his wife drafted a memo describing his previous involvement with Niger, but he said she did so at the request of her supervisor. A Senate Intelligence Committee report issued in July 2004 said Ms. Plame "suggested his name for the trip."

The New York Times blasts Bush and Cheney on the NIE report leaks in the Valerie Plame investigation.

Since Mr. Bush regularly denounces leakers, the White House has made much of the notion that he did not leak classified information, he declassified it. This explanation strains credulity. Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.

To declassify an intelligence document, officials have to decide whether disclosing the information would jeopardize the sources that provided it or the methods used to gather it. To answer that question, they closely study the origins of the intelligence to be disclosed. Had Mr. Bush done that, he should have seen that the most credible information made it clear that the Niger story was wrong. (In any case, Iraq's supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger happened four years before the invasion, and failed. The idea that this amounted to a current, aggressive and continuing campaign to build nuclear weapons in 2002 -- as Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney called it -- is laughable.)

The Times calls upon Patrick Fitzgerald to make public Bush and Cheney's 2004 interviews in the leaks investigation.