firedoglake has been quite good over the last couple of months in keeping track of the players and dates involved in the Plame scandal. I have to confess my eyes finally glazed a bit with the Viveca Novak revelations coming out. It's really not fair in a scandal to have two unrelated people with the same name, especially when not Brown or Smith. And now it's apparently uninvolved reporters having conversations with Rove's lawyer that somehow becomes relevant and (if you believe Luskin, the lawyer), good for his client?
But Jane holds your hand here and then later and more damagingly here. Here's the gist in her view: Luskin was hoping that by relating his conversation, it would provide a plausible reason for Rove to not have told the grand jury about his conversation with Matt Cooper. If Rove could somehow shorten the timeline between Luskin hearing from Novak about Cooper, and his magical remembrance that he DID in fact talk to Cooper, then his sudden change in testimony could be tied to Viveca having reminded Luskin of the conversation.
Yikes...still with me? Luskin was hoping Novak had provided a spur to make Rove's changing story look like failed memory. But Jane thinks Novak may screw things up before the GJ and mention multiple conversations...including one BEFORE Rove's testimony where he had no recollection of the Cooper conversation. Now rather than giving Rove an alibi for his memory, it makes the testimony look even more suspicious than before.
Is Luskin really that stupid, or is he just desperate? Hamsher seems to think so. And in a sidebar, she correctly wonders what kind of BS the journalistic code of anonymous sources must be if Novak was blabbing about TIME's secret source to government lawyers. Throw her on the stake with Woodward--had I the benefit of Jane's plausible analysis, I too might have been one to read of her ethicless behavior and say, "WTF?"
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