Substantive details are a little hard to come by, but I feel compelled to offer a round-up of the latest Plame-related news before someone comes and takes away my “Liberal Bloggers ‘R Us” card.
* The WaPo reported today, “The CIA leak investigation returned to a more active stage yesterday as a special prosecutor presented information to a grand jury for the first time in six weeks.”
* Yesterday, Patrick Fitzgerald hosted a three-hour grand jury session where he was accompanied by three deputies and an FBI agent, but he didn’t call any witnesses, instead bringing the new grand jury up to date. It prompted some speculation about upcoming indictments, with one former U.S. attorney noting that Fitzgerald wouldn’t bother to summarize matters for a new grand jury unless he were planning to pursue additional criminal charges.
* Today, Fitzgerald spent more than an hour at a law firm representing Viveca Novak, the Time magazine reporter who’s a friend of Karl Rove’s lawyer, and whose testimony is expected to be important in the case. As Salon’s Tim Grieve noted, Novak reportedly “alerted Rove’s lawyer to the fact that Rove had leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to Matthew Cooper at a time when Rove wasn’t “remembering” any such conversation and Cooper and Time were fighting to keep it secret.”
* For her part, Novak (who is not related to Robert Novak) hired a heavy-hitter defense attorney to represent her in this case.
* The WaPo also noted, “[S]everal legal experts and sources involved in the case said Fitzgerald was probably providing the new grand jury with a primer on what has been learned in the investigation and what remains unresolved. They said the prosecutor’s move into a more active probe could spell trouble for Rove, or for other people enmeshed in more recent developments in the case.”
Stay tuned. The Plame scandal may not be on the front page every day anymore, but it is still percolating along — and may still cause serious headaches for the Bush White House.