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(Photo: AP)
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Karl Rove, President Bush's closest adviser, apparently escaped indictment Oct. 28, 2005, when his top adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was indicted. But Rove remained under investigation, his legal status a looming political problem for the White House.
The grand jury was expected to investigate Rove's role in the CIA leak.
Rove has already testified four times before the grand jury investigating who leaked Valerie Plame's CIA identity.
The federal investigation into the leaker's identity revealed in July 2005 that Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified in Novak's column.
Rove told Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper that the woman "apparently works" for the CIA and that she had authorized her husband's fact-finding trip to Africa, according to a July 11, 2003, e-mail by Cooper obtained by Newsweek magazine.
Cooper had planned to go to jail rather than reveal his source to investigators, but at the last minute he agreed to cooperate when Rove gave him permission to do so. Another reporter, The New York Times' Judith Miller, was jailed July 6, 2005, for not revealing her sources for a leak story she'd researched.
Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, said his client did not disclose Plame's name. "In the conversation, Karl is warning Cooper not to get too far out in front of the story," Luskin said. "There were false allegations out there that Vice President Cheney sent Wilson to Niger and that Wilson had reported back to Cheney about his trip to Niger. Neither was true."
Joseph Wilson had said in a late August 2003 speech that he suspected Rove as the leaker, but then backtracked somewhat from that assertion a month later. "I did not mean at that time to imply that I thought that Karl Rove was the source or the authorizer, just that I thought that it came from the White House, and Karl Rove was the personification of the White House political operation," Wilson said.
Wilson, however, then added: "I have people, who I have confidence in, who have indicated to me that he (Rove), at a minimum, condoned it and certainly did nothing to put a stop to it for a week after it was out there. Among the phone calls I received were those that said 'White House sources are saying that it's not about the 16 words, it's about Wilson and his wife.' And two people called me up and specifically mentioned Rove's name," he said.
At the time, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said it was "ridiculous" to suggest that Rove was involved. "The president knows he wasn't involved. ... It's simply not true." When news of Cooper's source broke, he refused to comment on the story.
Meanwhile, President Bush was asked directly whether he would fire Rove - in keeping with a pledge made in June 2004 to dismiss any leakers in the case. The president did not respond.
On July 15, 2005, the Associated Press reported that, according to a person briefed on the testimony, Rove testified to a grand jury that he originally learned about the operative from the news media and not government sources.
The person told the AP that Rove testified last year that he remembers specifically being told by columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of a harsh Iraq war critic, worked for the CIA.
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