Plame gossip - V. Novak- Luskin confirmed (reposted)

The NYTimes has a story up tonight that confirms the speculation as to why Luskin thinks Viveca Novak's testimony will free Rove from perjury charges.

Mr. Rove's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, spoke in the summer or early fall of 2004 with Viveca Novak, a reporter for Time magazine. In that conversation, Mr. Luskin heard from Ms. Novak that a colleague at Time, Matthew Cooper, might have interviewed Mr. Rove about the undercover C.I.A. officer at the heart of the case, the people said.

The theory that Luskin will push is that after his conversation with V. Novak's he asked Rove to look again to see if he could find any evidence that he had talked to Cooper, and from that a new search turned up the email to Hadley that confirmed Rove did speak to Cooper. Maybe enough to confuse a jury, but there's a problem with this little theory. Check the date on the Luskin-Novak conversation above(earlier reported as "from May 04"), then ask yourself, why did Rove wait until after(Oct. 14) Cooper was held in contempt for not revealing Rove as a source(Oct. 13.)

But Mr. Fitzgerald appears to be evaluating whether Mr. Rove came forward with the e-mail and his new testimony only after it became apparent that Mr. Cooper might be compelled to testify about it. It is not clear precisely what Ms. Novak told Mr. Luskin, or what the context for their conversation had been.

That's the million dollar question as to whether Rove gets indicted or not. This Huffington Post piece by Jane Hamsher also explains the exact same thing (maybe more clearly.) None of the btop Plame blogs has written this up yet. I will update if they come up with anything elase/new.

UPDATE: Jeralyn at TalkLeft has a more thorough exploration of this. Also an interesting post on this by Armando over at dKos.