Sources close to the leak investigation being run by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald say it was the discovery of one of Rove's White House e-mails-in which the senior Bush adviser referred to his July 2003 conversation with Cooper-that prompted Rove to contact prosecutors and to revise his account to include the Cooper conversation. ....Luskin also asserted that any misstatements that his client might have made to the president, the FBI, or other public officials, were not purposeful and were due to incomplete records and faulty memories.

I think a big question remains when and from whom did Rove and other White House officials learn about Plame? Rove reportedly told the grand jury he learned about it from a reporter but couldn't remember which one, a story that has had us all snickering for months.

With Judith Miller's notes from June, 2003 about to be turned over, it's time to revisit this post quoting a Time Magazine article on how those at the White House may have learned of Plame and which discusses the history and actions of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and Defense Policy Board with respect to Joseph Wilson's trip. I wrote then that there seemed to have been a clear plan among these Pentagon groups to discredit the CIA analysts and Joe Wilson because they didn't support the Pentagon's theory of WMDs and uranium and Niger in particular.

Judith Miller is known for her strong sources in Pentagon circles. Did she pass on to Libby info in June she learned from them? Is that how Rove knew?

It was also in June, 2003 that Post reporter Walter Pincus made his first inquiry to the White House. From the Time Magazine article:

The previously undisclosed fact gathering began in the first week of June 2003 at the CIA, when its public-affairs office received an inquiry about Wilson's trip to Africa from veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus. That office then contacted Plame's unit, which had sent Wilson to Niger, but stopped short of drafting an internal report. The same week, Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman asked for and received a memo on the Wilson trip from Carl Ford, head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Sources familiar with the memo, which disclosed Plame's relationship to Wilson, say Secretary of State Colin Powell read it in mid-June. Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage may have received a copy then too. (emphasis supplied)

When Pincus' article ran on June 12, the circle of senior officials who knew about the identity of Wilson's wife expanded. "After Pincus," a former intelligence officer says, "there was general discussion with the National Security Council and the White House and State Department and others" about Wilson's trip and its origins. A source familiar with the memo says neither Powell nor Armitage spoke to the White House about it until after July 6. John McLaughlin, then deputy head of the CIA, confirms that the White House asked about the Wilson trip, but can't remember exactly when. One thing he's sure of, says McLaughlin, who has been interviewed by prosecutors, is that "we looked into it and found the facts of it, and passed it on."

It's beginning to look like the operative time period for determining whether Libby and Rove have been truthful is June, 2003 - rather than the week before Novak's article ran in July.

Update: A new Reuters article about Miller and her newly found Libby notes from June, 2003.