Hang on to your hats. This story has legs that are moving as fast as Lance Armstrong’s as he battles to again win Le Tour de France. If you blink, you might miss something important. Focus. Focus.

The lawyer for Time Magazine’s Matthew Cooper, Richard Sauber, has provided the Washington Post with some interesting background information about the last minute developments that led up to Cooper’s agreement to testify in the Plame leak case.
Sauber says:

Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, facing a jail term in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, never asked White House political adviser Karl Rove to release him from a pledge of confidentiality because Cooper’s attorney believed that any conversation between the two men could be construed as obstruction of justice.

“I forbid Matt to call him,” Richard Sauber said yesterday. “I cringed at the idea. These two witnesses would have to explain their discussion before the grand jury.”

…

Cooper testified Wednesday after Sauber worked out a waiver of confidentiality with Rove’s attorney in the case, which began with columnist Robert D. Novak revealing in July 2003 that Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a covert CIA operative. Cooper’s story was posted online days later.

Sauber states that he warned Cooper he could end up with a felony record, but Cooper still resisted testifying originally because he felt that the blanket waiver he’d previously received from White House officials could have been coerced.

Then this happened:

On July 6, the day Cooper expected to be jailed, Sauber was taking a red-eye flight back from a family vacation in Alaska and changed planes in Chicago. He bought a Wall Street Journal and saw Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, quoted as saying: “If Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source, it’s not Karl he’s protecting.”

Pardon me? Did Luskin lie? Say it ain’t so.

After checking with Cooper, Sauber called Luskin and asked if Rove would approve a waiver that mentioned Cooper by name. They hammered out a statement that said Rove “affirms his waiver . . . concerning any conversation he may have had with Matthew Cooper” in July 2003.

And, Cooper adds now:

Cooper left the impression he had talked to Rove that day when he said his source had released him in “somewhat dramatic fashion.” He said yesterday that “I definitely should have been more clear.”

We’ll forgive you, Matt.

Rove’s lawyer, Luskin, who seems to be quite Rovesque himself then spun this thusly:

Luskin has said that he merely reaffirmed the blanket waiver by Rove, who is the president’s deputy chief of staff, and that the assurance would have been available at any time. He said that Cooper’s description of last-minute theatrics “does not look so good” and that “it just looks to me like there was less a desire to protect a source.”

Typical sleazeball tactic: take the heat off Rove again and point the theatrical finger at Cooper. Get over it, Luskin. You’ve been busted.

Meanwhile, back at the Time magazine ranch, Pearlstine is in big trouble:

On Monday, two Time correspondents, upset about Pearlstine’s decision to release Cooper’s notes, showed top company officials e-mails from sources who said they would now have trouble trusting the magazine. The tense meeting in the Washington bureau with Pearlstine, Time Inc. Editorial Director John Huey and Managing Editor Jim Kelly was “angry” and filled with “bile,” said several participants who requested anonymity because the meeting was confidential.

One reporter, Mark Thompson, circulated copies of an e-mail from a woman who deals regularly with whistle-blowers, saying that she would not turn over a confidential source to Time and that the magazine had slid to the bottom of her media list. He told Pearlstine the Cooper decision had “made our job a heck of a lot tougher.” Another, Brian Bennett, displayed a similar note from a source with the name blacked out.

When Huey told the staff that they were in a conservative judicial environment, Michael Weisskopf, who lost an arm in Iraq, accused him of a “cop-out.”

Kelly said the meeting “accomplished what it set out to do, to have all 18 correspondents tell Norm their concerns and fears about his decision and have Norm explain his decision maybe a little differently than it had been explained initially in the press.”

Ouch.

Stay tuned for the next installment of As the Leaker Gets Squeezed…

(Why don’t you just turn yourself in already Novak…I mean Rove…I mean Novak…I mean Miller…?)