Rove Indictment Watch

In today’s Rove Watch, we see that Rove remains at risk of indictment, and Rove expects an answer within weeks. Also significant is that top White House aides are discussing whether Rove needs to step down or at least issue a formal apology. It is significant both that they see Rove as a politcial liability and that they feel safe to discuss this with the media. From the Washington Post:

While Rove faces doubts about his White House status, there are new indications that he remains in legal jeopardy from Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s criminal investigation of the Plame leak. The prosecutor spoke this week with an attorney for Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper about his client’s conversations with Rove before and after Plame’s identity became publicly known because of anonymous disclosures by White House officials, according to two sources familiar with the conversation.

Fitzgerald is considering charging Rove with making false statements in the course of the 22-month probe, and sources close to Rove — who holds the titles of senior adviser and White House deputy chief of staff — said they expect to know within weeks whether the most powerful aide in the White House will be accused of a crime.

But some top Republicans said yesterday that Rove’s problems may not end there. Bush’s top advisers are considering whether it is tenable for Rove to remain on the staff, given that Fitzgerald has already documented something that Rove and White House official spokesmen once emphatically denied — that he played a central role in discussions with journalists about Plame’s role at the CIA and her marriage to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Iraq war.