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Miller "finds more notes" -- from a JUNE 2003 conversation with Lewis Libby. Reports Reuters:
That June 2003 conversation would predate Joe Wilson's July 6 2003 oped, but not the Vice President's office angst over Nick Kristof's May and June 2003 opeds and Walter Pincus's June 12 2003 piece that describe Wilson's factfinding trip to Niger (without naming him).New York Times reporter Judith Miller discovered notes from an earlier conversation she had with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and turned them over the prosecutor investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative's identity, legal sources said on Friday.
Miller's notes about a June 2003 conversation with Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, could be important to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's case by establishing exactly when Libby and other administration officials first started talking to reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson.
Update: Who's leaking Miller's discovery of more notes? Probably not Miller's attorneys. Libby's? That doesn't seem right either. Fitzgerald's office?
Update II: The significance of the timing of this conversation is really very interesting. Remember, Miller worked out an agreement with Fitzgerald where she only has to turn over notes related to the Plame matter, and then, only those sourced to Libby. So the fact she and Libby were already discussing the Plame issue in June 2003 - a month before Wilson went public in her paper - is interesting. The NY Observer says the notes may concern a conversation as early as May 2003 (when Kristof's column about the unnamed diplomat's Niger trip appeared)? We know Pincus was talking to Libby in June 2003 about Wilson's trip. But the allegation that Wilson's wife had a role in his getting the trip wasn't in Pincus June 12 2003 report. However, we do know that the State Department had a memo from May/June 2003 identifying Wilson's wife as having a role in sending him on that trip. Who knew about that memo?