By Adam Entous Fri Oct 7, 7:30 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A New York Times reporter has given investigators notes from a conversation she had with a top aide to Vice President
Dick Cheney weeks earlier than was previously known, suggesting White House involvement started well before the outing of a CIA operative, legal sources said.
Times reporter Judith Miller discovered the notes -- about a June 2003 conversation she had with Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- after her testimony before the grand jury last week, the sources said on Friday. She turned the notes over to federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and is expected to meet him again next Tuesday, the sources said.
Miller's notes could help Fitzgerald establish that Libby had started talking to reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her diplomat husband, Joseph Wilson, weeks before Wilson publicly criticized the administration's
Iraq policy in a Times opinion piece, the sources said.
Wilson asserts that administration officials leaked his wife's identity, which damaged her ability to work undercover, to discredit him for criticizing
President George W. Bush's Iraq policy in 2003, after a CIA-funded trip to investigate whether Niger helped supply nuclear materials to Baghdad.
One source involved in the investigation said Miller's notes could help Fitzgerald show a long-running and orchestrated campaign to discredit Wilson, which could help form the basis for a conspiracy charge.
Fitzgerald has yet to indicate whether or not he intends to bring indictments, but lawyers close to the investigation said there were signs he may be moving in that direction.
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