Treasongate gets curiouser and curiouser...

Today Bloomberg reported this:

July 22 (Bloomberg) — Two top White House aides have given accounts to a special prosecutor about how reporters first told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to people familiar with the case.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, one person said. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn’t tell Libby of Plame’s identity, the person said.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, according a person familiar with the matter. Novak, who was first to report Plame’s name and connection to Wilson, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor, the person said.

I'm no lawyer, but I believe the technical term for that is perjury. And it's a felony. It's never the crime, always the cover-up, remember?

Add to that this bombshell: MSNBC's Hardball reported yesterday that John Bolton (hi, remember me?) is tied up in this mess too. He apparently testified to the grand jury in the Plame case, and it's unclear whether or not he disclosed that to the Senate Intelligence Committee during confirmation hearings. Any nominee confirmed by the Senate is required to disclose any criminal investigations with which he or she is involved.

The hub of the Bolton sage on the Web, Steve Clemons' The Washington Note, has more:

This takes us back to whether it is possible that John Bolton's shop played a role in promulgating not only the Niger/Uranium story inside the State Department but in its cozy relationship with the Vice President's office tried to help undermine Joe Wilson by exposing the identity of his wife....

...and more intriguingly:

TWN has just learned from a highly placed source -- and in the right place to know -- that John Bolton was a regular source for Judith Miller's New York Times WMD and national security reports.

The source did not have any knowledge on whether Bolton was one of Miller's sources on the Valerie Plame story she was preparing, but argues that he was a regular source otherwise.

It's all "thickening."

This shouldn't be a surprise. Bolton's job was concerned with WMD and proliferation. If there was a question about the Iraq/Niger story, he would be the point person at the State Department. And the special prosecutor is very concerned with that State Department memo that was floating around Air Force One right before the Novak leak, with Ari Fleischer and others reading it. We now know that the memo was marked (S), for secret.

Who do YOU think wrote that memo?

This house of cards is about one slight breeze from blowing all the way down.