fitzgerald, after rumors had him sitting on a closed document indicting Rove,meets one month later with rove and lusken and informs lusken to tell his client he will not be indicted.

Catching Karl doing anything, as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has learned, is not easy. Deniability is a perfected skill. In Rove's practice of it, even incontrovertible proof can be insufficient to compel admissions. Up until the moment that it appeared Matthew Cooper of Time was going to testify before the federal grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, Karl Rove was insisting he had had no communication with Cooper until after the secret agent's name was already published. When he was finally confronted with his e-mail to the deputy national security adviser, which gave the lie to his assertion about Cooper, Rove conceded the communication must have occurred. If the e-mail had not existed, Rove would have persisted in his denial. Rove has been manufacturing alternative realities to fit political needs for so long, one has to wonder whether he, at least on occasion, confuses the real world with the alternative one his political imagination insists exists.