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THE ROBBER NOVAK CASE!

Lighting move, says journalist did not receive informationMSNBC and NBC News

Updated: 8:45 p.m. ET May 21, 2004WASHINGTON - NBC News said Friday night that it would oppose a subpoena issued to Washington bureau chief Tim Russert by the federal grand jury investigating the leak of the identity of an undercover CIA operative last year.

Russert, the moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” is the first journalist known to have been subpoenaed in the investigation, which the Justice Department opened after syndicated columnist Robert Novak reported in July that Valerie Plame, the wife of a former ambassador who criticized President Bush’s justification for going to war in Iraq, worked for the agency.

Novak has refused to reveal who identified Plame, saying only that the information came from two senior administration officials.

The Washington Post and the New York newspaper Newsday said this week that their reporters were asked to sit for questions in connection with the investigation but that they had not been formally subpoenaed.

NBC News promised to fight the subpoena in court, saying Russert was not among the journalists who may have received the leak, which Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, called an attempt to intimidate him into silence. Disclosing the identity of an undercover U.S. agent is a felony.

Grand jury casts wide net
At the request of the CIA, Wilson investigated allegations that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from an African country and reported that the claim was inaccurate.

After Bush repeated the allegation in his 2003 State of the Union address as one of the justifications for going to war, Wilson wrote an editorial column in The New York Times accusing the president of operating under false pretenses.

The grand jury, which was convened after MSNBC.com and NBC News reported in September that the CIA had requested a criminal investigation of the leak, has also issued subpoenas for records of telephone calls from Air Force One during the week before Novak published Plame’s name.

Wilson identified Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Elliott Abrams, a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council, as the possible leakers in a book he published earlier this year. He has also accused Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, of having known about and encouraging the campaign to discredit him.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan has said that his conversations with Rove, Libby and Abrams ruled out their involvement.

By MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson