There’s a lot of excitement in the lefty-blog world about a new National Journal story which suggests that Robert Novak and Karl Rove cooked up a cover story to tell investigators at the beginning of the CIA leak investigation. According to National Journal’s Murray Waas, Novak called Rove on September 29, 2003, just as the leak investigation was getting underway, and said something like, “You are not going to get burned” and “I don’t give up my sources.”

Some might say that sounds like a reporter protecting a source, but National Journal sees possible obstruction, although it concedes such a charge would be hard to make:

Even if the prosecutor and his investigative team conclude that Rove and Novak did indeed devise a cover story to protect Rove, it is simply too difficult to prove what happened in a private conversation between two people.A longtime friend of Rove, who doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of the CIA leak case but who knows both Rove and Novak well, doubts that Fitzgerald could get a conviction — “as long as neither [Novak nor Rove] breaks, and there is no reason for them to, no matter how much evidence there is. These are two people who go way back, and they are going to look out for each other.”

Rove’s side responded to the story today, in a statement reported by National Journal this way:

A spokesman for Rove, Mark Corallo, said, “Karl Rove has never urged anyone directly or indirectly to withhold information from the special counsel or testify falsely.”

But Corallo tells National Review that his statement was a bit longer than what was included in the National Journal piece. This is it, in its entirety:

Karl Rove has never urged anyone, directly or indirectly, to withhold information from the Special Counsel or to testify falsely. No one has ever said or implied to Karl Rove that he intended to do so. The Special Counsel has never suggested that there is any evidence to support such an allegation. Frankly, it is hard to think of anything less reliable or less relevant than what investigators may or may not have speculated before they had started collecting evidence. Circulating such speculation now is nothing short of irresponsible.

One last thing. National Journal reports that investigators first learned about the September 29, 2003 phone call between Rove and Novak from…Rove himself, who told FBI agents about it during his very first conversation with them in Fall 2003.