Uh oh

And no day at the Plame mines would be complete without a new Judy wrinkle. Reuters reports:

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.

So she takes her ridiculous "guardian of liberty" argument all the way to the Supremes, spends 85 days in jail, negotiates her deal with Pat Fitzgerald, testifies before the grand jury... and then finds her notes? I don't think so.

My guess? The Queen of All Iraq is under enough pressure to feel the same need Dubya feels -- take care of number one. Could she worried about being a target herself?

Double heh.

After two years of stonewalling, witnesses are suddenly auditioning their singing voices. This is the real "American Idol" (American Idle?), except that Patrick Fitzgerald is going to be a lot nastier than Simon Cowell.