Where are these bogus reports coming from? - UPDATED and BUMPED

Last evening the blogosphere was all atwitter over a story indicating that Karl Rove had been indicted. The details are below, but before you begin to read, let me point out that the STORY IS NOT TRUE!!!! Repeat: this story is BOGUS. The question remains ... WHERE ARE THESE STORIES COMING FROM? This is not the first bogus story to publish via the Truthout site. And anyone who has been reading here recently knows that I have charged David Schuster of MSNBC  with blatant misreporting and he seems to use Leopold as his source.

Here is the original story:

Via truthout.org.

He [Jason Leopold, pictured at left] says:

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment. Sources said Fitzgerald was in Washington, DC, Friday and met with Luskin for about 15 hours to go over the charges against Rove, which include perjury and lying to investigators about how and when Rove discovered that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative and whether he shared that information with reporters, sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said.

Today we have the CORRECTED story from Byron York at NRO The Corner:

REPORTS OF ROVE'S INDICTMENT ARE GREATLY... [Byron York]

You haven't heard about it, but many reporters spent part of their weekend making calls to check out a report on a left-wing website, truthout.org , that Karl Rove has been indicted in the CIA leak investigation.  The report, by someone named Jason Leopold, was posted yesterday and was headlined, "Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators."  It began:

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment. Sources said Fitzgerald was in Washington, DC, Friday and met with Luskin for about 15 hours to go over the charges against Rove, which include perjury and lying to investigators about how and when Rove discovered that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative and whether he shared that information with reporters, sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said.

It was still unknown Saturday whether Fitzgerald charged Rove with a more serious obstruction of justice charge. Sources close to the case said Friday that it appeared very likely that an obstruction charge against Rove would be included with charges of perjury and lying to investigators.

The report came out of the blue on Saturday.  Jason Leopold, who has written a memoir, entitled News Junkie, in which, according to the book's promotional material, he portrays himself as a writer "whose addictive tendencies led him from a life of drug abuse and petty crime to become an award-winning investigative journalist," has written wildly unreliable reports about the CIA leak affair before.  But still, reporters of every stripe felt they had to check this one out.

So did I.  I talked with Rove defense spokesman Mark Corallo, who told me the story was completely baseless.  Part of our conversation:

Did Patrick Fitzgerald come to Patton Boggs for 15 hours Friday?
No.
Did he come to Patton Boggs for any period of time Friday?
No.
Did he meet anywhere else with Karl Rove's representatives?
No.
Did he communicate in any way with Karl Rove's representatives?
No.
Did he inform Rove or Rove's representatives that Rove had been indicted?
No.

So there seems to be nothing to the story, certainly nothing which any other reporter has seen fit to report.  Which raises a question: What is going on here? The journalists who checked out the story, quite properly, did not repeat Leopold's bad information.  But for some media blogger out there, it might be reasonable to ask: Where are these reports coming from?

_______________________________

UPDATE:

Just One Minute is on the story. Several good threads are worth reading, including ALL the comments. If you want to see what the "experts" are saying, this is the blog to visit.

MAKING SENSE:  Peter Daou of Salon (Leopold's on-time employer) is spot-on with his skepticism:

My concern - and the reason I write this - is that Leopold's ubiquitous reporting has set expectations very high in the blog community. We're at a moment when blogs are under assault by prominent media and establishment figures. I wouldn't want to see him used as a cudgel to flog the progressive netroots as a bunch of conspiracy nuts. There's enough of that already. We don't need to provide ammo to our opponents.

No worries - like chipmunks, we can find the nuts easily enough already.

AND MORE ... Obviously five believers

Talk Left from a conversation by Jeralyn Merrit:

My Conversation With Mark Corallo Re: Leopold on Rove

Karl Rove's spokesman, Mark Corallo, called me at 8:20 a.m. Mountain Time today. He said someone had read him my post over the phone about my conversation with Jason Leopold (and he had picked up my voice-mail from Saturday night) and he wanted to respond. Here is Mr. Corallo's version:

1. He has never spoken with someone identifying himself as "Jason Leopold." He did have conversations Saturday and Sunday along the lines I described, but the caller identified himself as Joel something or other from the Londay Sunday Times. The calls were to his home number. At one point during their last conversation, he offered to call Joel back, and was given a cell phone number that began with 917. When he called the number back, it turned out not to be be a number for Joel.

2. Josh Gerstein and Byron York called him, not the other way around.

3. There was no meeting or communication between Luskin and Fitzgerald on Friday. Bob was not in the office on Friday at all. He was home, taking care of a sick cat.

4. Karl Rove did not tell the President he would resign.

5. Karl Rove has not been indicted nor told he would be indicted. As far as Corallo knows (and he is in contact with Luskin) Fitzgerald has not yet made up his mind as to whether to charge Rove. There are no charges.

6. He says there is not an ounce of truth to anything Jason wrote. He says he made it up. He also denies that Jason left him a message before the article ran.

7. He has received calls from the major papers on this and denied the story to all of them.

Mr. Corallo's tone was not angry. He was friendly and seemed sincere. If anything, he sounded somewhat bewildered and incredulous at how Jason could have written his article.

So, there you have it. A full and complete official Camp Rove denial of everything in Jason's article.

Now we wait and see. Jason has said if the story is false, he will publicly disclose his sources.

Mr. Corallo gave me his cell phone number for future questions. I asked him how late I could call him and he said up to 11 pm was fine for routine matters and any time if it was breaking news.

Malkin weighs in with a post entitled "Rovemania:"

There are a lot of rumors flying around the left side of the blogosphere about a Karl Rove indictment. (He's among the top Technorati searches today.) The New York Sun reports otherwise.

But unhinged Democrats are already partying hard. The Detroit Free Press report:

Wisbang  sums it all up succinctly:

The author of the story, freelance writer Jason Leopold, seems to be working his way down the media chain; going from respectable outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times, to online magazine Salon, and now a kooky site like Truthout. There's a reason his work isn't featured anywhere else - he's already been busted down by as a plagiarist and fabricator of material, and as Howard Kurtz reports: he's engaged in "lying, cheating and backstabbing," is a former cocaine addict, served time for grand larceny, repeatedly tried to kill himself and has battled mental illness his whole life. [See Kurtz, Salon, NRO, and NewsMax, and DUmmie Funnies for coverage of Leopold's past]

Leaving aside Leopold's complete lack of credibility, his sudden believability probably hints more at hopefulness on the left than a new mastery of facts. Leopold has been hawking this same every few months since 2005. The story last appeared in April, when indictment was just "days away."

Sure it's possible Rove could be indicted; but Leopold inventing indictments doesn't make it any more likely...

How much weirder does this story have to get? Now from American Spectator Blog:

               
In the blog post immediately below, I report on the apparent false identity scam used, according to our friend Mark Corallo, by lefty blogger Jason Leopold, in the course of spreading apparently false stories to the effect that Karl Rove had been indicted. Now it gets even better/weirder: In the course of talking to Corallo under the identity of a reporter for a British publication (conversations Leopold himself reported on, but without the little detail about having used an alias), Leopold gave Corallo a number to call back on. When Corallo tried back, Corallo said, the number didn't work. Well, just in the few minutes since I posted the tale below, I got the following e-mail from Corallo:

"Gets better – at 4:00 p.m. today I got a call from a guy named Joel Loria of the London Sunday Times!! He was a bit miffed (to say the least) that Leopold used his name. And the phone number was one digit off!"

This is really getting fun! Calling Janet Cooke, in addition to Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.....

How does a bogus blog story end up as a major story in the Wall Street Journal?

By ANNE MARIE SQUEO
May 16, 2006; Page A4

On Saturday night, attorney Robert Luskin was trying to barbecue at his Washington home when the phone started ringing nonstop. A story posted on an Internet site Truthout.org reported that his client, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, had been indicted.

Mr. Luskin says he issued an explicit denial to anyone who contacted him. But the story set off a fire storm, with reporters from newspapers, television and elsewhere seeking to check its veracity, and Web log writers seeking comment.

With more people turning to the Internet for news, bloggers have blurred the lines with traditional media and changed both the dynamics of the reporting process and how political rumors swirl.

Mr. Rove is the subject of an investigation by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into whether the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative was illegally leaked by Bush administration officials. Mr. Rove has testified before the grand jury in the case five times, most recently last month.

But there is no evidence the Bush adviser was indicted last week. His lawyer says it is plain wrong. Mr. Fitzgerald hasn't commented, and he is expected in coming weeks to make a decision about whether to charge Mr. Rove for perjury or related wrongdoing in the matter.

On Friday, Truthout posted another story by the same correspondent, Jason Leopold, reporting that Mr. Rove had told President Bush and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten that he would be indicted imminently.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Mr. Rove, said the Bush official had no such conversation with the president or Mr. Bolten. Mr. Luskin disputed Mr. Leopold's Saturday story, which cited "high level sources with direct knowledge" that he had a 15-hour meeting with Mr. Fitzgerald at Mr. Luskin's office at the Washington law firm Patton Boggs. The Rove attorney says he spent part of that day at the vet with his cat and that Mr. Fitzgerald was in Chicago. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald declined to comment. [CONT'D. HERE]