Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday:

Criminal defense lawyers I’ve spoken to who are friendly to the administration are very worried that there will be one or more indictments in the next three weeks of senior administration officials, just looking at what Fitzgerald is doing and taking him at his word, you know, being a serious prosecutor here. And I think it’s going to be bad for the Bush administration.

Someone like Bill Kristol doesn’t get information like this by accident. It’s being fed to him so, if there is an indictment, he can prepare the base. Towards the end of the segment, Kristol got started, saying, “I hate the criminalization of politics.”

The best way to stop the criminalization of politics is to get the criminals out of politics.

Last week, right-wing Focus on the Family head James Dobson said that his support for Harriet Miers was in part due to “confidential” information he had received during a phone conversation with Karl Rove.

This morning on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called on Rove and Dobson to make public the details of their talk. He also announced that Dobson will likely be called to testify about the conversation before the Senate Judiciary Commitee:

SEN. SCHUMER: That is no way to nominate a Supreme Court Justice. For that nominee to refuse to answer questions to the American public, and then have someone supporting her do all this whispering saying ‘She’s okay, here is what she believes,’ is unfair. So as a result, I believe that we ought to call James Dobson as a witness at the Senate Judiciary hearing and find out what kind of assurances he has received. If those assurances are good enough for James Dobson, then all of America ought to hear them. … I believe my Democratic colleagues will go along and we will have James Dobson as a witness. Additionally, I think Karl Rove ought to let the public know what kind of assurances he gave James Dobson. This is not a game of wink and whisper. This is serious business.

Demonstrating the gravity of situation — that Rove may have given Dobson assurances of how Miers would vote on an upcoming case — Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) repeated Schumer’s call on ABC’s “This Week”:

SPECTER: If there is something which bears upon a precondition as to how a nominee is going to vote, I think that’s a matter that ought to be known by the Judiciary Committee and the American people.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So let me clarify here. You will call Dr. Dobson and Karl Rove to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee?

SPECTER: I haven’t made up a witness list, but I have done something unprecedented. I have divided the 30 witnesses equally between the Democrats and Republicans. Maybe that’s a witness that Pat Leahy will want to call.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Leahy —

SPECTER: Now, wait a minute. Now, wait a minute. If Pat Leahy doesn’t call him, Arlen Specter may. I want to know what all the facts are. I’m very fact-oriented, and if Dr. Dobson knows something that he shouldn’t know or something that I ought to know, I’m going to find out.

A new report from Newsweek:

[L]awyers close to the case, who asked not to be identified because it’s ongoing, say [special prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald appears to be focusing in part on discrepancies in testimony between Rove and Time reporter Matt Cooper about their conversation of July 11, 2003. In Cooper’s account, Rove told him the wife of White House critic Joseph Wilson worked at the “agency” on WMD issues and was responsible for sending Wilson on a trip to Niger to check out claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. But Rove did not disclose this conversation to the FBI when he was first interviewed by agents in the fall of 2003″”nor did he mention it during his first grand jury appearance”¦

After Fitzgerald discovered an email from Rove to Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley discussing Rove’s conversation with Cooper, Rove returned to the grand jury. But his account of the conversation differed substantially from Cooper:

[Rove] testified that the talk was initially about “welfare reform”"”a topic mentioned in the e-mail””and that Cooper then changed the subject. Cooper has written that he doesn’t recall a discussion of welfare reform.

Yesterday, lawyers in the case told the New York Times that special Fitzgerald “might consider false statement, perjury or obstruction of justice charges“¦if he could show that anyone intentionally misled investigators or prosecutors.”