Tick Tick Tick

Goes the time-bomb about to go off on the Bush Administration:

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.

Wilson asserts that administration officials leaked his wife's identity, which damaged her ability to work undercover, to discredit him for criticizing President George W. Bush's Iraq policy in 2003, after a CIA-funded trip to investigate whether Niger helped supply nuclear materials to Baghdad.