Washington ? Months before Karl Rove corrected his statements in the Valerie Plame investigation, his lawyer was told that the president’s top political adviser might have disclosed Plame’s CIA status to a Time magazine reporter.

Rove says he had forgotten the conversation he had on July 11, 2003, with Time’s Matt Cooper. But the magazine reported Sunday that in the first half of 2004, as President Bush’s re-election campaign was heating up, Rove’s lawyer got the word about a possible Rove-Cooper conversation from a second Time reporter, Viveca Novak.

Novak described her conversation with the lawyer, Robert Luskin, Sunday on Time’s Web site.

Luskin declined comment. Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Rove’s legal team, said the deputy White House chief of staff has cooperated fully with prosecutors.

“The integrity of the investigation requires that we not discuss the substance of any communications with the special counsel,” Corallo said in a statement.

Six weeks ago, in a so-far successful effort to avert Rove’s indictment, Luskin disclosed his conversation with Novak to the special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald. Rove remains under investigation.

In her account, Novak wrote that Luskin thought disclosing their discussion “was going to help Rove, perhaps by explaining why Rove hadn’t told Fitzgerald or the grand jury of his conversation with my colleague Matt Cooper.”