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Apparently Bob Novak has decided to play the game:

"Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this," Novak said on CNN's "Crossfire," of which he is a co-host. "There is no great crime here."

Now I don't really have a hard time believing that. Plausible deniability is a wonderful thing; I could easily believe that someone called him on another pretext, intending all along to let the Plame information "slip" along the way. Or that they had Novak call them. Or that it was done at a face to face meeting. Any of those would make that statement technically true. I guess you might say that it all depends on what the definition of "call" is.

Of course, you have to compare that to what he said in a July 22 interview in Newsday (thanks to Josh Marshall):

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

There's also the matter of "analyst" vs. "operative", which is pretty important in terms of whether and which laws were broken. Novak is now saying that

a confidential source at the CIA told him Plame was "an analyst, not a spy, not covert operative and not in charge of undercover operatives." (same CNN article)

On the other hand, we have CNN saying that other CIA sources have told them she was an operative plus Wilson's statements that when Novak originally called him before publishing the article he told Wilson that someone had identified his wife as a CIA operative.

Nothing illegal here on Novak's part; the First Amendment is a wonderful thing. But Novak is certainly working hard at cementing his credentials as the kind of vermin other vermin cross the street to avoid.