Adam Liptak has a blow-by-blow of the Cooper/Rove negotations and related matters that leaves me more confused than I was before. I don’t think the fault lies with Liptak; I think he’s giving a very skilled account of a a set of pieces that don’t yet form a coherent pattern.
Update
Atrios agrees with Kevin Drum and me about the difficulty of parsing Liptak’s account, and offers a plausible interpetation: As Rove’s lawyer kept repeating “Whoever Cooper is protecting, it’s not my client,” Cooper finally decided it wasn’t worth going to jail to protect Rove after all. That interpretation has the advantage of explaining why Rove’s lawyer would have allowed him to offer a waiver for information likely to send him to prison: he didn’t mean to, but stretched the rubber band a little bit too far and it broke.