WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 (Xinhuanet) -- Karl Rove, the top political aide to US President George W. Bush, testified for a fourth and the last time Friday before a grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA agent's identity.

White House political advisor Karl Rove walks to a waiting car as he leaves the U.S. Federal Courthouse after testifying for the fourth time before a federal grand jury investigating the CIA leak case in Washington Oct. 14. (Reuters)

    Rove spent about four and one-half hours in a federal courthouse in Washington.

    The special prosecutor investigating the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, had not advised Rove that he was a target of the investigation and affirmed that he had made no decision concerning charges, Rove's attorney Robert Luskin said in a statement.

    "The special counsel has indicated that he does not anticipate the need for Mr. Rove's further cooperation," the statement said.

    The grand jury's term was due to expire Oct. 28, and Fitzgerald, who has tried for two years to find out who in the Bush administration disclosed CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in the summer of 2003, would have to decide before then whether to indict anyone in the case.

    Disclosure of the identity of an undercover CIA agent constitutes a federal crime under US law.

Protestors dressed condoms hold a demonstration in front of the U.S. Federal Courthouse as US President George W. Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, appears before a grand jury in Washington, DC, Oct. 14.  (Reuters)

    Prosecutors had warned Rove before his latest grand jury appearance that they could not guarantee he would not be indicted over the leak of Plame's identity.

    The White House previously denied that Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were involved in the case.

    The case dated back to July 2003, when Plame's name was first published in a syndicated column, days after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, wrote an article in The New York Times criticizing the Bush administration for twisting intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq before the war.

    The timing of Wilson's article embarrassed the White House, which had failed to find the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that Bush had used as the main justification for going to war. Enditem