WASHINGTON – The special prosecutor investigating the involvement of top White House officials in the leak of a CIA operative’s name is likely to seek indictments today or tomorrow, lawyers involved in the case said yesterday.

With much of official Washington on tenterhooks, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, met for three hours yesterday at the federal courthouse here with the grand jury that has been investigating the leak for nearly two years.

While reporters eager for any sign about the investigation’s progress massed in an elevator lobby just outside the grand jury rooms, Mr. Fitzgerald used a back exit to slip out to a 45-minute lunchtime meeting with the chief judge for the federal district court, Thomas Hogan.

Mr. Fitzgerald and a colleague emerged from Judge Hogan’s office just before 1 p.m., declining to comment on the session, which was first reported yesterday on the Web site of The New York Sun.

Two lawyers representing witnesses in the probe said yesterday that they viewed the prosecutor’s meeting with the chief judge as an indication that indictments in the case are imminent.

“One possibility is he did something to ask Hogan to seal indictments so he can release them all at once,” one attorney deeply involved in the case said yesterday. “That’s what I think is going on.”

Legal experts disagreed about whether Mr. Fitzgerald could be seeking to extend the term of the grand jury, which was set to disband on Friday. Some lawyers said the prosecutor could get another extension, while others said he was up against a firm two-year limit set by federal law.

The experts said it was doubtful that the grand jury had voted to return an indictment yesterday because there was no sign that any of the grand jurors accompanied Mr. Fitzgerald to Judge Hogan’s chambers to hand up a formal charge.

However, the courthouse meeting, coupled with word that the FBI was continuing to conduct interviews related to the case, led some veteran observers to conclude that indictments are all but certain.

“If you know you’re going nowhere, you don’t go through this,” a former United States attorney for Washington, D.C., Roscoe Howard, said. Asked about the most likely reason for the prosecutor’s call on Judge Hogan, Mr. Howard said, “to let him know that all hell is going to break loose here.”

Mr. Howard said the session was likely arranged to discuss how to manage the horde of reporters, photographers, and average citizens who would descend on the courthouse in the event of indictments. The ex-prosecutor said he saw no grounds for sealing the charges in the highly publicized case. “I don’t know what excuse he’d have to seal it. It’s just tough to say you need to preserve evidence. You can’t seal it on the grounds that this is going to generate a lot of publicity,” Mr. Howard said.

The two White House officials thought to be in the greatest legal jeopardy are a deputy chief of staff who is a longtime political adviser to President Bush, Karl Rove, and the vice president’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Mr. Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, declined to comment yesterday on whether his client has been told of an imminent indictment. Mr. Luskin also declined to confim reports that he met with Mr. Fitzgerald on Tuesday. “I’m not talking status,” the defense lawyer said.

Mr. Libby’s lawyer, Joseph Tate, did not respond to a request for an interview.

The investigation stems from the disclosure of the CIA operative’s name, Valerie Plame, in the press in July 2003, soon after Ms. Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson IV, charged in an op-ed piece that Mr. Bush distorted evidence about Iraqi nuclear programs. Mr. Wilson wrote that, as a former ambassador, he was sent by the CIA to Africa to investigate some of the claims about Iraqi weapons efforts.

Some of the subsequent press reports said anonymous administration officials eager to rebut Mr. Wilson’s criticisms said he was sent on the trip at the urging of his wife, a longtime officer at the CIA. The intelligence agency objected to the disclosure and eventually asked the Justice Department to investigate whether the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity violated criminal law. In December 2003, the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, recused himself from the case, which was turned over to Mr. Fitzgerald, the chief federal prosecutor in Chicago.

Yesterday, the prospect of indictments of White House staffers was raised in the Oval Office as Mr. Bush met with Prime Minister Buckovski of Macedonia. After a reporter asked if the White House was preparing for possible criminal charges, Mr. Bush put on a poker face and remained mute as the press was escorted out of the room. Previously, he has said he won’t comment on the case until the prosecutor concludes his investigation.

One lawyer who helped represent a witness in the case said a New York Times report that Vice President Cheney may have been the first senior White House official to learn that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA could explain why judges have been so insistent that Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation be allowed to proceed.

“Now that you see the material he likely has, it’s more clear why the court wouldn’t quash those subpoenas,” the lawyer involved in the case said.

A reporter for the New York Times, Judith Miller, spent 85 days in jail after a federal appeals court rejected legal arguments that she was entitled to a so-called reporter’s privilege that protected her from having to testify before the grand jury working with Mr. Fitzgerald. Ms. Miller eventually agreed to testify after receiving what she said was an unequivocal waiver of confidentiality from one of her confidential sources, Mr. Libby.

The attorney with ties to the inquiry said he expected that Mr. Fitzgerald recognizes that it would be unwise to drag the probe on much longer. “He needs to end it,” the lawyer said.

At a press briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday, Senator Schumer, a Democ rat of New York, called on Mr. Bush to announce that he will suspend any White House official indicted in the probe. “We should get an answer before prosecutor Fitzgerald takes any action,” the senator insisted.

Mr. Schumer said an announcement of a clear policy on the point “would really set to rest a lot of the unease that the American people have.”

Republican senators have said that if either Mr. Libby or Mr. Rove are indicted the aides would take leave until the case is resolved.

Another Democrat, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, charged yesterday that the Bush administration’s misconduct went beyond any possible criminal case.

“When they could have paid attention to Ambassador Wilson’s report, they chose not to,” Mr. Kerry said during a speech at Georgetown University. “Instead, they attacked him and they attacked his wife to justify attacking Iraq. We don’t know yet whether this will prove to be an indictable offense in a court of law, but for it, and for misleading a nation into war, they will be indicted in the high court of history.”