CIA asks Justice to investigate possible White House role in Valerie Plame leak

According to MSNBC and NBC News, the CIA has requested an investigation into the White House's role in last summer's leak which blew the cover of Valerie Plame, wife of former diplomat Joseph Wilson, who angered the White House earlier this year by revealing his role in discrediting the claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. That revelation launched a brief firestorm over the administration's honesty in presenting their case for going to war against Iraq and helped to damage the President's credibility.

The White House had tried to blame the CIA for failing to remove the information from the State of the Union address, and CIA director George Tenet did accept responsiblity for it, but Wilson's story made it clear that people in the White House had also been aware that the informtion was bogus prior to the SOTU speech.

Plame's identity as an undercover operative (whose speciality is weapons of mass destruction) was revealed in a column by Robert Novak that was published about a week after Joseph Wilson's article about his findings in Niger.

The White House has denied being Novak’s source, whom he has refused to identify. But Wilson has said other reporters have told him White House officials leaked Plame’s identity.

NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell reported Friday night that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether White House officials blew Plame’s cover in retaliation against Wilson. Revealing the identities of covert officials is a violation of two laws, the National Agents’ Identity Act and the Unauthorized Release of Classified Information Act.

Speculation has centered on Karl Rove as being the one responsible for the leak. If the investigation is run properly (and not muffed for political reasons), and If Rove - or others in the White House - are behind the revelation, this could be huge.

UPDATE - 11:29pm 9/26/03: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a good post about this situation - including the following information on how investigating something of this nature works:

The way this works is that the CIA does its own investigation to determine whether there is reason to believe laws were broken. But the CIA has no law enforcement powers itself. So it makes a referral to the Justice Department, which obviously does have law enforcement powers. If the folks at Justice concur in the Agency's determination that there is reason to believe that laws were broken, they then task the FBI with mounting a formal criminal investigation.

[...]

On it's face, this news tonight almost certainly means that the CIA's internal investigation concluded that laws were broken or that there was sufficient evidence of wrong-doing for a criminal investigation to be undertaken.

Posted by thorswitch at September 26, 2003 11:06 PM | TrackBack