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October 08, 2003
A Crime or a Bungle?
Newsweek is running a story today suggesting that the senior administration official who told the Washington Post about two White House officials calling 6 reporters and telling them about Valerie Plame's CIA status may have been mistaken in implying that those particular calls came prior to Robert Novak's July 14th colum rather than after.
This still leaves unanswered the question of who told Novak, and while this is a theory that is, apparently gaining currency in some circles (and is, admittedly, quite plausible), it is by no means certain that such an error was made. It does, however, add another dimension to the scandal.
The article also notes that so far, the only specific denials to come from the White House have been through Scott McClellan and only that Lewis Libby, Karl Rove and Elliot Abrams have denied leaking any "classified" information to Novak. The phrasing is a bit vague, however. It could mean that they gave no information that was classified to anyone, or that they gave no information that they knew to be classified to anyone. If it's intended to mean the second of those options, then its possible one of them may have given the information to Novak, unaware that her status as a CIA agent was classified. In that case, the Intelligence Identities Act wouldn't apply, as one of the requirements for conviction under the act is that the person is knowingly transmitting classified information.
As things stand right now, the main questions to be answered are:
- Who told Robert Novak that Valerie Plame was with the CIA
- Did the leaker know at the time they told Novak that Plame's identity as a CIA operative was classified information?
- Was the person or people who called the 6 reporters that the Washington Post's article referenced the same as the person or people who informed Novak?
- Did the person or people who contacted the Washington Post 6 call them before or after Novak's article was published?
One thing that is clear right now is that after Novak's article was published, at the very least, Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews were contact, most likely by Karl Rove, to push the Wilson story and try to get word spread that Wilson's CIA wife had "gotten" him the Niger gig. Rather than being concerned that a NOC operative - the deepest kind of undercover agent that we have (these are the people who, if they get caught by a foreign government, are on their own, the government won't provide them with any assistance) - had just had her cover blown, they were more interested in using that information to smear her husband because he had the temerity to make Bush look bad. Even if nothing that happened was technically illegal, that, in and of itself, should be cause for heads to roll.
It's hard to see that happening, though, when the President, while promising to 'get to the bottom of this' and swearing he wants to know the truth, continues to refuse to ask his staff any questions himself and is having all of the documents that are to be turned over to the Justice department for their investigation, reviewed by the White House counsel to make sure they're ok to pass on.
Posted by thorswitch at October 8, 2003 05:09 PM
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