The Valerie Plame affair has blown up over the Bush White House like one of those mini-nukes the Pentagon wants to build to get bad guys out of their bunkers. The question is why it took so long.
The background: Valerie Plame is the wife of Joseph Wilson, the former diplomat who traveled to Niger at the request of the CIA to check into reports that Saddam Hussein had tired to buy uranium ore from the African country. Wilson concluded there was nothing to it and went public with the information, fueling the celebrated flap over Bush’s “16 words.” Within days, conservative columnist Robert Novak penned a column saying two “senior administration officials” had told him Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. The only apparent motive was revenge: a cheap, and ultimately ineffective, attempt to suggest that Plame’s wife got her hubby sent on the mission, which wouldn’t have happened if she wasn’t a spook herself.
Why this matters: According to today’s Post story, Plame “is a case officer in the CIA’s clandestine service and is currently working as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction … Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents.”
Also from the Post: “An administration official said the leaks were ‘simply for revenge’ for the trouble Wilson had caused Bush.” This assertion has CIA Director George Tenet’s fingerprints all over it. As I wrote shortly after this mess became public, "The CIA has been getting even for a lot longer than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney."
By now the leakers ought to be a bit concerned: It’s an aggravated felony to disclose the identity of an undercover agent, punishable by up to a $50,000 fine and 10 years in prison.
The key new revelations: After two and a half months as a shadow story, the Plame issue blew up bigtime over the weekend.
-- The CIA, according to the Washington Post, asked the Justice Department within a week of Novak’s column to consider a criminal investigation. The White House said today it had received no request for any information from the Justice Department. So Justice appeared to be trying to keep a lid on this scandal.
-- The dilatory Justice approach did not sit well with CIA Director George Tenet, who wrote a letter to the Justice Department requesting a criminal investigation.
-- Administration officials peddled Plame’s name not only to Novak but to at least five other reporters, four of whom called Joseph Wilson about it. So there are several people who know the names of these “senior administration officials.” Novak, who identified Plame in print, might feel some allegience to his sources and be disinclined to name them to a grand jury. But the others, who were called but didn’t use her name, might be more persuadable, particularly if they’re looking at jail time for contempt.
Why’d it take so long? Novak’s column became an instant sensation among bloggers, particularly those on the left. Oddly, the mainstream press – with the notable exception of the Washington Post -- largely ignored the story. Why? Here are a couple of possibilities:
-- Inability to advance the story. You can’t just recycle the same old stuff. The Post did write about the incident shortly after Novak’s column and stuck to the trail. But clearly it was a difficult one because of administration stonewalling.
-- Pack instincts: if nobody else is writing about it, why should I?
-- Laziness: Closely related to pack instincts. L should be the middle initial of much of the White House press corps.
-- Fear. Lazy reporters tend to worry about things like “losing access” if they write stories their sources don’t like, and the White House certainly doesn’t like this story; it’s in full CYA mode. Consider this exchange from today’s White House press briefing by spokesman Scott McClellan, who was asked if Bush’s senior advisor Karl Rove was a leaker:
McCLELLAN: He wasn't involved. The President knows he wasn't involved.
QUESTION: How does he know that?
McCLELLAN: The President knows.
QUESTION: What, is he clairvoyant? How does he know?
Read all about it: Many of today’s blogs are all Plame, all the time and are full of links to other reading on this issue. Here’s a list:
Mark A.R. Kleiman, who deserves a lot of the credit for keeping this story moving when few newspapers would touch it, has wrapups at his own blog site and at Open Source Politics.
Billmon at Whiskey Bar has been riding this horse all weekend and has his usual good analysis and some good links.
Joshua Marshall’s Talking Points Memo – which along with Kleiman’s blog did a lot of heavy lifting to bring this story out of the shadows -- has a long thread of excellent stuff, including a link to this story, which reports that Karl Rove was fired by Bush’s father, George H.W. – for an unauthorized leak -- to Robert Novak, no less! -- during the elder Bush's presidential campaign.
The blog Body and Soul has another link-filled narrative.
Daniel Drezner, a good mainline conservative blogger who usually supports the administration, is having a hard time with this one.
At National Review Online, Clifford May says everyone knew Valerie Plame was a spook, so it doesn’t matter, (a legally hazardous line to follow, as Josh Marshall suggests), and besides Wilson deserved it because he isn’t a toe-the-line neocon.
Also at NRO, Mark Levin takes the even more preposterous blame-the-victim line that Wilson caused the outing of his wife by going public with what he found out in Niger.
“While I'm all in favor of investigating national-security-related leaks,” he piously writes, “we'll never know if foreign-intelligence agencies, among others, had already learned of Plame's position thanks to the attention her husband drew to himself by taking the Niger fact-finding assignment in the first place. Like it or not, Wilson bears some responsibility for his wife's predicament.”
This doesn't even make the cut as lame. It's just a crock.
Well, this story has real legs now and we'll see how it plays out.
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