Month: October 2003

Are the Dems backing off a little? One thing this Washington Post profile strongly suggests: this guy is a world class meshuggena pain in the ass. The more he gets on television, the better for Bush.

I haven’t linked to Bob Novak’s column today. In case you haven’t read it, here it is. To my mind, the key points he makes are that he doesn’t believe that this was a coordinated leak (which doesn’t bear on its illegality); and that its investigation is a routine one:

The Justice Department investigation was not requested by CIA Director George Tenet. Any leak of classified information is routinely passed by the Agency to Justice, averaging one a week. This investigative request was made in July shortly after the column was published. Reported only last weekend, the request ignited anti-Bush furor.

Interesting.

Some readers have argued that Larry Johnson’s description of Plame as having worked undercover “for three decades” could have meant that she had been active in the 1980s, 1990s and the current decade, which is just possible if she started in her mid-20s. So Johnson might have meant – “in the last three decades.” Well, Johnson can easily clear that one up, can’t he? Stay tuned.

They agree with the Wall Street Journal. The British anti-war paper simply asserts that the only suspect in the Plame affair is Karl Rove. They don’t mention either the White House’s clear denial or even Joseph Wilson’s back-tracking on it. More evidence that this may indeed be the point of the whole exercise. But it remains the case that if a crime has been committed, a crime has been committed, whoever is responsible.

Drudge pulls together an obvious discrepancy. Former CIA guy Larry Johnson claimed on PBS’ Newshour last night that he had worked with Valerie Plame as an undercover agent for thirty years. But she’s forty. That’s some early recruitment. Here’s what we can say for sure: whenever she was recruited, outing her was criminal and wrong. But everything else looks murkier and murkier. Obviously, I deeply suspect Joseph Wilson. He’s a guy happily calling pro-war types “right-wing crazies” well before the war, yet is asked to perform a critical intelligence mission for the Bushies. How? Why? The WSJ has a good point on this, although I find their dismissal of the basic charge to be gratuitously partisan. It would be nice if an editorial board like the Journal’s, that pioneered all sorts of (often worthy) investigations into the Clintons, could work up a smidgen of concern that someone’s CIA cover had been illegally blown.