Umm, every secret agent we have can be found in high school year books and other such things. They all have families, private lives, husbands, wives, friends, etc. None of that is secret. The fact that they were husband and wife was never a secret. The fact that she was an undercover operative for the CIA was a secret, and that (fortunately) was not listed in the Who's Who book. It doesn't make the discussion <i>any</i> more interesting, let alone a lot more interesting.
Except that those who somehow claim Rove shouldn't be a target of investigation sometimes use the excuse that he only said Joseph Wilson's wife, and didn't use her name. Therefore Rove didn't do anything wrong. Of course the legislation doesn't talk about the revealing the name. It talks about revealing the identity. This only goes to further show that by identifying her as Wilson's wife, he was leaking her identity. I'm surprised Basso posted something that seems to help the prosecution in this one.
Sometimes you wanna go Where everybody knows your name And you're known as Mrs. Plame You wanna go where people know That Karl is not to blame You wanna go where everybody knows your name.
Of course none of that has to do with being outed as a covert CIA agent, BAsso. Once she was exposed she can do whatever she would like, and pose in any magazine she wants. It may or may not be in the best taste, but it doesn't change the facts of the case at all.
hmmmmmm.....a couple a weeks old, but still... http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/AlbertEisele/071305.html -- CIA leak chimera If Joe diGenova is right, and I suspect he is, the federal investigation into the disclosure of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame should never have happened. “My views are stronger than ever,” the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said Monday when asked about the white-hot controversy that has sent a New York Times reporter to jail, changed the rules of investigative journalism and now threatens to envelop the White House in a major crisis. “This investigation never should have started because it’s apparent that no crime was ever committed.” It was exactly two years ago tomorrow that syndicated columnist Robert Novak triggered the investigation when he first publicly identified Plame as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” Novak cited “two administration officials” who told him Ms. Plame was married to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whom the CIA dispatched to Africa in February 2002 to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Niger. Novak reported that Wilson was sent there at the suggestion of his wife, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at the CIA. Novak’s column appeared shortly after Wilson wrote an op-ed column in the Times charging that the Bush administration sought to build a case for invading Iraq by falsely claiming that Saddam was seeking uranium to reconstitute his nuclear-weapons program. Subsequent reporting by the Times’ Judith Miller and Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper made them — but not Novak — the targets of a grand-jury investigation and sent Miller to jail last week after she refused to disclose her sources, even though she had not written anything. Cooper avoided jail because Time turned over his notes to the special prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, and Cooper’s source — now known to be Karl Rove — released him from his pledge of confidentiality. DiGenova, who served as an independent counsel investigating alleged misuse of passport information by the Clinton administration and now is in private practice with his wife, former Justice Department official Victoria Toensing, lays most of the blame for this explosive controversy on the CIA. “I believe the agency didn’t properly protect [Plame’s] identify because they didn’t want to and clearly didn’t try,” he said. “To think that journalists are being put through this is crazy. Where we are now is absolutely absurd.” DiGenova says he hasn’t changed his mind from what he told me in March, when we had a long conversation just before I left for a reporting trip to Iraq. He pointed out that the statute that protects the identity of covert agents “has a very high standard for prosecution. “The only way an investigation can begin is if the agency swears — swears — that it took every conceivable step to protect this person’s identity.” For example, the CIA had to answer 11 specific questions about what steps it took to protect the identity of a covert agent. But diGenova questions whether some of the information the CIA provided the Justice Department on those 11 questions “was materially false.” In addition, he pointed out that the CIA paid for Wilson’s trip, didn’t ask him to sign a confidentiality agreement, didn’t object to his writing the op-ed article in the Times and allowed him to conduct TV interviews and to appear in a photo with his wife in Vanity Fair, he noted. “The CIA isn’t stupid,” he said. “They wanted this story out. I’m raising the question: Did the CIA mislead Fitzgerald?” The answer to that question may be the biggest story of the summer.
Appologize in advance if this has been already posted... Interesting bit of history behind the close 'friendship' between Karl Rove and Bob Novak... Doesn't seem like the first time Mr. Rove is accused of leaking something to damage his opponents: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/06/politics/06novak.html?pagewanted=print C.I.A. Leak Case Recalls Texas Incident in '92 Race By ELISABETH BUMILLER WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - These hot months here will be remembered as the summer of the leak, a time when the political class obsessed on a central question: did Karl Rove, President Bush's powerful adviser, commit a crime when he spoke about a C.I.A. officer with the columnist Robert D. Novak? Whatever a federal grand jury investigating the case decides, a small political subgroup is experiencing the odd sensation that this leak has sprung before. In 1992 in an incident well known in Texas, Mr. Rove was fired from the state campaign to re-elect the first President Bush on suspicions that Mr. Rove had leaked damaging information to Mr. Novak about Robert Mosbacher Jr., the campaign manager and the son of a former commerce secretary. Since then, Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove was the source, even as Mr. Mosbacher, who no longer talks on the record about the incident, has never changed his original assertion that Mr. Rove was the culprit. "It's history," Mr. Mosbacher said last week in a brief telephone interview. "I commented on it at the time, and I have nothing to add." But the episode, part of the bad-boy lore of Mr. Rove, is a telling chapter in the 20-year friendship between the presidential adviser and the columnist. The story of that relationship, a bond of mutual self-interest of a kind that is long familiar in Washington, does not answer the question of who might have leaked the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, to reporters, potentially a crime. But it does give a clue to Mr. Rove's frequent and complimentary mentions over the years in Mr. Novak's column, and to the importance of Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak to each other's ambitions. "They've known each for a long time, but they are not close friends," said a person who knows both men and who asked not to be named because of the investigation into a conversation by Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove in July 2003 about Ms. Wilson, part of a case that has put a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, in jail for refusing to testify to the grand jury. The two men share a love of history and policy, as well as reputations as aggressive partisans and hotheads. People who have been officially briefed on the case have said Mr. Rove was the second of two senior administration officials cited by Mr. Novak in his column of July 14, 2003, that identified Ms. Wilson by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and said she was a C.I.A. operative. The larger question has been whether Mr. Rove might have been using the columnist to confirm Ms. Plame's identity to punish or undermine her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had accused the Bush administration of leading the nation to war with Iraq on false pretenses. Mr. Novak, who stalked out of a live program on CNN on Thursday after uttering a profanity on the air, declined to be interviewed for this article. The anchor of the program, "Inside Politics," Ed Henry, has said he was preparing later in the broadcast to ask Mr. Novak about his role in the leak case. Mr. Rove also declined to be interviewed. But Mr. Novak, through his office manager, Kathleen Connolly, provided the information about his first encounter with Mr. Rove. Mr. Novak, by his recollection, met Mr. Rove in Texas in the mid-80's, when Mr. Novak turned up to write columns about the state's shifting out of Democrats' hands into those of Republicans. In those years, Mr. Rove regularly had dinner with Mr. Novak when the columnist went to Austin. Mr. Rove, in his mid-30's, was a rising political operator who in 1981 founded his direct-mail consulting firm, Karl Rove & Company. Gov. William P. Clements, a Republican, was one of his first clients. Mr. Novak, in his mid-50's, was big political game for Mr. Rove. He was the other half, with Rowland Evans Jr., of a much read and increasingly conservative column that was syndicated by The Chicago Sun-Times and published weekly in The Washington Post. Evans and Novak, as it was called - Mr. Evans retired in 1993 -closely chronicled the Reagan era, and it would have been a sign of Mr. Rove's arrival on the national scene for Mr. Novak to mention him in print. Still, a computer search of Mr. Novak's columns shows that Mr. Rove's name did not appear under his byline until 1992, when Mr. Novak wrote the words that got Mr. Rove into such trouble. "A secret meeting of worried Republican power brokers in Dallas last Sunday reflected the reality that George Bush is in serious trouble in trying to carry his adopted state," the column began. The column said that the campaign run by Mr. Mosbacher was a "bust" and that he had been stripped of his authority at the "secret meeting" by Senator Phil Gramm, the top Republican in the state. Also at the meeting, Mr. Novak reported, was "political consultant Karl Rove, who had been shoved aside by Mosbacher." Specifically, Mr. Mosbacher told The Houston Chronicle in 2003 that he had given a competitor of Mr. Rove the bulk of a $1 million contract for direct mail work in the campaign. "I thought another firm was better," Mr. Mosbacher told The Chronicle. "I had $1 million for direct mail. I gave Rove a contract for $250,000 and $750,000 to the other firm." The other firm belonged to Mr. Rove's chief competitor, John Weaver, and Mr. Rove was so angry, Texas Republicans say, that he retaliated by leaking the information about Mr. Mosbacher to Mr. Novak. Mr. Mosbacher fired Mr. Rove. As a result, Mr. Weaver, who later faced off against Mr. Rove as the political director of Senator John McCain's presidential campaign in 2000, walked away with Mr. Rove's $250,000, too. "That's about the only time that a Novak column benefited me," Mr. Weaver said this week in a telephone interview. Mr. Rove again turned up in Mr. Novak's columns in 1999, when Gov. George W. Bush was running for president. Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's national campaign strategist, was quoted briefly on the record in at least three columns, even though Mr. Novak has said on CNN, "I can't tell you anything I ever talked to Karl Rove about, because I don't think I ever talked to him about any subject, even the time of day, on the record." Whether Mr. Novak forgot about the 1999 mentions is unclear. What is clear is that Mr. Rove has made frequent appearances in Mr. Novak's column in a positive light, often in paragraphs that imparted information about the inner workings of Mr. Bush's operation, feeding perceptions here that Mr. Rove is one of the columnist's most important anonymous sources. In April 2000, under the headline "Bush Thriving Without Insiders," Mr. Novak wrote of the fears of the Republican old guard about the triumvirate of "rookies" in Austin - led by Mr. Rove - who were running Mr. Bush's "supposedly fading" presidential campaign. "Actually," Mr. Novak wrote, "the Austin triumvirate has managed the most effective Republican campaign since Dwight D. Eisenhower's in 1952." Last December, Mr. Novak wrote that the "retention of John Snow as secretary of the treasury was viewed in the capital's inner circles as a defeat for presidential adviser Karl Rove, who wanted a high-profile manager of President Bush's second-term economic program." Although Mr. Novak did not directly debunk that view, he did suggest a different turn of events when he wrote that two Wall Street executives had said no to the position and that it was "decided at the White House to relieve Snow from his uncertainty and keep him in office." These days, friends of the two men say they have not seen Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak at dinner together and note that there is little the two would have to celebrate. But in June 2003, The Chicago Sun-Times gave a party for Mr. Novak at the Army and Navy Club here to salute 40 years of his columns. The biggest political celebrity guest, to no one's surprise, was Mr. Rove.
What a red herring. Folks are still grasping for straws like there was a straw shortage. Whether Wilson signed any kind of confidentiality has zero to do with whether Valerie Plame was outed. And the fact that Joe diGenova for some reason doesn't believe the CIA has little to no affect on the case either. Joe diGenova isn't even involved.
Looks like the Times itself is investigating Miller's role... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/arianna-huffington/ -- The Judy File expands. A well-connected media source e-mailed to say that the most interesting development on the Miller story is coming from inside the Times: "I gather that Doug Jehl, who is a dogged and respected reporter, has been assigned to do an in-house investigative report for the Times and that he is already cutting pretty close to the bone. Several editors he has spoken to are now asking themselves why there wasn't more questioning of whether Miller's silence reflects a fear of incriminating herself rather than betraying a source. I predict this will start to unravel in the next couple of weeks -- if only because the Times is afraid of getting scooped again by outside rivals." A different source within the Times confirmed that Jehl is indeed on the story, having been given the assignment not from New York but from the paper's Washington bureau. And the Plamegate story he filed last week shows that he isn't afraid to step on the toes of his bosses. Stay tuned. Speaking of the Times' Washington bureau, according to another source within the Times, the DC office has put in a dedicated phone line specifically for the purpose of receiving Judy's collect calls from prison -- which are then forwarded to whoever it is she wants to talk to. It's been dubbed "the Judy Line." No word on whether the number is 1-800-4-MARTYR. One of the more intriguing tips directed me to Miller's lawyers' motion [pdf] seeking home detention -- and to Fitzgerald's response [pdf]. The question was whether Miller might have opened the door to more trouble with Fitzgerald by invoking the ill health of her 76-year-old husband, Jason Epstein, when trying to convince Judge Hogan to let her serve her time at home. The fact that after Judy was sent to jail, Epstein headed off on a Mediterranean cruise, led my e-mailer to suggest: "When Fitzgerald and Hogan find out about the cruise, Miller could get hit with a separate contempt charge for misleading the court -- judges and prosecutors do not take that kind of thing lightly." It's hard to say whether Miller was misleading the court since the parts of her motion relating to her husband's health have been marked "confidential" and filed under seal. However, the non-confidential part says: "Also relevant to consider is the health of Ms. Miller's 76-year-old husband." Why would it be relevant if it wasn't being used to stop the judge from sending Judy to jail? And glean what you will from Fitzgerald's acid response: "We do not dispute the accuracy of the sealed filings concerning Miller's health conditions, nor those concerning her husband. Suffice it to say, however, that...one who can handle the desert in wartime is far better equipped than the average person jailed in a federal facility.... Miller could avoid even a minute of separation from her husband if she would do no more than just follow the law like every other citizen in America is required to do." [Emphasis added] During a conversation with Gore Vidal (more about that tomorrow) we talked about the fact that we had both heard from different people that Judy was planning to start writing a book about her experiences in the Plame case while in jail. "De Profundis it's not going to be," Vidal said, referring to Oscar Wilde's jailhouse classic. "More like De Shallow-undis." Gore also made the point that Miller had continued to carry water for her neocon chums right up until her incarceration. The last articles she wrote before going to jail -- about Kofi Annan and that neocon bugaboo, the UN -- stand as an example of sloppy and slanted journalism that required two Times corrections, one of them an entire article. For chapter and verse on this, look here and here. Then there is the e-mail I received from a Judy File-ophile regarding "the truly burning question" about Miller. It too involved her husband and his Mediterranean vacation. "Here's what I want to know," my e-mailer wrote: "Who is taking care of the cockapoodle that Judy gave Jason so that he would have company when she went to jail?" Fear not: we'll leave no stone -- or kennel receipt -- unturned to bring you the answer.
