Free Republic

While the Justice Department has started an investigation into whether the Internal Revenue Service broke any laws by targeting conservative groups for heightened scrutiny, critics of the Obama administration will likely continue their call for a special counsel.

Valerie Plame was a CIA agent who was catapulted into stardom in 2003 when her name appeared in a Robert Novak column in 2003. Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me. It has been argued that Joe Wilson himself outed his wife:...

Now that memoirs by the late Bob Novak, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, and former President George Bush have all been published, we now know much more about the Valerie Plame case than we did before these individuals put what happened to paper. (Plame, if you'll remember, was a CIA agent whose identity was leaked to the press during a newsman's investigation into George W. Bush's explanation for going to war against Iraq.) Yet, the one book that still needs to be written is a memoir by Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the VP’s assistant, the only individual indicted by the Special Prosecutor...

Naomi Watts and Valerie Plame Wilson are teaming up – again – but this time it’s about more than whitewashing history via the big screen. Watts portrayed the former CIA operative in ‘Fair Game,’ the 2010 feature on Wilson’s famous outing by a member of the Bush administration. Now, the two women are joining forces to compel the Obama administration to “cut nuclear weapons instead of education and other priorities.” Their new Public Service Announcement asks citizens to sign a Global Zero pledge found at CutNukes.org. Global Zero is an international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Here’s some...

VIDEO HERE.

'Fair game' a box-office flop The movie Fair Game, about the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair, was in theaters and then it seemed to disappear. Any reason? Poor ticket sales, basically. Fair Game was a generally well-regarded movie (it got a good 79 percent favorable rating on the movie website Rotten Tomatoes) that starred big-name actors in Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. It was about CIA operative Valerie Plame (played by Watts) whose cover was blown in Bob Novak's widely read Washington Post political column. The information was allegedly leaked to Novak by White House officials to discredit her husband, Joseph...

I went to jail in the summer of 2005 to protect the identity of a confidential source who spoke to me about Valerie Plame, the former CIA spy whose identity was disclosed after her husband publicly challenged part of the evidence that President Bush cited to justify his invasion of Iraq. I'm the only person to have gone to jail in what became known as Plamegate. But you wouldn't know it from the recently released movie "Fair Game." There is no character based on me in the film—and that turns out to be a good thing. Although the movie is...

During Thanksgiving weekend I went to see the movie REDS with Bruce Willis. Awesome movie and I highly recommend it. But during the trailers they showed the movie FAIR GAME with Sean Penn, supposedly based on the Plame/Wilson affair. I groaned when I saw it. It appears my groan was warranted. Here is the WaPo: (h/t Dan Riehl) In fact, "Fair Game," based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions - not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi...

WE'RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film "Fair Game" - which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq - deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame's exposure as a CIA agent. "It's accurate," Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson:...

A movie that cost 22 million to produce has grossed a 9.3 million world wide after 4 weeks in theater.

*snip* Memory can be unreliable, and misstatements can happen despite pure intentions. It's only fair game to point this out. So say Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA case manager and Vanity Fair cover girl, and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, former ambassador to Gabon and extravagant self-promoter. Too bad the Wilsons, a power-mad federal prosecutor, an officious federal judge, a confused jury and a badly misled president wouldn't apply those same common-sense considerations to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, wrongly convicted of perjury in the case stemming from State Department official Richard Armitage's public identification of Mrs. Wilson as a...

Hollywood moguls continue their defamation of America, even though the presidency and both houses of Congress have been controlled by fellow leftists for the past two years. How many years of leftist control of the government would be needed before leftists feel that America’s “sins” are forgiven? Would 100 years be enough? One reason the movies are dying is that many movie makers are leftists. Like most leftists, including President Obama, they persist in trying to shove their ideas down people’s throats, rather than listening to what people actually want.

Minutes after Naomi Watts, movie star, arrived at the CIA’s secret Virginia training center called The Farm, she was thrown to the ground in a way that left bruises. When she cried out in pain, her instructor glared and informed her, “Don’t say 'ow’ again unless you need to go to the hospital.” During the days that followed, she was “stripped of everything that cloaked her in specialness,” said director Doug Liman. The actress chose the rough treatment, Liman said. He chose Watts to play Valerie Plame Wilson, the spy who was outed in one of the most controversial episodes...

When Hollywood decides a former White House aide is fair game for attack, facts don't come into play. History, however, cannot be so cavalier about the truth. The new movie "Fair Game" - based on the outing of CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson during political battles concerning the war in Iraq - is anything but fair or honest. In depicting former vice-presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as a sinister point man in a broad effort to destroy Mrs. Wilson's career while concocting a fraudulent case for the war, the movie perpetuates myths that improperly damage U.S. credibility....

Valerie Plame says in her memoir that she read the report that the CIA wrote immediately after debriefing Wilson on his trip and also read his column before it was published. She added that she thought the column was accurate. She said the report was only a few pages long. No one, let alone a professional intelligence officer, could have missed the part about Iraq trying to buy yellowcake. She had to know the column was wrong, but evidently said nothing. So she was anything but an innocent bystander as her husband created a political firestorm. In a question and...

... the title is drawn from how Karl Rove told Matthews that the CIA agent Valerie Plame was fair game for critics of her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson. Wilson, you’ll recall, was dispatched by the CIA in 2002 at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to investigate whether Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from the African country of Niger. Wilson came back with the answer no, and he was outraged when President Bush nevertheless stuck with the claim in his 2003 State of the Union address, which made the case for war with Iraq. Just three...

The only way we even know the name of Valerie Plame (and fame seeking hubby Joe Wilson) is that that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage leaked her name as a CIA officer to columnist Robert Novak. That is what set in motion the long drawn out Plamegate affair in which only Scooter Libby was convicted of something other than leaking her name. So you would figure that the supposedly biographical movie scheduled for a November USA release about Plame, Fair Game, would feature Armitage front and center as the principal villain. Right? Wrong. The fact is that "Fair...

Democrats said that the outing of a CIA agent, personnel, whatever, was bad, and said that someone's head in the Bush Administration had to roll. Democrats wanted Cheney, but didn't get him. When the New York Times outs Karzai's brother as supposedly being paid by the CIA to do who knows what, Democrats act as if it is no big deal. What gives?

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney told a special prosecutor in 2004 that he could not remember playing any role in leaking the identity of Valerie Plame as a clandestine CIA officer, according to FBI records released under court order Friday. In his May 8, 2004, interview with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, Cheney said he could not recall when he learned that Plame, the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, worked for the CIA; could not recall telling his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, about Plame's employment; and could not recall telling Libby to disclose...

A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to release notes and summaries of former Vice President Dick Cheney's 2004 interview with Special Prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, but is allowing the deletion of what may be some of the most interesting details in the documents. In a ruling issued Thursday morning, Judge Emmet Sullivan flatly rejected claims by both Bush and Obama appointees at DOJ that the entirety of the records should be withheld because their disclosure could discourage White House officials from cooperating in future investigations. The judge said the prospect of such inquiries was...