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http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200504050125.html

What do you make of this story, esp. the quotes attributed to Pincus? Strange, and comes from a Japanese paper.

Thanks very much for the ping.

Strange, indeed, and I filed it in my Wilson/Plame folder.

It sounds like Pincus is trying to make sure to keep the "her name was leaked in retaliation for Wilson's 'whistleblowing'" line as the main focus.

I found it very interesting that he claims his source had no problem with him testifying as long as he didn't name him, and further, that he says the source he's speaking of has spoken to the prosecution.

Very intriguing.

I wouldn't trust anything Pincus says, but assuming he's not lying in this particular instance, his statements seem to imply his discussions with members of the Bush administration triggered his unnamed source to contact him:

Over breakfast recently, Pincus said, ``Joseph Wilson finally came forward the first week in July (2003) and wrote his own story. I was doing a follow-up to that story on July 12, and in gathering information for the story, I spoke to (several members of) the Bush administration, and I got a call that day. The caller suddenly went off on a tangent and said, `By the way, why do you keep writing about Joe Wilson's trip? Don't you know it was arranged by his wife?''. . .Pincus went ahead and wrote about the leak and its background, but he didn't reveal his government source.

I assume as likely (though not certain, but it's the simplest scenario per Occam's Razor) that his source was the same source who approached Novak with similar information. This seems to imply that there was an individual with good contacts in the Bush administration who was going around to reporters leaking this information.

Now on previous threads, we've discussed Pincus' apparent relationship with the Clintons.

This leads me to theorize that perhaps the Clintons have a mole close to or in the Bush administration who is leaking information to the press and is being protected by Pincus and others. This is, of course, only one possibility, but it might explain some things, such as the reluctance of reporters with anti-Bush leanings to reveal their source even under threat of legal penalties (i.e., presumably, if it was a pro-Bush source, anti-Bush reporters would be eager to reveal that the Bush administration outed Plame, while conversely the prosecutors would not be so intent on pressing the inquiry). A corollary of this hypothesis would be that the motive for leaking the information about Plame was not actually to discredit Wilson but rather to damage Bush by portraying Plame as a martyr (and, perhaps, to thus pre-empt any legitimate inquiry into Wilson's connections to elements in the CIA). Again, this is only one possibility. The other major possibility is a supporter of Bush's Iraq policy did out Plame in an attempt to discredit Wilson, but in that case certain things remain puzzling, such as the reporters' reluctance to name their sources even in the face of jail-time; so at this point I'm leaning towards the other possibility.