Gee, I should have just kept reading. I agree with where your thinking is going, Eva.
Pinz
The whole issue is so complicated, with so many players, all with the same agenda, to bring down the president.
Here's a summary:
Politicized CIA agents are looking for a way to stop Bush from going to war with Iraq. Foley and Plame are WMD specialists and come up with the idea that if they could discredit the report that Saddam was trying to buy yellow cake, they could discredit Bush's premise for going to war to stop Saddam.
They get the idea to send Joe Wilson, Plame's husband because he's not doing anything at the moment and he might be able to take care of some business while he's over there.
Someone from the Bush administration goes to Foley and asks him about the yellow cake statement in the speech. Foley is vague, but says that he wouldn't use, but gives no real reason.
Wilson goes over there and drinks a lot of tea and meets with a few people, but doesn't really accomplish anything. He comes home a writes a phoney report. I think FreeRepublic posters were the only ones who even read it.
Robert Novak writes an article saying that Cheney didn't send Wilson and that wilson was sent to investigate the yellow cake story by the CIA and was recommended by his wife.
Cooper contacts Rove about welfare or something and then leads into a question about Cheney sending Wilson. Rove tells him that it didn't happen that way, that Cheney didn't send Wilson and never read his report.
Cooper writes an article accusing Rove of outing Plame as retaliation for the Wilson report. Still, no real reaction from the public, big yawn.
In May, Chris Lehane pays Wilson a visit and talks to him about becoming an advisor to the Kerry campaign, sets up the Vanity Fair interview and gets Wilson to write that article for the NYT about how someone at the Whitehouse had outed his wife in rataliation for the yellow cake report. The article comes out in June, and the Vanity Fair article in July. Wilson had never mentioned anything about his wife being outed before he met with Chris LeHane, the Democrat campaign dirty trickster.
Judith Miller is entirely different story, only tied to the Plame story by her sources, probably inside the CIA. The prosecutor has said that Rove is not a target, so who is? What could the crime be? There are two possibilities, perjury or leaking security information, maybe from inside the CIA.