This looks to me like an attempt by Powell and Armitage to get the Bush admnistration. And they got it done. But not without people knowing what a piece of crap both Poweal and Armitage are. I think they thought that with Fitzmas set to keep the secret, their role would never be revealed.
I always thought Powell was a weenie and a bureaucrat-poseur, but I guess treason in wartime kinda goes with that.
Fourth, any competent criminal defense lawyer advising Armitage and others at the time these events occurred would have had to take note of the political climate (Democrats and the media calling for a prosecution) as well as a rule-of-thumb which is followed by many, but happily not all, prosecutors: namely, when all the acts necessary for the commission of a crime have occurred, and guilt turns on state-of-mind (i.e., did the defendant act with criminal purpose?), the safest thing for a prosecutor to do is indict and let the jury do the mind-reading part.
"All of the acts necessary for the commission of a crime" had not occurred, certainly not under the statute authored in part by Victoria Toensing, as she so eloquently described on a number of occasions. McCarthy's attempts to reach out to other statutes that might have been used to prosecute Armitage as a reason for Armitage to stay quiet are so farfetched as to be laughable. As everyone well knows, the political clamor for someone to be prosecuted was based on the hope that it would be someone in the White House, not the State Department.