The usual Lefty bloggers are all over it. South Knox Bubba points to "confirmation that someone in the Bush administration has outed a CIA agent. possibly in retribution for her husband's role in exposing the Niger uranium fraud." Oliver Willis calls it a "Smear From 1600" - that's the address of the White House - and points to a David Corn article that makes the allegations. Blogger Mark A. R. Kleiman claims It's official: the Bush Administration deliberately blew the cover of a secret agent who had been gathering information on weapons of mass destruction, endangering the lives of her sources and damaging our ability to collect crucial intelligence. (And, not incidentally, committing a very serious crime.) The apparent motive: revenge on Joseph Wilson, her husband, for going public with the story of his mission to Niger... And CalPundit recounts the accusations and says that "if" they are true, it is "an appalling abuse of power by the administration that not only blows an agent's cover, but reduces the effectiveness of an important CIA program." At least CalPundit said "if" because there's no evidence so far that the allegations are in any way true.
It appears that Corn, a Lefty who writes for the very left-wing magazine The Nation, sliced and diced a paragraph from a Robert Novak column in order to manufacture the scandal. His article was the first to make the allegations that the Bush administration illegally outed Plame as a CIA undercover operative, in order to discredit her diplomat husband.
The core of the mini-scandal is the charge that "two senior administration officials" told Novak, a famous conservative political columnist and commentator, Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent to him. But that is not what Novak wrote. You see, I'm not just a reader of the news, I'm a journalist with a very inquisitive mind - and an Internet connection. And I've got Google. So I did what those Lefty bloggers apparently didn't do before swallowing Corn's version hook, line and sinker. I Googled and found Novak's article. Here is what it says, verbatim, and in its entirety, about Valerie Plame:
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 his wife suggested sending Wilson 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.Novak did NOT say "senior administration officials" revealed her identity. Novak simply states her identity. Now I don't know how Novak knows what Valerie Plame does for a living. Maybe he knows her and Wilson socially. Wilson was fairly highly placed in the first Bush administration and in the Clinton administration, and Novak has been in DC for decades. No doubt, they all make the party circuit. Plame was not a CIA spy in the jungles of Africa or the deserts of the Middle East. She lived and worked in Washington DC, where Novak works. Or perhaps Novak got the information from a low-level government employee who didn't know Plame was an undercover operative - surely, someone other than Wilson and Plame knew she worked at CIA.
Corn, conspicuously, does not quote Novak's entire paragraph anywhere his piece - and Corn's piece is the foundational article of the entire "scandal." Corn does assert that Novak told him that "government officials" told him of Plame's real job, but it is telling that the words Corn said Novak uses are "government officials," which could be virtually anyone in the government. And Novak's piece does not source Plame's identity to the "senior administration officials," as Corn implies it does. In Corn's piece, in fact, the allegation that it was "administration officials" seems to rest on a claim by Corn that Wilson told Corn that Novak said so. That's third-party. It's hearsay. It would not be admissible as evidence in a trial. And Wilson, remember, has an ax to grind.
Yet the Lefty bloggers are grabbing Corn's spin and claiming they have "confirmation" and "official" proof that the White House released Plame's identity as a smear against Wilson. (How, exactly, that's a smear, I don't know...)
Did administration officials "out" Plame? The evidence is rather lacking. In fact, it is increasingly clear that Wilson is the one who is revealing his wife's identity as an undercover agent - if indeed that's what she really is.
That would make things different.
Many people are rushing to judgement and reacting to the spin rather than reading and analyzing the original source.
What also might be worth asking: "Who didn't know?"
NRO: Clifford May: Who didn’t know Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?