I heard it said (I believe by Andrew Napolitano on Fox) that disclosing the name of a CIA employee is a crime only if the person making the disclosure knows the employee is undercover.
But in any case, that was not my point. I was not making a statement about criminality or non-criminality. I am not a lawyer and don't know.
I was simply saying that, according to Novak's own account, this was NOT a "LEAK."
Continuing to parrot the Democrats and the leftist media by calling it a "LEAK" is playing the Dem's game.
The Washington Post has a useful backgrounder on the law in question, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, enacted in 1982 after former CIA agent Philip Agee (who now lives in communist Cuba) published a book and various articles revealing the names of undercover CIA agents in an effort to sabotage U.S. intelligence activities. Even if Plame does turn out to be a covert agent, revealing her identity wouldn't automatically be illegal:The law enacted to stop Agee and others imposes maximum penalties of 10 years in prison and $50,000 in fines for the unauthorized disclosure of covert agents' identities by government employees who have access to classified information.
The statute includes three other elements necessary to obtain a conviction: that the disclosure was intentional, the accused knew the person being identified was a covert agent and the accused also knew that "the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States."
Taranto concludes: "In order to violate the law, in other words, one must disclose a genuine secret. Was Plame's association with the CIA a secret? As we said yesterday, the CIA's blasé attitude toward Novak's inquiries suggests not."