This is made explicit in the recent Newsweek report by Michael Isikoff:
"Criminal or Just Plain Stupid?"
According to Isikoff:
- The "senior administration official" is not the original leaker who first told columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA "operative" specializing in weapons of mass destruction. That as-yet-unidentified official remains the target of Justice Department investigators who today are awaiting stacks of White House records -- including phone logs, e-mails and other material relating to the possible dissemination of information about Wilson and his undercover spouse.
Instead, it is another "senior administration official" -- the one quoted in a Sept. 28 Washington Post article as saying that "before Novak’s column ran" two top White House officials "called at least six Washington journalists" and disclosed the identify and occupation of Wilson’s wife. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," that senior administration official told the Post’s Mike Allen and Dana Priest.
The Post story may have been the most eye-popping development in the leak story: it suggested for the first time that there was a big-league dissenter within the upper ranks of the Bush administration, someone who was genuinely appalled at crude White House attempts to discredit a critic. (Novak’s small point was that Wilson was dispatched by the CIA to check out claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium from Niger only because his agency wife recommended him.) It also was the strongest evidence that the disclosure of Plame’s identify was done with malicious intent and not, as Novak has since insisted, a passing reference in the course of a lengthy conversation about a wide range of matters.
But more than 10 days after the story exploded, an alternative theory is emerging among those who are directly involved in the leak case: that the “senior administration official” quoted in the Washington Post piece simply got it wrong. There were indeed White House phone calls to reporters about Wilson’s wife. But most, if not all, of these phone calls, were made after the Novak column appeared, some government officials now believe. They were placed as part of a blundering effort to persuade journalists to concentrate on Wilson’s presumed lack of credentials as a critic of pre-Iraq war intelligence rather than the substance of his critique.
The upshot of this scenario: Novak was the only journalist to whom Plame's identity as a CIA agent was leaked before his column ran. All other White House contacts about the matter only pointed to the Novak column -- which by itself was not against the law.
Isikoff has been a reasonably reliable transmitter of Republican talking points, and the headline of the piece -- and the thrust of its contents -- suggests what will almost certainly become the White House's story about the Plame matter: There were no laws broken. Just "stupid" behavior.
Someone -- the "senior administration official," possibly Andy Card -- will be made a scapegoat, and the sources of the leak will have their hands slapped.
Earlier today, Josh Marshall wondered why press spokesman Scott McClellan answered questions about the complicity of two key suspects -- Lewis Libby and Elliot Abrams -- with carefully worded responses referring to "leaks of classified information".
Isikoff's story explains why this distinction is important to the White House:
- One possible translation: whatever they may or may not have said to Novak, nobody passed along anything they knew to be classified at the time.
And that may make all the difference in the world. As former CIA director James Woolsey points out, the 1982 law that makes it a federal crime to disclose the identify of an undercover CIA agent was carefully written to target witting perpetrators. Congress had in mind actors such as ex-CIA agent turned left-wing critic Philip Agee who, for political reasons, wrote a book "outing" many of his former colleagues, leading to considerable and justifiable concern about their safety. The law "was quite narrowly drafted," notes Woolsey, and much will depend on "whether there was criminal intent" by the leaker. If the leaker did not know that Wilson’s wife was undercover at the time of the conversation with Novak, that alone may get him or her off the hook.
Anyone willing to wager that John Ashcroft's Justice Department will find that there was no "criminal intent" on the part of the leaker?
I'm reminded of the time back in the late 1970s when then-Congressman George Hansen -- a Bircher Republican from Idaho -- was convicted of tax evasion, in no small part a product of Hansen's cockamamie Posse-style arguments about the legitimacy of the Internal Revenue Service. (Hansen's congenital "mishandling" of campaign funds was also a problem.)
Hansen was convicted rather readily, despite his courtroom theatrics. But when it came time for sentencing, the judge decided to simply give Hansen a fine and a warning: After all, the judge reasoned, it was clear that Hansen was too "stupid" to have formed any real criminal intent.
Hansen -- whose political career survived the first conviction -- was convicted a few years later of kiting checks. The second time around, the judge was not so easily fooled, and sent him to prison.
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