Judith Miller's culpability. OK, I kind of buried it in the last post, so just to make it prominent:

My guess is that Judy Miller was the cooperative press contact deputed to put Valerie Plame's identity in circulation in the media. (Which, incidentally, is precisely why she didn't write the story herself—so as to conceal her role. In fact, her unwillingness to pursue this particular scoop I take as supporting evidence to what I'm saying here.) She, and probably she alone, knows the name of the administration operative who passed the information along. That person—and probably that person alone—directly committed a crime in leaking the Plame info, and I'm betting it's someone who's never signed a waiver, or was ever asked to. It's someone whose name Patrick Fitzgerald doesn't know, or can't confirm, and that's why Judy's in jail: to shake it out of her. With that name in hand, Fitzgerald can then walk back the crime to the conspiracy to commit the crime, which is the real prize in this investigation.

Judy Miller's a martyr to nothing, and people who think she's representing some principle of press freedom are dupes. She's a quasi-spook and a conscious disinformation agent within the mainstream media. Her motive for sitting in a cell now, otherwise somewhat mysterious, is to protect a criminal conspiracy in which she's played a key part. She doesn't want to be exposed.

It's a shame, really, that her journalist cover makes it impossible to charge her with a crime in the Plame outing, because she deserves it. (And why Fitzgerald needs the name of her source: he can't hold a sentence over Miller's head to coerce cooperation, but her source will be a different matter.) And the Times deserves to blow sky-high when the truth about her work finally, incontrovertibly comes out. (And they thought Jayson Blair was bad ...)

posted by michael  11:51:58 AM  
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A chip off the workbench. Let's go back to Mike Allen, from the end of today's article on the Rove-Novak conversation:

Sources who have reviewed some of the testimony before the grand jury say there is significant evidence that reporters were in some cases alerting officials about Plame's identity and relationship to Wilson -- not the other way around.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, has also testified before the grand jury, saying he was alerted by someone in the media to Plame's identity, according to a source familiar with his account. Cooper has previously testified that he brought up the subject of Plame with Libby and that Libby responded that he had heard about her from someone else in the media, according to sources knowledgeable about Cooper's testimony.

It doesn't sound at all like Scooter and Turd Blossom were operating from the same fucking playbook, does it?

Thing is, I believe them both, sort of. They did "learn" who Valerie Plame was from the media—in the sense that they made sure that such media contacts would be the only traceable route between them and that piece of knowledge. (Maybe they genuinely didn't even know her name, given how much emphasis has been placed on the name not having been uttered: maybe they insulated themselves from such details, for maximum deniability, or for extra protection from legal jeopardy.)

To my eye, as someone who came to political consciousness during Watergate, the Plame affair looks like nothing so much as another third-rate burglary. Much more significant than the burning of Valerie Plame was the conspiracy behind it, a conspiracy for which the Plame operation was nothing more than a small sideline, maybe somebody's pet revenge project—somebody, say, in or affiliated with the White House Iraq Group.

Digby, in that last link, mentions a paper written by Col. Sam Gardner, formerly of the National War College, contending that he'd found "50 instances of demonstrably false stories" planted in the press in the runup to war by the Iraq Group. (I hadn't noticed, when I first read Digby's post, that it was none other than Joe Wilson who began passing the Gardner paper around late last year. Tell me Wilson doesn't know what this is about.) Which is where the Plame investigation becomes directly linked to the controversy touched off by the Downing Street Memo. Outing Valerie Plame was a chip off the workbench, as it were, a political whack job forming just a (kind of castoff) piece of the much larger effort to "fix the facts and intelligence round the policy." And if we're lucky, and Patrick Fitzgerald has his eye on the ball, what we'll get out of all this is a detailed look at the sources and methods of the conspiracy: who the key players were on both sides (press and government), how the channels operated and how disinformation was laundered into the press.

The Plame story wasn't developed by Rove or Libby, and they didn't set the story in motion within the media. They almost had to be in on planning and approving the operation, but the details will have been left to some slightly lower-level operative, aka a Fall Guy—somebody whose job it was to develop the necessary intelligence and put the item in circulation. (My hunch would be that it's this Fall Guy, the only one who directly committed a crime and who can be walked back towards the conspiracy, that's the name Patrick Fitzgerald needs from Judith Miller—one possibly she alone knows. Which would mean that Miller was the chosen conduit for laundering the story into the media gossip-sphere, not by a long shot her only service in that role. Or even her most significant. Just in case there's any lingering idea that what Miller's really defending from her blessed incarceration is the First Amendment.) And Rove and Libby would then sit back, all innocence, and wait to pounce on the inevitable "Hey, did you hear"s coming from the useful idiots their friends in the press, and Joe Wilson and wife would be done.

And it would have worked fine, as it's worked in God knows how many other instances in the Propaganda Administration's tenure: except that there was an unambiguous crime involved, one that hit the CIA where it lived, and the Agency made a referral to the DOJ, and then along came a special prosecutor ... And all, ultimately (I'm betting), because Dick Cheney had a bug up his ass and couldn't be told no. Out of just such miscalculations do governments unravel.

posted by michael  11:22:43 AM  
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Two stories this morning, one in the Times, one in the Post, both anonymously single-sourced, telling nearly the same story about Karl Rove's conversation with Bob Novak about Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation. In both accounts, it's Novak who passes the name to Rove, rather than vice versa. Here's the Times lead:

Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a C.I.A. officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist the name of the C.I.A. officer, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, the person said.

After hearing Mr. Novak's account, the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: "I heard that, too."

The previously undisclosed telephone conversation, which took place on July 8, 2003, was initiated by Mr. Novak, the person who has been briefed on the matter said.

There's already a fair amount of huffing and blowing about this, but Atrios is clearly wrong when he says that the WaPo piece is probably from the same anonymous source as sits behind the Times article. Mike Allen of the Post sources a "lawyer involved in the case," rather than Johnston and Stevenson's (ludicrously vague) "person briefed on the matter," and adds this:

The New York Times reported the conversation between Rove and Novak in its Friday editions. The lawyer confirmed that account and elaborated on it. The account suggests that Rove could not have been Novak's original source but may have been a secondary source. Novak has refused to comment about his sources or to say whether he has cooperated with prosecutors.

Allen wouldn't have used the bolded language if he was working from the same source that Johnston and Stevenson had. "Confirmed" means that Allen has made sure that his source isn't the same guy. (Specifically calling the source a "lawyer" means something, too, though I'm not sure what. Hard for me to believe that Allen's source comes from within Fitzgerald's operation, which has been really tight; but it seems unlikely he'd allow Luskin to speak off the record like this, not when he's been so vocal already.)

In any case, between them the Times and the Post have given us two, apparently independent, sources for the Rove-Novak conversation. Like it or not, the story looks pretty solid.

Nor does it surprise me. I never really bought the idea that Rove would be so careless, or (quite) so hubristic, as to leave obvious fingerprints on the effort to smear Wilson through his wife—as to make himself personally responsible for leaking Plame's identity and employment to reporters. Rove's not some monstrous political super-genius, as several people have pointed out of late (as Paperwight says, "a fairly bright bog-standard sociopath who found a vocation in Republican politics"): but he didn't get where he is now by taking unnecessary legal risks, either.

This is threatening to get long, and I'm a little worried about my connectivity, so I'll post now and complete my thought in a bit.

posted by michael  10:08:17 AM  
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You know you've reached a certain age when people who haven't seen you for a while feel compelled to say, often as a form of greeting, "You look good"—emphasis on good, as if they're a bit surprised at your continuing to cheat decrepitude.

It's started happening with some regularity lately. I'm not saying I don't look good—just that nobody seemed to need to remark on it when I was in my thirties.

posted by michael  8:45:45 AM  
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