Villain or Victim?

Mark Levin on Valerie Plame's role in the Plame Affair:

Despite all the hype, it appears that Plame works a desk job at the CIA. That's an admirable and important line of work. But it doesn't make her a covert operative, and it didn’t make her a covert operative when Bob Novak mentioned her in his July 14, 2003, column, or the five years preceding the column’s publication, during which time she hadn’t served overseas as a spy, either. And even if Plame had been a covert operative, as I read the statute, Karl Rove or anyone revealing her identity, would: 1) have had to secure the information from classified information; and 2) intended to use the information to expose her identity. There's no information on the public record to support this, either.

The New York Times now reports that a State Department memorandum identifying Plame was circulated on Air Force One and perhaps other places. Ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell was reportedly seen on the plane with the memo in his hand. (Of course, like so much the Times publishes, this had already been reported long ago by both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.) Perhaps the document was classified. Who knows at this point? But if Plame wasn't a covert operative who met the five-year foreign-service requirement, identifying her based on the memo should be of no legal consequence. And there are other reasons to conclude that revealing Plame's identity would not be a crime. In a devastating piece about the media's unconscionable hypocrisy, Andy McCarthy explains that the same media that are speculating about Rove's guilt filed papers in federal court insisting that there can be no underlying crime as Plame's identity was already known thanks to revelations having nothing to do with Rove or anyone else at the White House.

At this point, I have to wonder: What, exactly, is being investigated? The Left acts as if it doesn't much care as long as someone in this administration is made to look like a criminal. The goal is to damage the president. Indeed, even before the investigation's end, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, and Joe Wilson himself are demanding Rove's head. And to think it all started with Valerie Plame herself.

That's right. Plame started this phony scandal. And so far, she’s gotten away with it. What do I mean? Plame has shown herself to be an extremely capable bureaucratic insider. In fact, we know she's accomplished — she accomplished getting her husband, Joe Wilson, an assignment he desperately wanted: a trip to Niger to investigate a "crazy" report that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger (her word, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, not mine). And she was dogged. She asked not once but twice (the second time in a memo) that her husband get the job. And there's more. The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation also found that a CIA "analyst's notes indicate that a meeting was 'apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger issues."

I can't imagine naked nepotism and bureaucratic scheming of this sort is somehow the norm at Langley. Colin Powell's possible involvement tends to lend weight to there being plenty of the latter going on, however.