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November 15, 2005
Administration Official Told Bob Woodward About Plame's CIA Role Before Leak: Post

Tomorrow's Washington Post has a stunning new development in the Valerie Plame story, one that could unravel most of the investigation conducted by Patrick Fitzgerald. The paper reveals that its most celebrated reporter, Bob Woodward, learned of Valerie Plame and her employment at the agency from an unnamed administration official a month before Robert Novak revealed it in his column -- and it wasn't Karl Rove or Scooter Libby:

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.

Fitzgerald interviewed Woodward about the previously undisclosed conversation after the official alerted the prosecutor to it on Nov. 3 -- one week after Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted in the investigation.

So much for the covert status of Valerie Plame. Even the CIA didn't think she worked under cover -- a rather obvious conclusion, given that she went to work rather openly at the Langley facility. Someone will need to remind me why we've spent two years on this investigation, because at the moment it looks like a gigantic waste of time and money. Fitzgerald had two years and came up with nothing more than a perjury and obstruction indictment against one person on a case in which no crime has been proven to be committed. Now it looks like in those two years, it never occurred to Fitzgerald to check with other journalists to see if they had heard of Plame and her association with the CIA.

Woodward also testified that he never discussed Plame with Libby or Karl Rove. That answers the question that would have come up, which is whether the two officials may have heard Plame's status from Woodward instead of other government officials. It doesn't exactly excuplate either, especially Libby of perjury and obstruction, but it does make the indictment look even more foolish if the CIA itself outed Plame to Woodward, one of the most famous journalists in America. Woodward's story shows that the leak did not come from some back-door effort to punish Wilson or his wife for their efforts to discredit Bush and the war effort.

The Left will have to go back to the drawing board, and I suspect that Fitzgerald will eventually withdraw the indictment.

UPDATE: Corrected for the rather egregious error of assigning the official to the CIA, which the story does not do. The other point, which I missed in my first presentation of the story, is that Woodward doesn't believe that the leak was malicious at all. According to Woodward, the administration didn't even think Plame was covert at all -- which eliminates the mens rea needed for the crime Fitzgerald's investigation meant to uncover.

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Posted by Ed Morrissey at November 15, 2005 10:36 PM

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