Dean Esmay has the best summary of the Valerie Plame scandal I’ve heard yet. There’s now nothing left of Joe Wilson’s original charge – that President Bush misrepresented the state of intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s efforts to buy element needed to make nuclear weapons in Africa – and little or nothing left of Wilson’s credibility. Nor is there any reason to think that Plame’s career as a Langley, Virginia-based CIA analyst has been injured, nor her safety jeopardized.
What’s left, primarily, is the issue of whether there’s been a technical violation of 50 U.S.C. 421, which of course requires proof that the defendant disclosed a covert agent’s identity “knowing . . . that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States” – a state-of-mind requirement that seems very difficult to establish in this case, especially given the likelihood that the sources who told Bob Novak that Plame was with the CIA had encountered her in her capacity as a Langley-based analyst and reviewed her recommendation of Wilson in the same capacity.
Oh, and just by the way: this is interesting.