The White House strategy of using a Supreme Court nomination to bump Karl Rove from the front page worked for a day — but only a day. The Washington Post comes roaring back this morning with a major front-page story with important new details.
A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked “(S)” for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.
Plame — who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo — is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.
The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the “secret” level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as “secret” the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.
These details are significant because it undermines a persistent White House defense — ignorance. The State Department memo made it clear to Bush aides that Plame’s identity was classified. Some of them leaked it anyway.
But this Post article is significant in a variety of other ways.
For example, we learn today that the memo was largely about Wilson’s substantive claims, not his wife.
Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson’s wife.
Oddly enough, this, too, undercuts White House assertions — Bush’s State Dept. knew claims about Hussein’s alleged uranium purchases were bogus (i.e., the WH lied), and knew that Joseph Wilson’s conclusions about the matter were true (i.e., the WH lied again). When combined with the we-didn’t-know-Plame-was-undercover defense, that puts the Bush gang 0-for-3 in the truth department today.
But then there’s the story behind the story. The Washington Post learned these key details about the State Department memorandum yesterday — the same day the John Roberts nomination started shifting attention away from Rove. I’m not privy to the behind-the-scenes details, but it seems that someone with access to very valuable information, wanted to put the Rove story back onto the front page, as if to say to the Bush gang, “Nice try, but this isn’t going away that easy.”
Somehow, I suspect the White House manipulation strategy didn’t factor in this possibility.