This may be misplaced optimism, but I still have hope that the Plame Game scandal will play a major role in this year’s campaign. Sure, there are a rash of other Bush-related scandals swirling around the White House — the $700 million diversion, the Bandar deal, the ignored al Queda warnings, the WMD, the lies to Congress about Medicare, etc. — but I have a special fondness for the Plame Game and hope that it may still have an impact.
There’s reason to believe the investigation, which we rarely hear about because of a confidential grand jury process, may get some renewed public attention soon.
Joseph Wilson’s “The Politics of Truth” will be released next week, which should remind people that the scandal is still pending. Wilson will reportedly reveal which White House officials he believes were responsible for leaking the identity his undercover CIA agent’s wife to the press. At a minimum, expect a new round of denials from those Wilson implicates.
Moreover, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman told Chris Matthews last week that this controversy is still percolating along.
Fineman: Remember the leak investigation?
Matthews: Yes.
Fineman: Who leaked that name? That’s getting big behind the scenes, and I think it’s going to be a bigger story than we know, because the question now is not just who leaked it but who lied to investigators about the leak.
Fineman didn’t elaborate further, but he may have been going off a New York Times report from two weeks ago that said federal investigators are no longer just looking into which White House officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent, but also exploring who may have lied to cover up the crime.
In the off chance you missed the NYT piece, here are the key parts:
Prosecutors investigating whether someone in the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer have expanded their inquiry to examine whether White House officials lied to investigators or mishandled classified information related to the case, lawyers involved in the case and government officials say.
In looking at violations beyond the original focus of the inquiry, which centered on a rarely used statute that makes it a felony to disclose the identity of an undercover intelligence officer intentionally, prosecutors have widened the range of conduct under scrutiny and for the first time raised the possibility of bringing charges peripheral to the leak itself.
[…]
The broadened scope is a potentially significant development that represents exactly what allies of the Bush White House feared when Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from the case last December and turned it over to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago.
Republican lawyers worried that the leak case, in the hands of an aggressive prosecutor, might grow into an unwieldy, time-consuming and politically charged inquiry, like the sprawling independent counsel inquiries of the 1990’s, which distracted and damaged the Clinton administration.
This one’s not over yet.