The New York Times’ Douglas Jehl had what can only be described as a complicated story about the Plame scandal today, but, after reading it twice, I think there are some key details in it.
Specifically, the number of leakers who spread classified information about an undercover CIA agent seems to be growing. Whereas the conventional wisdom said there were two (Rove and Libby), there now appear to be three.
In the same week in July 2003 in which Bush administration officials told a syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter that a C.I.A. officer had initiated her husband’s mission to Niger, an administration official provided a Washington Post reporter with a similar account.
The first two episodes, involving the columnist Robert D. Novak and the reporter Matthew Cooper, have become the subjects of intense scrutiny in recent weeks. But little attention has been paid to what The Post reporter, Walter Pincus, has recently described as a separate exchange on July 12, 2003.
In that exchange, Mr. Pincus says, “an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention” to the trip to Niger by Joseph C. Wilson IV “because it was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, an analyst with the agency who was working on weapons of mass destruction.” […]
Mr. Pincus has not identified his source to the public. But a review of Mr. Pincus’s own accounts and those of other people with detailed knowledge of the case strongly suggest that his source was neither Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s top political adviser, nor I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and was in fact a third administration official whose identity has not yet been publicly disclosed.
In addition to the new idea of a third leaker, Pincus’ experience also suggests, as Mark Kleiman noted, that the Bush gang was proactively getting the word out to as large a number of reporters as possible about Plame. They were, in other words, indiscriminate when leaking classified information.
We’ve heard hints about this before, but the more recent GOP claim — reporters told the Bush gang about Plame, not the other way around — looks increasingly ridiculous.
Mr. Pincus’s most recent account, in the current issue of Nieman Reports, a journal of the Nieman Foundation, makes clear that his source had volunteered the information to him, something that people close to both Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby have said they did not do in their conversations with reporters.
Pincus knows who his source is and knows the source leaked classified information. This same source told prosecutors that he or she talked to Pincus, which led Pincus to talk about his conversation with the grand jury. And yet Pincus still won’t tell any of us about his source.
It’s only a matter of time…