It now seems clear that “two senior administration officials” did, indeed, identify undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to newspaper columnist Robert Novak. The question now turns to figuring out which two senior administration officials are responsible.
As I mentioned yesterday, there’s little doubt as to why Plame was identified. The administration was doing its best to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, who was largely responsible for starting the Niger-gate controversy with a revealing New York Times op-ed.
The discovery, however, that the administration leaked word of a covert agent’s identity, and in the process may have destroyed her career and jeopardized the safety of her contacts, is simply too much for some to bear.
Several congressional Democrats, for example, are demanding an investigation to determine how this happened and who is responsible.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the disclosure of Plame’s identity “vile” and “a highly dishonorable thing to do; highly, highly dishonorable.” He said he will be pushing for committee hearings into the matter.
Many in the intelligence community expressed equal outrage.
W. Patrick Lang, former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said, “I think it is inherently irresponsible to disclose the true identity of a covered DO [directorate of operations] officer. It’s a frivolous and irresponsible act.”
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s intelligence on Iraq, called the release “unconscionable” and said it “could be incredibly damaging.”
It’s worth repeating that if Novak is telling the truth, and these administration officials did “out” Plame as a CIA agent, this could be much worse than Niger-gate. After all, Bush lied about all kinds of things regarding Iraq and the threat posed by Hussein. But it’s a felony to leak confidential information.
Also keep in mind that Novak, who obviously knows who the two officials are but would never reveal his sources, identified the two people as “senior administration officials.” The key word is “senior.” There aren’t too many folks in the administration that warrant the title. Lower-level bureaucrats who may hear something and tell a reporter about it anonymously don’t get the “senior” label.
As Tapped explained yesterday, “When reporters cite ‘senior administration officials,’ they generally mean the vice-president, the cabinet secretaries, those with cabinet-rank, the chief of staff, maybe the deputy chief of staff, and a couple of other really senior advisors. It’s a fairly limited pool.”
Why is this important? Because if someone, say an official in the West Wing, wanted to know who was responsible for this, it wouldn’t be too hard to narrow the search.
The media, which seemed for a while to be hot on the White House’s trail when it came to Niger-gate, hasn’t picked up on this controversy at all. The combined number of news stories about the Plame flap in the New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times this week is zero. Not one story.
White House reporters are, however, aware of the controversy and peppered press secretary Scott McClellan about this during a briefing yesterday.
McClellan began with a nice, Fleischer-like, non-answer to a question about whether “two administration sources…deliberately blew the cover of an undercover CIA operative, and in so doing, violated a federal law.”
“That is not the way this president or this White House operates,” McClellan said. “And there is absolutely no information that has come to my attention or that I have seen that suggests that there is any truth to that suggestion. And, certainly, no one in this White House would have given authority to take such a step.”
That’s a 56-word answer that managed to say absolutely nothing. Someone told Novak about Plame. Obviously, therefore, this is the way this White House operates. So, the press corps kept trying, asking McClellan if he’s willing to acknowledge that someone leaked word to Novak. Here’s the transcript:
Q. Is Novak lying? Do you think he’s making it up?
McClellan: I’m telling you our position. I’ll let the columnist speak for himself.
Q. You’re saying, flatly, it did not happen, nobody…
McClellan: I’m telling you, flatly, that that is not the way this White House operates. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that there’s any truth to that.
Q. That’s different from saying it didn’t happen. Are you saying, absolutely, it did not happen?
McClellan: I’m saying no one was certainly given any authority to do anything of that nature. And I’ve seen no evidence to suggest there’s any truth to it. I want to make it very clear, that is simply not the way this White House operates.
Q. If it turns out that somebody in the administration did do that…
McClellan: I’m not even going to speculate about it, because I have no knowledge of any truth to that report.
Q. What’s the extent of your knowledge? Don’t you want to get some more facts? I mean, how do you know that no one in the administration…Robert Novak has been around for a long…
McClellan: If I could go find “anonymous,” Terry, I would.
And with that, McClellan moved on.
I think the point that reporters were beginning to pick up on is that McClellan can go find anonymous. There aren’t that many people Novak could have been talking about. Two of them may have committed a felony by leaking classified information. Shouldn’t McClellan and the White House be furious about this leak? Shouldn’t they be actively trying to figure out which two of their colleagues are responsible?
Stay tuned…