"Another Watergate" and "Quagmire Lust." Two conditions a lot of the left is suffering from right now. I know the Plume affair is all "PoMo," but from a legal standpoint, it looks like the leaker gets off.
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JAMES TARANTO, "BEST OF THE WEB."
Is She Covert?
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations notes a key limitation in the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the 1982 law that Robert Novak's sources supposedly violated by revealing that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA: An employee of an intelligence agency is a "covert agent" for the purposes of the statute only if he "is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States." This makes sense; after all, the CIA isn't supposed to spy in the U.S.
Does Plame qualify? It's not entirely clear, for both the CIA and her publicity-hungry husband, Joseph Wilson, have revealed little about her professional history. But here's what we do know:
According to Wilson's biography on the Web site of the Saudi-funded Middle East Institute, which lists him as a "media resource," his last overseas assignment, as political adviser to the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces in Europe, ended in 1997, six years ago. (Wilson's bio, by the way, lists his wife's supposedly secret maiden name.)
Yesterday the Washington Post reported that Wilson and Plame have three-year-old twin sons.
Maureen Dowd reports that Wilson and Plame met at a Washington cocktail party six years ago.
Wilson's bio says he worked for President Clinton as a special assistant between June 1997 and July 1998, which means he was based in Washington when he met Plame. If their kids are three years old, they would have been born in 1999 or 2000, and it seems reasonable to surmise that she was not stationed overseas as an expectant or new mother. If she has been stationed overseas during the past five years, then, the Wilson-Plame romance would have to have been a long-distance one at least during its first two years. So far as we are aware, no one has asserted that it was.
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