"She had a desk job in Langley," said Ms. Toensing, who 
    also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, 
    referring to the C.I.A.'s headquarters. "When you want 
    someone in deep cover, they don't go back and forth to 
    Langley."

    I don’t even know how to describe the journalists’ 
    questions in the briefing. I guess I could say they were 
    disrespectful and disgraceful, but that does not quite do 
    it justice. When I was watching, I just could not even 
    get terribly angry about it because I was laughing too 
    hard. Here are these blow-dried reporters who have spent 
    years focusing their reports on whatever points the 
    Democrat leaders tell them are important, rather than 
    correctly framing and reporting the stories they cover, 
    getting all nasty and going off on Scott McClellan over 
    Karl Rove.

    I was also laughing away, and we put out calls for Terry 
    and David to join me on the program, but evidently faux 
    outrage is too difficult to maintain. Lorie asks why such 
    focus on Rove, and the answer is clearly that --unlike 
    the war or the SCOTUS nomination-- the Plame Affair is 
    about journalists, and this makes it very, very important 
    to journalists. Add in the fact that Rove does talk to 
    Cooper and others but not the television guys who are 
    generally understood not to bring too much game to the 
    table, and the perfect storm develops over the White 
    House press room.

    The e-mail message from Mr. [Matthew] Cooper to his 
    [Time] bureau chief describing a brief conversation with 
    Mr. Rove, first reported in Newsweek, does not by itself 
    establish that Mr. Rove knew Ms. Wilson's covert status 
    or that the government was taking measures to protect her.

    Based on the e-mail message, Mr. Rove's disclosures are 
    not criminal, said Bruce S. Sanford, a Washington lawyer 
    who helped write the law and submitted a brief on behalf 
    of several news organizations concerning it to the 
    appeals court hearing the case of Mr. Cooper and Judith 
    Miller, a reporter for The New York Times. Ms. Miller has 
    gone to jail rather than disclose her source.

   "It is clear that Karl Rove's conversation with Matt 
    Cooper does not fall into that category" of criminal 
    conduct, Mr. Sanford said. "That's not 'knowing.' It 
    doesn't even come close."

    There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how 
    secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.

   "She had a desk job in Langley," said Ms. Toensing, who 
    also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, 
    referring to the C.I.A.'s headquarters. "When you want 
    someone in deep cover, they don't go back and forth to 
    Langley."

    But politically, this is a bombshell. Rove, who has 
    insisted he did not leak Plame's name, had something to 
    do with this effort, even if he didn't "name" her. (The 
    defense: It all depends on the meaning of the word "leak")
    He was attempting to undercut Wilson when he told Cooper 
    that wifey had helped set up Wilson's fact-finding trip 
    to Niger (where Wilson didn't find the facts the 
    administration wanted on Saddam seeking uranium) and that 
    the uranium business could still be true (it wasn't). And 
    didn't the White House promise to fire anyone involved in 
    the leak?

    We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence 
    assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the 
    Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi 
    attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s 
    dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of 
    Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude 
    also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the 
    Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: 

    The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein 
    recently sought significant quantities of uranium from 
    Africa was well-founded. (Paragraph 499)