Her Code Name Was 'Kerfuffle'
It's inevitable. Every time a Republican is in the White House, Democrats and the press go off in search of "another Watergate." Scandal, the Dems seem to think, is a quick fix for their political woes. And it's true that after George McGovern's landslide defeat in 1972, Watergate helped the Democrats stage a comeback. They made major gains in Congress in 1974 and won the White House in 1976. But that was it: The Republicans picked up congressional seats in 1978 and thoroughly trounced the Democrats in 1980.
Ginning up a scandal in the Bush administration was going to be particularly difficult, because there was no independent counsel statute. That law, a post-Watergate reform, provided for the appointment of prosecutors who had unlimited resources and a mandate to investigate a particular executive-branch official and those around him. Republicans had long complained of the excesses of such unconstrained investigations, and after Bill Clinton's experience with the Whitewater independent counsels, the Democrats came to see that they had a point. By bipartisan consensus, the independent counsel law expired in 2000.
But there is now a special prosecutor--a quasi-independent counsel--at work on one Bush "scandal." We first weighed in on the Valerie Plame kerfuffle on Sept. 29, 2003.
Here's the backstory: On July 6, 2003, a man by the name of Joseph Wilson published an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Wilson had been sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein had sought to acquire uranium there. Wilson said he had found no evidence of this, and in his op-ed he concluded "that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
This created something of a media sensation, and on July 14, Robert Novak published a column explaining why Wilson had been chosen for the mission:
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.
Wilson denied that Plame had anything to do with his getting the Niger gig, and he charged that Novak's sources had "outed" his wife as a covert agent in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act as retaliation for his criticism and in order to "discourage others from coming forward" against the administration. The CIA asked the Justice Department to investigate the matter, and in late September the existence of this investigation became public.
This column was among the first to cast serious doubt on Wilson's allegation. On Oct. 6, 2003, we pointed out that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is a difficult law to break. First of all, the CIA agent in question must be "covert," which by the statute's definition means he must have been working overseas within five years of the disclosure. Plame was known to be working a desk job at CIA headquarters in July 2003; and since she became pregnant with twins in 1999 or early 2000, we surmised that if she had been working overseas during the requisite five-year period, it was most likely only at the very beginning. Further, as we noted:
In order for the alleged leakers to have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, they would have to have known that she was covert and that the government was "taking affirmative measures to conceal" her relationship to the CIA. Novak's statement that the CIA made only "a very weak request" that he not use her name suggests the absence of such "affirmative measures."
Nonetheless, the administration came under strong political pressure to appoint a special prosecutor, and it eventually succumbed. On Dec. 30, 2003, Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation and appointed Chicago prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to take it over.
But Wilson's story fell apart. On July 12, 2004, we noted that a Senate Intelligence Committee report had discredited both of his key allegations. As the Washington Post reported:
Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly. . . . The panel [also] found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts.
Then, on July 29, 2004, we noted a Wall Street Journal editorial reporting that Wilson had been quietly cast out of the Kerry campaign, which had been trumpeting his role as a foreign-policy adviser. The previous day, at an offsite event during the Democratic National Convention, Wilson railed against his critics, including The Wall Street Journal, which publishes this Web site, implying that the paper is part of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the investigation. What's more, as the Journal editorial noted, "He began his talk by asking 'if it is OK if I harbor just a little bit of violence toward a certain journalist'--presumably a reference to Robert Novak."
Despite Wilson's disintegration, the special prosecutor's investigation ground on, and Fitzgerald sought to question various reporters who had covered the kerfuffle. Most of them reached agreements to testify, but two, Time's Matt Cooper and the New York Times' Judith Miller, held out and said they were willing to go to jail rather than reveal confidential sources.
Suddenly, the Times changed its tune. Its editorial page had beaten the drums loudly for a special prosecutor: "Mr. Fitzgerald is charged with finding out who violated federal law by giving the name of the undercover intelligence operative to Mr. Novak for publication in his column," the Times editorialized on Dec. 31, 2003, applauding the appointment of a special prosecutor. But on Feb. 28, 2005, as we noted, the Times argued:
Meanwhile, an even more basic issue has been raised in recent articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere: the real possibility that the disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity, while an abuse of power, may not have violated any law. Before any reporters are jailed, searching court review is needed to determine whether the facts indeed support a criminal prosecution under existing provisions of the law protecting the identities of covert operatives.
As we pointed out that day, Times columnists and op-eds had been even more reckless in asserting flatly that a felony had been committed.
Earlier this month, Cooper reached a last-minute agreement to avoid jail, but Miller, having exhausted her appeals, was held in contempt of court and is now behind bars. "Such an outcome might have been avoided," we wrote on Feb. 28, "if journalists--notably including the Times' editorialists and columnists--had treated Wilson's accusations with responsibility and skepticism in the first place."
The revelation this month that Karl Rove, now the White House's deputy chief of staff, was a Cooper source set off a frenzy of speculation among Angry Left fantasists, which eventually bubbled up to Democratic politicians and the mainstream media. Yet there is no publicly available evidence that Rove or anyone else violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or any other law, so on July 12 we engaged in little gentle mockery:
People who think in clichés keep asserting that "there's blood in the water," meaning Rove's. Those of us who have actually gone fishing know chum when we see it.
The special prosecutor's office has played its cards close to its chest, so any prediction as to how this will end would be pure speculation. As Bill Clinton can attest, sometimes prosecutors investigate alleged wrongdoing for years and find nothing worth bringing an indictment over. And as Martha Stewart can attest, an innocent person can become guilty by doing the wrong thing during a criminal investigation--so it's possible Fitzgerald will seek indictments for perjury or obstruction of justice, even if there is no underlying crime.
When it's all over, though, we hope that anti-Bush partisans in the press will think long and hard about whether it was all worth it. |
