Monday, July 25, 2005

Plame-Gate In A Nutshell

So either Karl Rove or Lewis Libby leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent to Matthew Cooper, Judith Miller, Walter Pincus and Robert Novak, and then Gonzales found out that the Justice Department was investigating, and then Gonzales talked to Andrew Card but Gonzales waited until the next morning to tell everyone else, and after a grand jury was empanelled, then Patrick Fitzgerald of the Justice Department may or may not have had Novak testify before the grand jury, then Fitzgerald decided to go after Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, then Daniel Pearlstine, Cooper’s boss at Time, agreed to turn over Cooper’s notes, but Bill Keller didn’t force Judith Miller to do that at the New York Times and stood behind her, and Miller didn’t reveal her source to Fitzgerald, so she was sentenced, but then when Cooper did, it was documented in his notes that he got the information on background from Rove, and then there was a question of who sent Joe Wilson, Plame’s wife, to Niger anyway to contradict the Bushco claim that yellowcake uranium was being purchased by Saddam Hussein for nukes, but then it was established that Plame’s bosses at the CIA requested that Wilson go and he didn’t go on his own, so it looks like a total slam dunk that Rove and possibly Libby leaked the name of a CIA agent to the press, blowing her cover and possibly that of others.

Did I miss anything (God, my head hurts now)…

Notice how “out of the loop” Dubya is in all this, of course. Typical.

Update 7/26: Great digging by Brendan Smith at Brandoland to come up with this link to a document from CA Rep Henry Waxman's office detailing 11 security breaches in this investigation (looks like I missed some above...oops). Also, how cool is it that human-scab-and-nude-web-poser James Guckert has gotten sucked into this?

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