What we think Patrick Fitzgerald thinks
Richard Armitage — a former State Department personage with no involvement with Joe Wilson — has been identified as the leaker of Valerie Plame’s identity to Robert Novak. So it was not Rove, it was not Scooter Libby, it was not anyone in or near the White House. It was not a politically motivated leak. It was not an attempt to discredit Wilson, or to put Secret Agent Plame (“license to bake“) in danger.
Further, Armitage, “a terrible gossip” in his own words, was blabbing about Plame to Bob Woodward, Colin Powell and many others in the July – October 2003 time frame. So what the heck has Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Scooter Libby been about, with Armitage having been the fellow yip-yapping all about Plame all over Washington in the summer and fall of 2003, when the controversy arose?
We continue to believe that Fitzgerald has gone on this meaningless witch hunt because he thinks that Scooter Libby lied to him, a subject we wrote about at significant length almost a year ago. Fitzgerald, in our view, thinks Libby lied in a particular way to kick the investigation down the road beyond the 2004 election — and dammit, Fitzgerald doesn’t like being lied to — whether there was an underlying crime or not!
Of course Scooter Libby may have merely gotten multiple facts confused about conversations with MSM types about a terribly unimportant subject — but no matter. Fitzgerald smells a rat, and he’ll pursue his rat no matter how many millions it costs us all at the end of the day. Hell hath no fury like a federal prosecutor (who thinks he’s been) scorned.
UPDATE
Outstanding summary of this whole sordid mess by Christopher Hitchens.
UPDATE II
We credit the Washington Post with some (additional) sound judgment in this case:
[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.