A Republican lobbyist friend

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A Republican lobbyist friend just sent me a link to today’s Best of the Web column at the Wall Street Journal’s opinionjournal.com. There James Taranto goes on a long and detailed series of responses and criticisms of things I’ve written over the last few days about the Plame controversy.

First (or rather last in Taranto’s piece) is the answer to the question I asked yesterday. That was, if the decision to reveal Plame’s identity creates no political or legal problems for the leakers, why don’t they come forward?

The answer, Taranto says, is that doing so would expose them to further vilification from sites like TPM.

I think that explanation speaks for itself.

Then there’s the matter of legal jeopardy for the leakers. Taranto seems to believe that it is legally significant whether the White House officials revealed Plame’s identity to damage her personally or to damage Wilson’s credibility by alleging she played a role in sending him on the trip — thus making her collateral damage.

Taranto’s point is that the White House was just trying to damage Wilson politically, albeit with what Taranto believes is a valid criticism. They didn’t have any particular desire to expose Plame’s identity. It was just that it was necessary to expose her identity in order to attack Wilson’s credibility.

This, as we noted earlier, is the imagined ‘need to attack the credibility of political opponents’ exception to the law in question, which pretty clearly doesn’t exist. The Wall Street Journal must have some in-house attorneys that Taranto could discuss this with.

It may be that these two valiant worthies could only serve the cause of the higher truth by breaking the law, a sort of oddly insider form of civil disobedience. But they were still breaking the law.

What would be a defense is if the leakers, for whatever reason, did not know Plame was covert. But, as we noted late last year, a careful analysis of both the language Novak used to describe Plame and that which he’s used in past columns to describe other covert CIA employees makes it pretty clear that Novak knew quite well what her status was. And the only reason he knew is because they knew and they told him.

Taranto even still argues about whether Plame was even covert. But this is the silliest of arguments for the following reason. Plame’s status is the predicate of the whole case. If she’s not a person covered by the law then there’s nothing even to investigate.

Yet an investigation into the matter has been going on for almost a year; and the quasi-independent Fitzgerald investigation has been underway for more than six months.

If Plame wasn’t covert, the CIA never could have made its referral to Justice. If they did, that would have been the most obvious of reasons for Justice to decline to investigate. And surely Fitzgerald wouldn’t have spent these months dragging members of the White House staff before a grand jury without satisfying himself that the first and essential legal predicate of the entire case (Plame’s status as covert) was valid — a factual matter that could have been nailed down in rather less than a day.

My apologies to regular readers for all the back and forth. But occasionally it’s necessary.

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