More on the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s employment at the CIA.
The Post today runs a story, basically similar to the one which ran yesterday afternoon in the Associated Press. There’s not too much there beyond word that a dozen-member FBI team has now interviewed more than three dozen administration officials.
They’re also poring over phone logs and memos and the like. And the investigation remains centered on the White House.
The sizzle to the story is that Karl Rove and Scott McClellan, the president’s press secretary, have both been interviewed.
Here’s what catches my eye though. These are, as the Post notes, voluntary interviews. And I doubt that either of these men is the actual culprit (I suspect Rove pushed the story after the fact, but was likely not the original leaker, though he may have known about it.)
I’d be much more interested to learn whether the investigators have interviewed anybody in the Office of the Vice President, or the NSC, for that matter. These are voluntary interviews. So have the investigators asked but been rebuffed? Just not gotten to it yet?
That’s the story I’d read with great interest.
One other point: The Post piece says “McClellan has specifically denied that any of three prominent White House officials — Rove, Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby and National Security Council official Elliott Abrams — had leaked the information or authorized leaks.”
As we’ve noted here before, that’s not precisely what he’s said. He’s hung his statements on a very precise — and to my mind — highly technical and obfuscatory statement that none of them has “leaked classified information.”
He’s never made any blanket statements about things they may have told reporters about Plame.
