A TPM Reader informs me that Tucker Carlson, and apparently other scofflaw Republicans, are out there again making the claims that Valerie Plame wasn’t a covert agent at CIA after all and that, apparently, there’s no crime at the bottom of the whole thing.
I’m hoping maybe I can speak to Tucker or maybe that he’ll go directly to Langley and also to speak to Mr. Fitzgerald because he seems to know stuff no one else is aware of, perhaps vouchsafed to him through a special revelation.
As we noted almost two years ago, the statute that started this whole gangling cavalcade in motion only applies to covert agents. The Justice Department investigation began in response to a CIA ‘referral’. Presumably the people at the CIA know Plame’s status. Such a referral is made when the referring agency believes that a crime may have been committed that the Justice Department should investigate. If she wasn’t covert, a crime could not have been committed. And yet they sent the referral because they think a crime may well have been committed. Ergo, the CIA must believe she is covert. Carlson says, no. But that’s their story and they’re stickin’ to it.
Perhaps she wasn’t covert enough for Carlson. But I’ll leave that to Carlson, Angleton, Donovan and whatever other worthies he regularly communes with.
As for Fitzgerald and the current investigation, he seems out of the Carlson loop too.
As we noted a few days ago, DOJ guidelines are pretty clear on just how and when prosecutors should even try to compel testimony from journalists, let alone try to throw them in jail. It’s not to be done for idle curiosity or to tie up loose ends, but only when the prosecutor believes he’s zeroing in on a crime. And even then they’re not supposed to do it unless all other alternatives have been exhausted. So unless Fitzgerald’s not following the procedures he should be, it seems Fitzgerald is pretty confident there is a significant crime at the bottom of all this.
In sum, Carlson seems like the only fellow in Washington who’s really got the goods on this whole case. If he could just lay it out for us, maybe Cooper, Miller, Fitzgerald and all those good souls at the White House could finally put this regrettable saga behind them.
