Nixon Time
Of all the bogus charges surrounding the Whitewater investigation, the one that struck me as both most grave and most likely to be true was the affair of the Arkansas State Troopers in then-Governor Clinton’s entourage who were alleged to have been bought or intimidated into silence (source article by Michael Isikoff – take with several pounds of salt). Interestingly, the charge of witness tampering didn’t make it into the Articles of Impeachment, and if it didn’t rise to the level of credibility to be seen as useful to the anti-Clinton lynch mob then perhaps there really was nothing to it. But there is something extremely troubling about the idea of a President misusing the power of office to silence his critics. The powers of the Chief Executive are vast and often unaccountable; in the hands of an experienced politician highly motivated to avoid embarrassment, they are potentially terrifying, both to the individual whistle-blower and to the idea of democracy. If Starr and his pals could have made that one stick, it would have made things much more difficult for the President’s defenders – myself included.
If making some inappropriate suggestions to a few backwoods cops to get them to keep their mouths shut about a few sexual pecadillos was potentially impeachable, how much moreso is the possibility that someone in the White House compromised a CIA intelligence asset in an effort to intimidate a respected diplomat with a highly-credible (indeed, true) indictment of Administration policy?
Here are the facts. On July 6, diplomat Joseph Wilson wrote an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times (reprinted here) called “What I Didn’t Find In Africa” that raised serious questions about one of the arguments the Administration used to justify its impending Iraqi invasion. Wilson suggested not only that evidence alleging that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase enriched uranium from Niger was false, but that high-ranking figures up to and including National Security Advisor Condoleza Rice knew it was false. Of course, the claim eventually became the notorious “16 words” from the Bush State of the Union that Bush himself eventually had to admit were unsubstantiated, if not outright lies.
When these allegations first surfaced, we suddenly began hearing questions raised about the reputation and credibility of Wilson. Exceptionally well-connected conservative political reporter Robert Novak, in the context of an otherwise-innocuous July 14, 2003 column, “Mission to Niger,” that gave background about the uranium story and its source, dropped in this interesting tidbit:
“Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.”
Revealing the identity of a CIA operative, as Novak blithely does in the above excerpt, is against the Intelligence Identity Protection Law of 1982, passed, incidentally, at the behest of former DCI and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush and signed by Ronald Reagan (more details at Daily Kos, here). Each count carries a 5-year prison term and a $50,000 fine. Why would Novak do such a thing, and what would his source hope to accomplish by making such information public, except to somehow intimidate Wilson by placing his wife's career in jeopardy?
Novak rightly refuses to reveal the identity of his sources, but Wilson has some ideas of his own. At a forum on the Iraq war sponsored by Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA), Wilson said:
It's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.
In an interview with reporter Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (full fascinating version here), Wilson clarified his position:
When they're talking about "senior administration officials", they're talking about the White House. The CIA does not "out" its own. It just doesn't do that…
Well, apparently the CIA agrees. Last night, MSNBC broke the story that, following an internal investigation, the spooks of Langley have formally requested that the Department of Justice open an investigation into the matter, pursuant to the Intelligence Identity Protection Act. As Marshall opines,
On its face, this news tonight almost certainly means that the CIA's internal investigation concluded that laws were broken or that there was sufficient evidence of wrong-doing for a criminal investigation to be undertaken.
Interestingly, in 18 hours, there has been little reporting of this in any of the major news outlets. However, it’s making the rounds of the Blogosphere fairly rapidly, turning up at TPM, Daily Kos, Cursor.org, BuzzFlash and many other meta-blogs and is filtering out to independent review-and-opinion sites like yours truly and Kriselda at Different Strings, who was on it as it broke yesterday. It's only a matter of time before this story breaks big-time, and our press corps can get into gang-bang style coverage mode with all the restraint and decorum they demonstrated during the Monica crisis.
The Justice Department, it must be remembered, is the department of the Executive Branch run by Attorney General John Ashcroft. This ticking time-bomb of political dynamite is now stuck on the desk of one of the most partisan, authoritarian and compromised figures in the entire Administration. He can choose to follow the law and allow the FBI to pursue the matter, or he can follow in the footsteps of his distinguished predecessor John Mitchell and undertake a cover-up. Time will tell.
Regardless, however, the facts are now out in the open and the machinery of justice has been engaged. This will be a real test of the principles of Bush’s supporters, especially those who eagerly anticipated the impeachment of Clinton on similar, but much less serious grounds.
There is no doubt that someone compromised a CIA asset, in clear violation of the law. It is possible, indeed likely, that that person is someone extremely inconvenient for the White House. Anyone else who was party to this scheme, certainly including Novak and possibly including senior Administration officials, is potentially a member of a criminal conspiracy to endanger the security of the United States, entered into in order to silence or discredit a political opponent.
Blackmail, intimidation, abuse of power, utter arrogant recklessness: we’re way past Clinton here. This is Nixon time, folks.
2:46:22 PM 
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