Reporters Relevancy Act of 2007

From National Review's Dead Tree edition (12 February):

"Shady characters in the Bush administration were thought to have outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA employee in relation for the self-aggrandizing (and largely false) anti-Iraq War op-ed her husband Joe had published in the New York Times.

Snip

"We also know that the leaker was not (Vice Presidential aide I. Lewis) Libby but Colin Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, an Iraq War skeptic who let Valerie's name slip out inadvertently. In short, there was no crime, and nothing to investigate.

Snip

"(Special prosecutor Patrick) Fitzgerald is smart enough to know that memory is imperfect, and that any man who works 18 ours a day and speaks with dozens of journalists a week, as Libby did, will mix up a few details. He chose to ruin Libby's life anyway..."

Clear cut case. Right? Well, not exactly if you are either former movie critic Frank Rich of the New York Times and sometime novelist David Ignatius of the Washington Post. They see the Libby case as the uncovering of a monumental cover up where Bush lied in order to go to war with Iraq.

Rich decries the "red herrings" of the case. In fact, he gets one wrong. According to Rich, "The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr. Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since Mr. Wilson didn’t make that accusation in the first place.)"

Well, actually Mr. Wilson did make that accusation in the first place when he wrote: In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office." Furthermore, he stated, "The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government."

While it's fair to say that Dick Cheney didn't personally ask Joe Wilson to check the story out, he obviously executed the mission with the thought that this trip was under the aegis of the VP's office.

But this is beside the point. Here's the takeaway -- the case against Libby is much ado about nothing. Fitzgerald knew from the onset that Armitage was the leaker; so I'm not sure what Fitzgerald's motivation is here -- other than trying to score some sort of victory while he's in the limelight. As for Rich and Ignatius -- they're trying to give a non-story some traction and justify the disproportionate media interest in the case as opposed to the public's lack of concern as to who said what to whom when. (And Rich, on a personal level, is peddling a book about the lead up to the war anyway -- think of his writing as free advertising.)