Robert Novak, who has been a leading political columnist longer than I’ve been alive, has announced his immediate retirement in the wake of his diagnosis with a brain tumor.

Robert Novak has announced his immediate retirement following the diagnosis of a brain tumor, a prognosis the Sun-Times’ political columnist describes as “dire.”

“The details are being worked out with the doctors this week, but the tentative plan is for radiation and chemotherapy,” Novak said.

The Evans-Novak column was first distributed by Publishers Newspaper Syndicate on May 15, 1963, with the New York Herald-Tribune, the flagship newspaper. When the Herald-Tribune folded in 1966, the Chicago Sun-Times became their home newspaper.

Younger readers will likely know Novak best for his unfortunate role in the Valerie Plame scandal or even his recent hit-and-run accident.  Given the timing of his brain tumor diagnosis days later, I suspect most will forget about the later.  The former may stain him forever, even though his role was tertiary.  It would be too bad.

I first became acquainted with Novak, probably twenty-odd years ago now, through his various appearances as a television talking head, notably on CNN’s Crossfire.  He was, frankly, not very good at it.  He was, however, a legendary political reporter in his print capacity.

Roland Evans, whose name still graced the column until the end, died more than seven years ago.   This day was inevitable, I suppose, given the human condition.  Still, it’s the end of an era.

Via Hotline

A federal judge has backed the CIA’s bid to keep Valerie Plame Wilson from disclosing the length of her CIA service, despite it being publicly available information.

Valerie Wilson may be the best known former intelligence operative in recent history, but a federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that she was not allowed to say how long she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the memoir she plans to publish this fall.

Although the fact that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. from 1985 to 2006 has been published in the Congressional Record and elsewhere, the judge, Barbara S. Jones of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Ms. Wilson was not free to say so. “The information at issue was properly classified, was never declassified and has not been officially acknowledged by the C.I.A.,” Judge Jones wrote.

[...]

Judge Jones acknowledged that the C.I.A. “does not contest that the information is, in fact, in the public domain,” adding that “the public may draw whatever conclusions it might from the fact that the information at issue was sent on C.I.A. letterhead by the chief of retirement and insurance services.”

But she said a classified court filing from Stephen R. Kappes, the deputy director of the C.I.A., which lawyers for Ms. Wilson and her publisher were not allowed to see, contained a reasonable explanation for the agency’s position. Judge Jones did not reveal it, saying only that Mr. Kappes has persuaded her of “the harm to national security which reasonably could be expected if the C.I.A. were to acknowledge the veracity of the information at issue.”

The judge’s ruling is almost certainly legally correct, although the result seems bizarre. Obviously, Kappes hasn’t shared his reasoning with me. I can’t fathom, however, what it might have been.

Book Blog had this coverage back in January:

The [CIA's Publications Review Board] refused Plame permission to even mention that she worked for the CIA because she served as a “nonofficial cover” officer (or NOC) posing as a private businesswoman, according to an adviser to Plame, who asked not to be identified discussing a sensitive issue. “She believes this will effectively gut the book,” said the adviser. Larry Johnson, a former colleague, said the agency’s action seems punitive, given that other ex-CIA undercover officers have published books. But even Plame’s friends acknowledge that few NOCs have done so. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the panel was still having “ongoing” talks with Plame to resolve the dispute. “The sole yardstick,” he said, is that books “contain no classified information.”

That she worked as a NOC is public information, solely because the CIA chose to make it so. Therefore, keeping it classified appears awfully silly.

Were Plame/Wilson seeking to publish juicy details of classified ops, reveal trade secrets, or the like, they should obviously be allowed to stop her. But the dates of her employment? Even aside from the Congressional Record, her retirement announcement received worldwide attention.

via Taegan Goddard

Valerie Plame’s civil suit against Dick Cheney and others has been thrown out. AP’s Matt Apuzzo:

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against members of the Bush administration in the CIA leak scandal. Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had accused Vice President Dick Cheney and others of conspiring to leak her identity in 2003. Plame said that violated her privacy rights and was illegal retribution for her husband’s criticism of the administration.

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds and said he would not express an opinion on the constitutional arguments. Bates dismissed the case against all defendants: Cheney, White House political adviser Karl Rove, former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Plame’s attorneys had said the lawsuit would be an uphill battle. Public officials are normally immune from such lawsuits filed in connection with their jobs.

No surprise here. Allowing private suits against public officials for harm caused by official acts would open a Pandora’s box.

This is purely a technicality, not a ruling on the merits, so Bates’ ruling sheds no light on Plame’s claims.

UPDATE: WaPo’s Carol Leonnig has more:

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates said that Cheney and White House aides cannot be held liable for the disclosure of information about Plame in the summer of 2003 while they were trying to rebut criticism of the administration’s war efforts levied by her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The judge said such efforts were certainly part of the officials’ scope of normal duties.

Bates also ruled that the court lacked the power to award damages for public disclosure of private information about Plame. The judge said that was because Plame and Wilson had failed to exhaust other remedies in seeking compensation from appropriate federal agencies for the alleged privacy violations.

The text of Bates’ ruling is here. The key ‘graphs:

Defendants’ motions, however, raise issues that the Court is obliged to address before it can consider the merits of plaintiffs’ claims. As it turns out, the Court will not reach, and therefore expresses no views on, the merits of the constitutional and other tort claims asserted by plaintiffs based on defendants’ alleged disclosures because the motions to dismiss will be granted.

For the reasons explained below, the Court finds that, under controlling Supreme Court precedent, special factors — particularly the remedial scheme established by Congress in the Privacy Act — counsel against the recognition of an implied damages remedy for plaintiffs’ constitutional claims. The Court also finds that it lacks subject-matter jurisdiction over the tort claim because plaintiffs have not exhausted their administrative remedies under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is the proper, and exclusive, avenue for relief on such a claim.

Valerie Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president on a conference call with liberal bloggers. Taylor Marsh, for one, is quite excited: “This is a huge deal for Candidate Clinton and a big endorsement for her candidacy. That it was broken on the blogs sends a powerful signal.”

My guess is the signal is that it actually isn’t a huge deal.

Bob Novak recounts the details of his meeting with Richard Armitage wherein he learned of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity in his new autobiography, The Prince of Darkness. His newspaper, The Chicago Sun-Times, has an excerpt:

It is important to note that Armitage reached out to me before Joe Wilson went public on the New York Times op-ed page and on “Meet the Press” with an account of his Niger report that he said contradicted 16 words in Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address: (”The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.”)

[...]

I then asked Armitage a question that had been puzzling me but, for the sake of my future peace of mind, would better have been left unasked. Why would the CIA send Joseph Wilson, not an expert in nuclear proliferation and with no intelligence experience, on the mission to Niger?

“Well,” Armitage replied, “you know his wife works at CIA, and she suggested that he be sent to Niger.” “His wife works at CIA?” I asked. “Yeah, in counterproliferation.”

He mentioned her first name, Valerie. Armitage smiled and said: “That’s real Evans and Novak, isn’t it?” I believe he meant that was the kind of inside information that my late partner, Rowland Evans, and I had featured in our column for so long. I interpreted that as meaning Armitage expected to see the item published in my column.

It’s noteworthy, too, that Armitage asked for the meeting after having rebuffed previous requests. Rather clearly, then, leaking Plame’s role in sending her husband to Niger was the primary purpose of the meeting rather than an off-the-cuff revelation.

UPDATE: Commenter Spencer thinks I’m reading too much into this and, upon re-reading the column, I think he’s right.
Novak’s account makes it seem that Armitage was eager to get the information out and was pleased with himself for doing so. Still, Novak writes, “the last week of June 2003, Armitage’s office called to agree unexpectedly to my request and set up the appointment for July 8.” The Wilson op-ed that triggered the controversy was published July 6. So, while Armitage may well have gone into the meeting with a plan to push the Plame-Wilson connection to Novak, it’s unlikely that that’s why he agreed to it in the first place in late June.

UPDATE: Then again, as an emailer reminds me, “the genesis of the Plame affair wasn’t Wilson’s July 6 op-ed. It was a Nick Kristof column in May and a Walter Pincus story in June, both of which relied on Wilson as an anonymous source.” Indeed, the timeline (forgive the bias of the source; it’s the most complete one I can find) makes clear that there was much scrambling within at least the Vice President’s office that started in very early June.

There’s less concrete evidence as to the timing within the State Department. Then again, Armitage was never put on trial.

As one would expect, last evening’s news that President Bush has commuted Scooter Libby’s jail sentence has spawned a huge amount of controversy in the blogosphere, with some decrying it as the greatest outrage since Watergate and others complaining it didn’t go far enough.

From the Left:

• Nancy Pelosi: “The President’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence does not serve justice, condones criminal conduct, and is a betrayal of trust of the American people.”
• Marcy Wheeler: “This amounts to nothing less than obstruction of justice.”
• Jane Hamsher: “This president’s contempt for the rule of law is thorough and complete.”
• Jeralyn Merritt: “President Bush’s commutation of I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby’s sentence is simply stunning, both in its hypocrisy and its arrogance.”
• Reid Stott: “[T]he Bush administration simply no longer gives a damn, about public opinion or the rule of law.”
• Doug Berman: “It will be interesting to see if, after the President has made clear that he views the guidelines are “excessive” for one of his pals, others with sentencing power begin to give less respect to the guidelines when the fates of less connected defendants are in the balance.”
• Anonymous Liberal: “Libby, apparently, doesn’t deserve to be treated the way the law demands that others be treated. He’s special. And what makes him special? Clearly nothing other than the fact that he is a well-connected Republican.”
• Bob Cesca: “If Scooter Libby had been some unfortunate nobody who was either black or poor or retarded . . . “
• Digby: “This is a very, very depressing day, even though we knew it would happen in one way or another. It’s just a continuation of this administration’s complete disregard for the law and their belief that they are entitled to special treatment because, well, they are just, so special.”
• Duncan Black: “President Bush engages in ongoing obstruction of justice by commuting Scooter Libby’s sentence.”
• Taylor Marsh: “George W. Bush today proved that the rule of law doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican. It’s all about the rule of politics.”

From the Right:

• Patrick Frey: “You do the crime, you do the time. The jury said Scooter Libby did the crime. He should do the time.”
• Steven Taylor: “One cannot lie to a grand jury and since he was a public servant at the time, that would seem to make the lying all the more problematic.”
• Ed Morrissey: “It strikes a balance that few will appreciate now, but later will accept as wise, as far as it goes.”
• Jay Currie: “Justice would have been served by a full pardon; but Bush rarely gets stuff right.”
• Rob Bluey: “Libby still has to pay a $250,000 fine and will be left scarred permanently, a penalty that’s harsh enough.”
• Andrew Sullivan: “When there are no normal channels of governance in this White House, it means the fusion of Cheney-Bush acting as extra-legal agents of their own power. We really no longer have the rule of law operating. We have the privileges and lies and policies of two men. The law is no competitor. And shamelessness is their ally.”
• Orin Kerr: “I find Bush’s action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received.”

The claims that this is somehow and “obstruction of justice” or outside the “rule of law” are simply bizarre. This power is expressly granted to the president in the Constitution. Indeed, it’s in the first sentence of the part of the Constitution which delineates the powers of the president (Article II, Section 2):

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

It’s listed before the enumeration of his foreign policy duties, for goodness sakes. The issuance of a pardon or commutation isn’t a sidestepping of the process: It is expressly a part of the process.

Further, this power is plenary. He doesn’t need anyone’s permission to exercise it nor does he need to jump through any hoops. Yes, there are long-established bureaucratic processes whereby the Justice Department vets petitions. They were put in place because presidents seldom know anything about the cases in question and don’t have time to read petitions that come pouring in. That obviously doesn’t apply in this case. As Bill Dyer observes,

Critics see it as cronyism, but in fact, no one is better qualified to judge the value of Libby’s public service than President Bush. Huge, huge portions of what Scooter Libby did as a key inside figure in implementing the Administration’s response to 9/11 and global terrorism is still highly classified. But the President knows on a first-hand basis what the man contributed, what its value has been, and under what critical and pressure-filled circumstances he served. And as it happens, George W. Bush is the one person in whom the Constitution entrusts the power to weigh that public service against the serious crimes of which Libby stands convicted. And he clearly thinks “this particular convicted felon” is deserving, even though there will be a political price to pay.

As to the “special treatment” issue: Of course it’s special treatment. Were Libby not a senior administration official, he’d never have been in this mess to begin with.

I heard Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this morning on NPR saying that Libby’s conviction “was the one faint glimmer of accountability for White House efforts to manipulate intelligence.” That’s exactly why he should have been pardoned, in my view.

First, because there was no underlying crime in the “efforts to manipulate intelligence.” Despite spending millions of dollars and years investigating the leaks, no one was ever charged. Indeed, we quickly found out who had told Bob Novak about Valerie Plame’s CIA job — and it wasn’t Scooter Libby. Yet, Richard Armitage, the actual leaker, was never charged.

Second, and more importantly, the responsibility for “efforts to manipulate intelligence” goes to the top. To the extent that information supporting going to war was cherry picked, it wasn’t Scooter Libby’s doing. Yes, he was in a powerful position as the VP’s chief of staff. He was not, however, a decision maker. If someone is going to be “accountable” for whatever offenses Reid imagines occurred, it should be George W. Bush. He is, after all, The Decider. He, not Scooter Libby, is The Commander Guy.

If Reid and Pelosi think the administration should be held accountable for manipulating intelligence, the same Constitution that empowers President Bush to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence gives them a remedy: Begin impeachment proceedings. In my view, that would be about the dumbest thing they could do, politically. But that’s the appropriate recourse if they actually believe the administration lied to get us into a war. If, on the other hand, it’s just cheap political rhetoric, they should pipe down.

President Bush has granted clemency to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

WHEREAS Lewis Libby was convicted in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in the case United States v. Libby, Crim. No. 05-394 (RBW), for which a sentence of 30 months’ imprisonment, 2 years’ supervised release, a fine of $250,000, and a special assessment of $400 was imposed on June 22, 2007;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, pursuant to my powers under Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, do hereby commute the prison terms imposed by the sentence upon the said Lewis Libby to expire immediately, leaving intact and in effect the two-year term of supervised release, with all its conditions, and all other components of the sentence.

IN WITNESS THEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this second day of July, in the year of our Lord two thousand and seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Update: Gene Healy provides a partial list of people also deserving of some clemency.

• Marsha Cunningham

  Like Kemba Smith, Cunningham, who was arrested in 1997, had no prior offenses. Nor was there any evidence that she had ever participated in a drug deal.

  Yet when police found powder and crack cocaine in the Dallas apartment that Cunningham shared with her boyfriend, and her boyfriend was caught with crack while driving her car, federal mandatory minimums kicked in. Now, Cunningham is serving 15 years in prison.

• Dane Yirkovsky

  Yirkovsky is serving a 15-year sentence for possession of a single .22-caliber bullet.

  In December 1998 he found this bullet while doing remodeling work for a friend who was giving him a place to stay in exchange for the work. Yirkovsky put the bullet in a box in his bedroom. Later that month, the police found the bullet while searching Yirkovsky’s room after a call from his former girlfriend, who claimed he had some of her possessions. Because of Yirkovsky’s prior convictions for burglary, federal prosecutors charged him under the Armed Career Criminal Act, although he had not threatened anyone and did not have a gun.

• Weldon Angelos

  A year ago this week, 24-year-old Angelos was sentenced to 55 years in prison for selling two small bags of marijuana to a police informant. During the transaction, Angelos was carrying a pistol in an ankle holster, although he did not threaten anyone with the weapon. Nonetheless, the law imposed a severe mandatory minimum for gun possession during a drug deal.

  In sentencing Angelos, U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell of Utah, a conservative Republican appointed by President Bush, also ran through the maximum penalties for hijacking an airplane (25 years), a terrorist bombing intending to kill a bystander (20 years), and kidnapping (13 years). The judge noted that just two hours earlier, he had imposed a sentence of 22 years in a case where a man beat a senior citizen to death with a log.

  “Is there a rational basis,” Cassell asked, “for giving Mr. Angelos more time than the hijacker, the murderer, the rapist?” Cassell called the 55-year sentence “unjust, cruel, and even irrational” but said that the law left him “no choice.”

  Of course, President Bush need not free Angelos immediately—a crime was committed—but he has the power to reduce Angelos’ sentence. Surely one mistake is a poor justification for taking away most of a young father’s life.

• Robert Blandford, Diane Huang, David McNab, and Abner Schoenwetter

  Three American seafood dealers and one Honduran lobster-fleet owner are currently doing hard time for importing lobster tails that were the wrong size and that were packaged in clear plastic bags rather than in cardboard boxes. They ran afoul of the Lacey Act, a federal statute that makes it a crime to import fish or wildlife taken “in violation of any foreign law.”

  The U.S. government argued that they had broken Honduran law because some of the lobster tails—3 percent, to be exact—were less than five and a half inches long, and because a Honduran regulation required that the lobster tails be packed in boxes. Yet Honduran officials testified that no laws had been violated.

  Nonetheless, Blandford, McNab (the Honduran national), and Schoenwetter, three small-business men with no previous criminal records, were sentenced in 2001 to eight-year terms. Their “partner in crime,” Huang, got off easy: two years’ incarceration for the mother of two young children.

55 years for selling pot to an undercover police officer while carrying a pistol in an ankel holster? Geez is that over the top. Kill a man you go to jail for less time. Rape a woman and you go to jail for less time. Commit a terrorist act and you’ll go to jail for less time. But sell some dope while carrying a pistol, why lock ‘em up and throw away the key!

Update II: More from President Bush here.

I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.

Okay, but what about 55 years for selling pot while carrying a pistol? Is that a crime worse than murder or kidnapping? And what about the lobster crime, eight years? Based on the lobster crime punishment Libby should be executed by firing squad. And the single .22 calibre bullet in a box (with no gun)? Talk about ridiculous.

Barring a presidential pardon, it appears that Scooter Libby is headed to jail soon.

A federal appeals court Monday rejected former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s request to remain free on appeal after his March conviction on federal charges stemming from the leak of a CIA agent’s identity. Libby, once Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, faces a 30-month prison term after being convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal agents probing the 2003 exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband had become a critic of the war in Iraq.

A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals found Libby has not raised a question for judges “that is ‘close’ or that ‘could very well be decided the other way’” — the standard for remaining free on appeal.

Barring further appeals, Libby’s term will start when the U.S. Bureau of Prisons decides where he will serve his time and sets a date for him to surrender. But his lawyers may appeal Monday’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rarely intervenes in these kinds of cases.

Not particularly surprising. As noted previously, the norm is for convicted felons to go to jail given that the burden of proof has shifted to them to prove that there were errors at the trial level that swayed the verdict.

This will increase pressure on President Bush to issue a pardon or at least commute the sentence. All indications, however, is that he is not inclined to do that.

Carol Leonnig, who covers the federal courts for WaPo and with whom I had the pleasure of sitting during my brief stint covering the Libby trail, shoots down “5 Myths About Scooter and the Slammer.”

Her column will irritate both Libby’s strongest supporters and most vehement critics.

It’s now rather clear that Libby lied to the grand jury about how he found out about Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment with the CIA. At the same time, there is no evidence that he, Karl Rove, or anyone else committed a crime aside from lying to cover up their leaks to the press.

Valerie Plame Wilson testified before Congress today, claiming that she was a covert operative at the time Richard Armitage leaked information to Robert Novak and that the content of that leak–that she had been behind sending her husband, Joe Wilson, to Niger, was false.

Her opening statement is transcribed here.

AP’s Matt Apuzzo, who has been reporting the ins-and-outs of this case for quite some time, sees little new.

Plame, the operative at the center of the leak scandal that resulted in last week’s criminal conviction of a former top White House official, created more of a stir by her presence on Capitol Hill than by her testimony. She revealed little new information about the case, which sparked a federal investigation and brought perjury and obstruction of justice convictions of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. No one has been charged with leaking her identity.

Still, Plame’s appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was a moment of political theater that dramatized Democrats’ drive to use their control of Congress to expose what they see as White House efforts to intimidate dissenters.

“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department,” Plame testified in her first public comments about the case. “I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained.”

[...]

Plame repeatedly described herself as a covert operative, a term that has multiple meanings. Plame said she worked undercover and traveled abroad on secret missions for the CIA. But the word “covert” also has a legal definition requiring recent foreign service by the person and active efforts to keep his or her identity secret. Critics of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation said Plame did not meet that definition for several reasons and that was why nobody was charged with the leak.

[...]

Plame said she did not select her husband for a CIA fact-finding trip to Niger. Wilson later wrote in a newspaper column that his trip debunked the administration’s prewar intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Africa. “I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him. There was no nepotism involved. I did not have the authority,” she said.

That conflicts with senior officials at the CIA and State Department, who testified during Libby’s trial and told Congress that Plame recommended Wilson for the trip.

[...]

Columnist Novak has said that former Deputy State Department Secretary Richard Armitage first revealed Plame’s job to him and Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove, and CIA spokesman Bill Harlow confirmed it.

Wilson has written a book, and Plame is working on one, “Fair Game.” Plame’s book is subject to a mandatory review by the CIA. On Thursday, Simon & Schuster spokesman Adam Rothberg would say only that the book was “in progress” and that publication was expected soon.

I don’t blame Plame for being outraged that her career was jeopardized by her identity as a CIA officer being revealed in the press. She told the committee, “I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained. I could no longer travel overseas or do the work . . . which I loved. It was done.” [ellipses in original] If true, it’s truly a shame.

On the other hand, numerous people, including CIA official Bob Grenier, testified at the Libby trial that Plame suggested her husband for the Niger trip. Either they–and all the CIA paperwork behind the trip–are wrong, she’s lying, or she’s playing a Clintonian wordsmithing game in saying she “did not have the authority.”

Frankly, I think the same is true of her claims as to her status. The fact that Harlow confirmed her status to Novak without flinching makes it pretty clear he didn’t think she was a covert agent. And he told the VP’s press secretary about Plame’s connection in the assignment of Wilson without so much as a “Hey, don’t spread this around” warning. That’s simply not how CIA people treat information that’s remotely sensitive. Oh, and there’s this:

Plame said she wasn’t a lawyer and didn’t know her legal status, but said it shouldn’t have mattered to the officials who learned her identity.

As Tom Maguire snarks, “She’s so covert that not even she knows if she is covert!”

Goodness, it’s been four years now. You can get a night school law degree in that much time. Or spend five minutes talking to one of the CIA’s lawyers. Or, hell, perhaps a double naught spy would just know that they’re covert agents. And, if they weren’t smart enough for any of that, you’d think they’d at least be smart enough not to testify to Congress about their covert-osity.

And this is a bit melodramatic–if not disingenuous:

The harm that is done when a CIA cover is blown is grave but I can’t provide details beyond that in this public hearing.

But the concept is obvious. Not only have breaches of national security endangered CIA officers, it has jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents who, in turn, risk their own lives and those of their families to provide the United States with needed intelligence.

Lives are literally at stake. Every single one of my former CIA colleagues, from my fellow covert officers to analysts to technical operations officers to even the secretaries, understand the vulnerabilities of our officers and recognize that the travesty of what happened to me could happen to them.

We in the CIA always know that we might be exposed and threatened by foreign enemies.

Regardless of whether her status was “covert” in any meaningful sense of the word–and, as I have argued, it makes no sense that it could have been given how her own agency handled the matter–she was not an undercover field agent but rather a supervisor at headquarters. Her life was not in danger by this revelation. Again, the CIA press spokesman took Bob Novak’s call and confirmed that she worked there. Does anyone think he would have done that had her life been in danger? Or that former Infantry officer Bob Novak would have printed it in his column had he thought there any chance that harm would come to one of his country’s intelligence officers?

A far more likely explanation for this over-the-top testimony, it seems to me, is that Plame is angry at the Bush administration for — even if unintentionally — turning her life topsy turvy, making her into a major public figure, and saying mean and nasty (if arguably true) things about her husband. She’s perfectly willing to use whatever platform she can to get her licks in. And, as it happens, she and her husband have a book to peddle.

Valerie Plame has been invited to testify before Congress. About nothing in particular.

Democratic lawmakers are eager to hear from outed CIA operative Valerie Plame as they try to make political fodder out of the 2003 leak scandal.

Plame was scheduled to testify before a congressional committee Friday, but it was unlikely the hearing would offer any new information about the Bush administration’s discussions of her employment at the spy agency. “Valerie’s going to be talking in general about the need to protect intelligence assets,” her attorney, Melanie Sloan, said prior to her appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “She’s basically talking about how important national intelligence is and about how leaking is bad.”

Her prepared testimony would take about five minutes, Sloan said, and wouldn’t include any behind-the-scenes details about the CIA or the White House.

The man with that kind of information is Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who spent years investigating the leak and interviewed President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and several top aides and journalists. But Fitzgerald isn’t talking, citing federal rules prohibiting such discussions. And nobody from the White House involved in the leak was scheduled to testify. Nor was someone from the State Department, where the leak of Plame’s identity originated.

The use of Congressional “hearings” as political publicity stunts are nothing new nor by any means limited to Democrats. Still, it’s rather hilarious to do so this on a four-year-old scandal that was turned over to a special prosecutor who closed his years-long investigation without charging anyone with a crime related to the subject of said investigation. (He did, however, successfully prosecute the crime of lying during said investigation. Yay.)

The upside is that Congress will get a five minute lecture on how bad leaks are. If anyone needs that, it’s Congress.

UPDATE: Richard Leiby and Walter Pincus lead their WaPo coverage of this dog-and-pony show with this jawdropper:

She has been silent nearly four years.

I guess if you don’t count the press releases, press conferences, magazine interviews ….

Jay Rosen has a long homage to those who blogged the Scooter Libby trial, most notably the Firedoglake gang.

As a critic who follows the fortunes of the American press, and writes about its collapse under Bush, I found it extremely painful to sit on the sidelines for this event. But as compensation I had the pleasure of watching Firedoglake, a group blog, emerge as the best site for primary, tell-me-what-happened-today coverage of the trial.

The political press supplemented FDL quite well, I thought.

If I had time, I went to Memeorandum and sampled all of it. If I didn’t have time, I read Firedoglake and the Washington Post’s team of Amy Goldstein and Carol D. Leonnig. It wasn’t a secret. Maybe 200,000 readers knew. If you wanted to keep up with the trial, and needed something approaching a live transcript, with analytical nuance, legal expertise, courthouse color, and recognizably human voices, Firedoglake was your best bet.

Now, if you wanted neutral reporting, FDL wasn’t for you. Then again, neither were any of the blogs. On balance, though, Marcy Wheeler, Christy Hardin Smith, and the others on the FDL team simultaneously provided a great public service and demonstrated what bloggers can add to news coverage.

Thanks to Robert Cox’s efforts, several of us from the Media Bloggers Association provided coverage and analysis of the trial. On balance, I think, we added something worthwhile: real-time commentary, different points of view, and some good old fashioned snark.

Rosen is right, though, that the FDL gang provided something unique. Wheeler and Smith, especially, provided in-depth expertise about the trial. Wheeler wrote a book about the case and Hardin is a former attorney and prosecutor, so she knows more about the legal end of this than almost any journalist or blogger. Further, there was probably no website or media organization more obsessed with the Valerie Plame affair than FDL, which meant they brought an encyclopedic knowledge of the trivia of the case to bear.

When the blogosphere broke open RatherGate, it was through a combination of two things that the mainstream press seldom has: obsession and expertise. There are people out there who simply care more about things like Dan Rather, Scooter Libby, Valerie Plame, or just about any other topic that you can think up than anyone working for any press venue. Similarly, there are people out there who know a whole lot more about the nuances of 1960s era typefaces, perjury law, FISA, or what have you than any working journalist could possibly be expected to know. The combination of these things give citizen journalists a powerful advantage.

Because bloggers don’t have to even pretend to be unbiased or interested in “all the news that’s fit to print,” I wouldn’t want to rely on any one blog for my news, or even my commentary. Collectively, though, blogs add an enormous amount of information and insight to the process.

Scooter Libby juror Denis Collins explains the thought process of the jury. It confirms and expands on some quotes highlighted yesterday at the Drudge Report.

Jurors in I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s perjury trial were certain of the former vice presidential aide’s guilt, but they also harbored sympathy for him as a “fall guy,” one of them said Tuesday after the verdict. Denis Collins, a Washington resident and self-described registered Democrat, said he and fellow jurors found that passing judgment on Libby was “unpleasant.” But in the final analysis, he said jurors found Libby’s story just too hard to believe.

“It was just very hard to believe how he could remember it on a Tuesday and forget it on a Thursday and then remember it two days later,” Collins told reporters outside U.S. District Court. “Having said that, I will say that there was a tremendous amount of sympathy for Mr. Libby on the jury.”

“It was said a number of times, ‘What are we doing with this guy here? Where’s [Karl] Rove … where are these other guys?’ “We’re not saying we didn’t think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of, but it seemed like … he was the fall guy.”

Collins said the jury believed Libby was “tasked by the vice president to go and talk to reporters.” “We never even discussed whether Cheney would have told him what exactly to say,” Collins said.

That Libby was “tasked by the vice president to go and talk to reporters” was not in dispute. Still, the fact that the jurors apparently wanted the scalps of Rove and “these other guys” is rather revealing, since the only crime being alleged was lying to the FBI and the grand jury about where Libby learned about Valerie Wilson’s role in sending Joe Wilson to Niger.

Collins said none of the jurors appeared to hold any animosity toward Libby, and some expressed a distaste for passing judgment on him at all. “I had conversations with a couple of jurors who said, ‘Wow this part is not fun,’ ” said Collins. “It’s just a question of not wanting to pass judgment on anyone. And I felt the same way.” But he said the jury’s sympathy didn’t interfere with the verdict, “it was just the unpleasantness of doing it.”

Libby was a rather sympathetic figure in the case, I think, because it was clear that he was usually a policy wonk who was tasked with damage control on the Wilson matter. Ironically, the charge he was defending his boss from was almost certainly untrue. By all indications, the Office of the Vice President did not in fact send Joe Wilson to Niger and had never seen his report until the Nick Kristoff column in the NYT.

Collins also opened up about the nuts and bolts of the decision-making process. He said at one point jurors were using 35 Post-It pages that measured 2½ feet by 2 feet to help them break down the testimony. “We took about a week just to get all the building blocks there,” Collins said. “There were some incredibly good managerial-type people who just took everything apart in to the smallest piece, put it in the right places, and it got to the point where opinion had very little to do with it,” said Collins. “You just came to this conclusion that, ‘wow here it is, right before us.’”

That’s a DC jury for you. About the only people who can’t legitimately claim that it would be a financial hardship for them to miss weeks and weeks of work are employees of the federal government, who continue to receive their paychecks during jury service.

Collins said among their key points of deliberation were: motivation to tell the truth, motivation to lie, believability and state of mind. “So we didn’t do a straw vote right away,” he said. “It was too big. It was too much. It was too important. We just didn’t do that. So that’s why it took so long.”

The primary testimony that convinced the jury on most of the counts, Collins said, was Libby’s alleged conversation with NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Tim Russert. “Some of us believed it never happened,” he said. “We were told he had a bad memory and we actually believed he did.” But that testimony was contradicted by testimony that he had an incredible grasp of details.

That’s fair enough, I think. I’d like to hear more, though, about their thoughts on the “motivation to tell the truth, motivation to lie” issues. Given that Libby was not the source of the leak to Novak that was the object of the investigation, and that no charges were ultimately brought on that matter, it has never been clear why Libby would be motivated to lie about his role.

Kevin Drum finds it interesting that Ari Fleischer today testified that Scooter Libby told him, four days before Bob Novak’s story was filed, about Valerie Plame’s role in sending her husband, Joe Wilson, to Niger.

Not “Valerie Wilson,” the name she used socially, but “Valerie Plame,” her maiden name and one that she used only on agency business. . . . Novak’s use of the name “Plame” has always been one of my pet obsessions in this story, and I continue to think it’s the key to something. Maybe eventually we’ll find out what. Maybe even today.

There are two problems with this.

First, we already know that Richard Armitage was Bob Novak’s source, not Scooter Libby. Not only does Armitage admit this and Novak confirm it, but prosecutor Patrick Fitgerald made a point of emphasizing it during opening arguments.

Second, none of the testimony thus far about the timeline provides any evidence that Libby knew “the wife” as anything other than “Valerie Wilson” or “Mrs. Wilson.” That’s the name in the file Marc Grossman got from INR and that Craig Schmall had written in the margin of his notes.

So, either Fleischer’s “I believe” is simply wrong–likely swayed by press accounts which have referred to her as “Plame” all these years–or there is some missing piece in the prosecution timeline.

In cross-examination by Ted Wells, Marc Grossman, the first prosecution witness, explained the reason that neither he nor his boss Richard Armitage had read a high critical article by Nicholas Kristoff that sparked the chain of events of the Valerie Plame affair this way: “I had about a billion things to do” and “couldn’t be troubled” to find out what happened in the past because he was so occupied by Iraq and other issues.

That’s precisely the defense’s argument with respect to Libby.

Grossman has been a very good witness, though, in that he comes across as earnest, scrupulously honest, and a hard working civil servant that was “embarrassed” that he couldn’t immediately tell the vice president’s chief of staff some information well below his span of control. Indeed, he is very self-effacing about failings that are obvious only in hindsight.

I think Wells is making a mistake in being confrontational in questioning Grossman, who is clearly being honest and whose testimony is on very minor facts that were easily called into question early in the cross-x with no resistance from Grossman. Indeed, Grossman shows no signs of animosity to Libby or trying to do anything but rely events as he remembers them.