Posted on 07/04/2005 3:54:05 PM PDT by Pikamax
Lawrence O'Donnell: No Crime in Plame Case
MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell, who broke the news Friday that notes taken by Time magazine's Matthew Cooper indictate that top Bush adviser Karl Rove leaked the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak, said Sunday it's likely that Rove broke no laws.
Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, acknowledged on Saturday that his client had indeed spoken to Cooper before the Novak column hit in July 2003. But Luskin insisted that Rove never revealed Plame's identity.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
The Agee Law is the only applicable law, and it is inapplicable. Period.
That seems contradictory.
Yes..Let me say it better--this Act is ostensibly what the prosecutor is working on--there is no other to cover "outing of agent". But it is narrowly written and doesn't apparently apply to any of the facts in this case.
[quote]Intelligence Identities Protection Act that was supposedly violated in this case wasn't. The act establishes an extremely high standard for a criminal violation — the agent in question has to be undercover (Plame wasn't), and the leaker has to know she was undercover and be intentionally trying to undermine U.S. intelligence (very, very unlikely).[/quote] http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2005/02/something_not_t.html
Victoria Toensig drafted this law. It was to deal with an exagent, Agee, who deliberately outed undercover CIA agents, placing them in danger. I know she has written an article explaining this and I urge you to Google it.
If that is where you got your info, then I think you're mistaken.
Plame was undercover at one point irrespective what this article in the National Review says. If she had not been, then do you think they would have convened a grand jury?
The question of whether it was intentional is a meritworthy point, but it depends on the assumption that whoever blabbed did not know that Plame was an operative. So why did he tell Novak that she was an operative, if he did not know?
Of course, Novak now says that the source did not use the term "operative", but Novak simply added that himself. If true, then the source is off the hook legally, and Novak is an idiot, and a very unlucky one at that since he apparently accidentally fingered Plame as an operative, and she by pure chance turned out to be one. But even if that's the case, it still was a huge misjudgment on the part of the source to even talk to Novak.
You can't sugar-coat this. There is a grand jury involved. At a minimum, whoever leaked the story created a huge embarrassment for the administration, and might have cost Bush the election. Fortunately, that did not happen, though.
Novak said that he talked to George Tenet to confirm the story, and Tenet said something like that he could not confirm that she was an "operative." OMG, what did Novak think he was going to say, "Yeah, she's an operative?" Since that's a violation of the law, he obviously would not say that, yet the fool Novak apparently concluded that Tenet's remarks were a confirmation.
I personally think that Tenet was the source, not Rove. Tenet should have said "Even if she were an operative, I couldn't tell you since it would be a felony. And you better not publish that article."
That's probably one of the big reasons that Tenet is no longer at the CIA.
I don't waste my time banging my head against brick walls. I have cited the relevant law under which the case was instigated. It seems to have no application to this case. If you think otherwise, you are welcome to that opinion no matter how ill-considered.
Where did you cite the law? All I saw was a post on a blog. That ain't the law.
GCMA, gotta cover my ass.
I gave you the name of the Act..It is a 2 minute search to get the text,but as that seems beyond your capacity--here it is.http://foi.missouri.edu/bushinfopolicies/protection.html
Thanks... Well according to that link, if some source leaked the info, then what it comes down to is whether he did it "knowingly."
I don't know how you can say with certainty that he did not. That's for the jury to decide.
And if you believe what O'Donnell says, then the source is guilty. So why does O'Donnell say that Rove leaked the info, but he's not violated any laws?
O'Donnell is contradicting himself, which is exactly what my point was all along.
What do you think about the stories that say that Wilson has been bragging about his wife's job for years?
Isn't that an equally likely source of the "leak"?
Hey Big Lar .. the bottom line comes down to Cooper could have gone to jail for not revealing his source
And Cooper WOULD NOT do that to cover for Karl Rove, you nit wit
Wilson is a serial liar. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee discredited everything he said in his attack on the Administration--an attack orchestrated carefully by Wilson, CBS and Kerry. Whoever said anything was trying to explain where he was coming from, not trying to "out" an undercover agent. Something it is unlikely anyone who said this to Novak knew. Indeed, Novak indicates someone in the CIA was the sourcof specific info about her position.
The whole thing is a crock, and , as to the media. It demanded a full investigation. It demanded a special prosecutor to fully investigate. It demanded Ashcroft recuse himself, preventing him from reining in an apparently off the wall prosecutor. And it insisted the Agee law was violated.
Now that it's reporters on the line, it has changed its tunr and is now arguing that Agee probably wasn't violated.
Tough. They asked for it for partisan reasons and they are paying for playing patty cake with Kerry and his dunce Wilson.
Kerry removed Wilson's page from his website after the Senate Intel report. His last public appearance was as the "star" witness at the Conyer's playhouse "hearings" in the basement on the Downing Memo.
Wilson and his wife are idiot, narcissistic layabouts of little brains , typical of the holdovers at DoS andthe CIA who have tried to sabotage the President at every step.
This is same wackjob leftist that called for blue state secession after they lost in 2004 and attacked the Swift Vets hysterially on TV. This whole thing does not make sense. If the left blames the Bush administration for going after Miller and the other reporter to out their sources, than why would they do that if it was Karl Rove.
Plame was covert? Then why was she advertised on her husbands website as working for the CIA?
It's one thing to say someone works for the CIA. It's another thing to say they are a CIA "operative."
Yeah, Larry, they decided to "reveal" this for the umpteenth time.
Here's a liberal column from over a year ago:
Even JOE WILSON admitted it wasn't Rove - in 2003 -- http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/09/29/novak.cia/
| Spy at Center of Leak Case Still in Shadow | ||
-- Is posing for a two-page spread in Vanity Faire discreet?  |
||
Correct.
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