[Lady Heron]

I follow your reasoning, but something said by the NYT pissed the President off, and left the impression that something unknown had been let out of the bag, serious enough to go after.

Both the Plame case and this one involve covert agencies being used as political tools against a sitting president in a time of war by people inside the agencies or the senate(thus helping our enemies along with a political party). So to me there is treason going on that needs to be rooted out, this is the real story.

[Alberta's Child]

The recent and prior White House reaction to the NYT story on the NSA surveillance is a strong indicator here. From what I understand, the NYT had the information for more than a year, and the White House asked them to refrain from running a story about it on the grounds of "national security concerns."

This bears all the characteristics of a government agency that knows it has no arrows in its quiver. If revealing the existence of the NSA surveillance was actually a crime, the White House would never have made that request. Instead, they would have pointed out that the NYT would be violating Title So-and-So, Section So-and-So of the U.S. criminal code -- and threatened to run the newspaper out of business and charge every employee with crimes that could land them in prison for decades.