(4) The term "covert agent" means-- (A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency-- (i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information,
Yes, she fullfills (A)(i).
and(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States;
She was not serving outside the US, and had not within the last 5 years been serving outside the US. (A)(ii)not fulfilled.
or (B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and-- (i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency,
Nope that's not her. (B) is satisfied but (B)(i) is not.
or (ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation;
Nope she never worked for the FBI (that we know of)
or (C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.
Well she is a US citizen, so that disqualifies her from paragraph (C).
Am I making any mistakes here? Remember the ands and ors are very important.
I think your analysis is generally correct, except that the answer to a(ii) is "we don't know."
Could the CIA have sent Plame on overseas trips within the past 5 years using her cover as an "energy analyst" for "Brewster Jennings"?
Who knows?
Would it be incompetent to send on an overseas covert assignment an officer who has already been "outed" and who openly drives herself to work at CIA HQ everyday?
Yes, to me that would be incompetent.
But who here thinks, in the case of an agency dysfunctional enough to keep around an idiot like Larry Johnson as an intelligence analyst, that the CIA is not so incompetent as to do that very thing?
There are probably grounds to challenge the "affirmative steps" part. Were I representing Rove or Libby, I would take the position that "affirmative steps" has to mean steps by the CIA that, when taken together, are reasonable to assure that the agent in fact is covert. When an agent is already "outed" by Aldrich Ames and drives herself to CIA HQ everday, the mere fact that the she pretends to be an "energy analyst" for a front company is not a sufficient "affirmative step" to reasonably accomplish the purpose of making her a "covert agent."
Your comprehension of this is the same as mine. The "ands" and "ors" ARE very important. The law was not broken. This guy can try and spin it any way he likes but it seems to me that anyone with basic reading comprehension skills ought to be able to see this...
You covered most of it.
Valerie Plame was known publicly, to friends and neighbors and much of the diplomatic community in Washington D.C. as both Valerie Plame and Mrs. Valerie Wilson, married to Ambassador Joe Wilson and working as an analyst at the CIA.
On June 14, 2003 Joe Wilson spoke at a forum sponsored by the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC). The website for EPIC includes a biography of Wilson under the June 14, 2003, event that concludes with this sentence: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has four children."
One of the keys in all the criminal aspects of the law is the "outer" has to have gotten the name of the "covert" agent by way of access to classified information; classified information that identified the "covert" agent's status as "classified".
It is unlikely in any of the scenarios identified so far that anyone went to a classfied document-source and looked up and found the "classified identity" of Valerie Plame.
Of course, let's not forget that in order to do her enbeded WMD reporting in Iraq, Judith Miller was cleared for and obtained a top-secret security clearance. Now, at the time that was to prevent her from revealing any classified information she witnessed the acquisition of during her WMD reporting stint in Iraq. I wonder what else it gave her access to when she got back? But, maybe it does not matter because now she says she really does not remember from who or from where she got Valerie's name. Maybe her 85 days in jail gave her amnesia.
I have read analyses like yours before, and they seem convincing. However, if you are right, then what is Patrick Fitzgerald investigating? Fitzgerald must have been informed as to Plame's status with the CIA. It is legal (or at least it is not unusual in D.C.) to discuss the identity of non-covert CIA employees.
I don't get it.