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What the CIA Leak Case Is About

Posted on Saturday 17 February 2007


At the end of each witness’s testimony in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, after prosecutors and defense attorneys examined and cross-examined, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton asked jurors to write down any questions they had. Walton would then look through the papers, decide which questions were appropriate and pose them to the witness.

Now, as the case heads to the jury, those queries are our best hints about what jurors are thinking.

But last week there was a moment when we got a hint not from a question that Walton asked, but from one he refused to ask. After the testimony of star prosecution witness Tim Russert, Walton scanned the jurors’ queries and announced, "There is going to be one question I’m not going to ask. I’ve concluded that that question is not appropriate and therefore you should not speculate as to what the response would have been."

What was he talking about? A moment later, Walton told the jurors: "What Mrs. Wilson’s status was at the CIA, whether it was covert or not covert, is not something that you’re going to hear any evidence presented to you on in this trial."

"Whether she was, or whether she was not, covert is not relevant to the issues you have to decide in this case," he said.

It is The Thing That Cannot Be Spoken at the Libby trial.

From the first day, Walton has said that jurors will not be allowed to know, or even ask, about the status — covert, classified or otherwise — of Valerie Plame Wilson, the woman at the heart of the CIA leak case. "You must not consider these matters in your deliberations or speculate or guess about them," he told jurors in his opening instructions.

It is something of an irony that the C.I.A. Leak Case isn’t about the C.I.A. Leak. York goes on to point out that Walton’s intent is to keep the jurors on task, since this trial is about whether Libby lied or not to the Grand Jury, not about the C.I.A. Agent Valerie Plame, and whether or not she is an undercover Agent or whether Libby knew that. Here’s the law with the loopholes highlighted in blue:

Protection of identities of certain United States undercover intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources

(a) Disclosure of information by persons having or having had access to classified information that identifies covert agent
Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

(b) Disclosure of information by persons who learn identity of covert agents as result of having access to classified information
Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information, learns the identify of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

(c) Disclosure of information by persons in course of pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents
Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States, discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual’s classified intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(d) Imposition of consecutive sentences
A term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be consecutive to any other sentence of imprisonment.

I live in a log cabin in the North Georgia Mountains and I know that Valerie Plame was an Undercover C.I.A. Agent.

I’m not bickering with York, or Walton. We all know that Cheney, Libby, Rove, Armitage, etc. are claiming [successfully] that since they didn’t know that she was an undercover C.I.A. Agent, the law doesn’t apply to them. But they are also claiming at various points along the way that:
  • they had nothing to do with the leak.
  • that they only confirmed the leak.
  • that there was no malice in their leaking.
  • that …
It’s all a chess game built around our permissive legal system [a legal system this Administration is trying to undermine on other fronts]. But I think that there’s a point that doesn’t get talked about very much that is at the center of this case – the real crime. The reason that they didn’t know that Valerie Plame was an undercover C.I.A. Agent was that they didn’t care. All they cared about was doing what they wanted to do. They didn’t care enough to even think about the C.I.A. and National Security. The went around the C.I.A. to justify their War with Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans. They over-rode the C.I.A. by including the "sixteen words" in the State of the Union speech. They over-rode the C.I.A. by including the kitchen sink in Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. They ignored Joseph Wilson’s report on his trip to Niger. They revealed his wife’s identity to discredit him when he wrote his [truthful] oped piece. They weren’t thinking about our country, or our Intelligence Agency, or our Laws. They were just doing what they wanted to do.

What the C.I.A. Leak Case Is About is that our Administration doesn’t care about America…

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