Here’s a profile of a great American from the Washington Post: The spy next door.

The latest spin from the White House on Plame’s outing seems to be that the initial leak to Novak was the work of some obscure flunky they’ll never be able to find. But the phonecalls by two top administration officials to at least six different journalists mentioned by the Washington Post was perfectly legal, since at that point her cover had already been compromised by the leak to Novak, even though the Post says those calls were made before Novak’s column was published.

To me, this is far worse than the legalistic parsing that gave us Clinton arguing, “I can receive a blow job without my ‘touching’ the person giving it to me.” In this case, we’ve got the assertion that once someone has committed the felonious, and arguably treasonous, act of compromising the cover of a CIA operative working on WMD proliferation, there’s nothing wrong with the White House phoning up reporters in an effort to get the story wider play. Under the provisions of the statute, only the initial revelation is a crime. Trying to push the story after that is perfectly legal.

Maybe it is. But it still sucks. And the people who did it should be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of Washington on a rail. There was a time in this country’s history when anyone who fancied himself a patriot would have happily volunteered to do just that.

This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, October 8th, 2003 at 5:32 pm and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.