Another Direction on Plamegate

A lot is being made in the blogosphere about Karl Rove being involved in leaking the information that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. Rove has never denied, and in classic lawyerly fashion, Rove’s attorney is choosing his words carefully. Rather than saying Rove "didn’t" provide any information, he is saying that Karl never "knowingly divulged confidential information." From whence does his deniability derive?

Now we have a reporter going to jail over this issue, but strangely enough, despite the claims that she’s making a statement about protecting freedom of the press, she never actually wrote a story about Valerie Plame. On top of that, she asked for an assignment to the United Nations beat, and has written a series of stories recently highly critical of the UN.

Now, let’s pick up what might be a totally unrelated strand. Everyone is aware that John Bolton, UN Ambassador nominee, was nosing around with NSA intercepts and classified information. The whole reason is confirmation is stalled is that the White House refuses to disclose the intercepts that Bolton requested. Despite their unwavering support for Bolton, the President suddenly has gone dark on the nomination, and doesn’t appear to be ready to do a recess appointment.

So, try this on for size. What if Bolton had the information about Val?ry Plame? He wants to ingratiate himself to the Administration, so he slips Karl a little tidbit of information that could be used against a person who is critical of the White House’s position on Iraq. Karl now has plausible deniability about having "knowingly divulged secret information." He could say that it didn’t appear to be a secret since other people knew. It could even be more circuitous than that. Maybe Bolton slipped it to Judith Miller, who then passed it along to Karl, who is known to be a close associate of Bob Novak. Remember, Bob Novak is the one who first revealed the information, but he’s never been a target of the Grand Jury investigation.

Maybe just an interesting set of circumstances, or, all the strands could lead to the same ball of yarn. It’ll be interesting to see, especially of the main stream media gets off their collective butts and does some investigative reporting.