On July 14, 2003, syndicated columnist Robert Novak published "Mission to Niger," which reported, among other things, that former Ambassador Joseph "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." The information was sourced to "senior administration officials." That left a lot of questions open. Had members of the Bush administration blown the cover of a CIA agent? Wasn't that illegal? Based on the information available at the time, it was impossible to say, but it certainly looked suspicious.
Liberal bloggers, some reporters, and a few congressional Democrats pressed for more information. Eventually the CIA agreed and made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, suggesting that based upon what was known about the situation, serious crimes may well have been committed. Pressure was put on the administration to appoint a special counsel to look into the matter. Not an independent counsel, of the sort that haunted the Clinton administration with endless, rambling investigations that veered off-topic and swiftly became transparent witch-hunts; a special prosecutor. Someone with a mandate to explore the case fully without undue interference from the White House.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, making the right call, recused himself from the decision on the grounds that he was too close to possible targets of the investigation. The decision thus fell to Ashcroft's deputy, Patrick Comey, a rare career professional in the hack-laden Bush administration. Comey determined that a special prosecutor was indeed warranted and named his friend and colleague Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney for Chicago and another of the few Bush appointees who is also a well-regarded apolitical figure.
Fitzgerald's team leaked little, if anything, over the next two years. But the country learned a thing or two about the relevant law. If crimes were committed, they were likely violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) or the Espionage Act, or conspiracy to violate those two statutes.
This past Friday, Fitzgerald stood before the cameras and announced one set of indictments against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for allegedly lying to investigators. Nobody was indicted under the IIPA or the Espionage Act.
Immediately the right sprung into action. "Obstruction for What?" was the headline of a special Saturday Web editorial from The Wall Street Journal's impeccably right-wing opinion section. "Libby is charged with lying about a crime that wasn't committed."
This would be silly were it not so dangerous.
From the beginning, the administration's critics couldn't know for sure which laws, if any, were violated in the course of generating Novak's column. That's because the statutes, as written, require prosecutors to prove not only that certain actions took place (to wit: the exposure of Plame's status as a CIA employee to persons not authorized to receive that information) but also things about the perpetrators' knowledge and state of mind at the time. These are difficult things to prove. They're especially difficult to prove if the relevant people feel free to mislead investigators.
Libby seems to have felt just this. He told investigators that Tim Russert told him that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Russert says he didn't. Libby said that he told Judith Miller and Matt Cooper that other reporters had told him that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Miller and Cooper agree that this isn't what he said. Libby told investigators that he was surprised to learn of Wilson's wife's CIA affiliation when Russert told him about it. According to the indictment, however, Libby had been informed of her affiliation previously by four different people: an undersecretary of state (thought to be Marc Grossman), a "senior CIA officer," Cheney, and a CIA briefer. Libby, in other words, lied.
Allegedly.
I've been told by editors that these circumstances are why God invented the word "allegedly." So, sure, maybe Libby's telling the truth here. Maybe Russert, Cooper, Miller, Grossman, Cheney, and two unknown CIA officers are engaged in a massive conspiracy to nail Libby to the wall for a crime he didn't commit. And if you believe that, I've got some crudely forged documents that I'd like to sell you alleging that Saddam Hussein bought uranium from Niger.
The point is this: To know whether Libby's conversations with Cooper and Miller violated the IIPA and/or the Espionage Act, we need to know exactly what Libby knew about Plame's status at the time. The easiest way to figure this out would be for Libby to tell the truth. But he's not in the habit of doing that. Testimony from Cooper and Miller doesn't tell us one way or the other. That Libby allegedly told his "then principal deputy" that there would be "complications at the CIA" if they disclosed the information suggests that he did, in fact, know the whole truth. Suggests but hardly proves. To get proof, we'll need honest testimony, which we may never get. And if we lay down the rule that dishonest testimony is OK as long as no other crimes can be proven, the message we'll send is that it's fine to violate the law so long as you lie enough about it afterward to make it impossible to prove a case. That should be obvious enough.
Right-wingers say that whatever you may think about the leak case, the arguments for invading Iraq are solid. I disagree; the issues seem to me to be intimately connected. But if they believe what they say, they should have no problem admitting the obvious: If Libby lied, it's at least a semi-big deal -- and he needs to go to jail.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
