In his masterful style, Christopher Hitchens in Slate Magazine [“Plame Out: The ridiculous end to the scandal that distracted Washington”] bids goodbye to the farcical Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson fandango, concluding that pretty nearly everyone – but most especially the lemming media – got it wrong. It was not the pro-Iraq war Bushies – Rove, Cheney et al -- that outed the CIA intelligence analyst. The outing came from the camp of the dubious -- Colin Powell and Richard Armitage.
Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."
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-ACR
And there are those who say that maybe it was not the pro-Iraq war Bushies – Rove, Cheney et al -- that directly outed the CIA intelligence analyst, but they were on the sidelines cheering what was going on.
Well, sure: There’s rarely an end to litigation. But here is what we know: 1) Plame was not a CIA agent when she was outed. She was an analyst, not the same thing; 2) the claim that Cheney or Rove or Novak did the outing was false. Novack apparently got her name from a Who’s Who report; 3) Armatige was the first administration official who gave her name to a reporter – Woodward, not Novak. It seems to me that these disclosures shred Fitzgerald’s case – which was grossly misprosecuted, since Fitzgerald knew 3) when he zeroed in on Libby.