Deputy AG: Valerie Plame Leak Not Illegal

The White House press corps lapsed into a full-blown feeding frenzy on Monday over the news that Karl Rove is identified in emails from Time Magazine reporter Matthew Cooper as someone who mentioned that Joseph Wilson's wife worked at the CIA - just days before her name was revealed by columnist Robert Novak.

But the former deputy attorney general who helped draft Intelligence Identities Protection Act - which Bush critics insist was violated when Valerie Plame was identified to Novak - said earlier this year that it's unlikely any laws were broken in the case.

Writing in January in the Washington Post, former Assistant Deputy Attorney General Victoria Toensing explained that she helped draft the 1982 law in question.
Said Toensing: "The Novak column and the surrounding facts do not support evidence of criminal conduct."

For Plame's outing to have been illegal, the one-time deputy AG explained, "her status as undercover must be classified." Also, Plame "must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years."

Since in neither case does Plame meet those criteria, Toensing argued: "There is a serious legal question as to whether she qualifies as 'covert.'"

The law also requires that the celebrated non-spy's outing take place by someone who knew the government had taken "affirmative measures to conceal [the agent's] relationship" to the U.S.

Toensing said that's unlikely.

In fact, the myth that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was violated in the Plame case began to unravel in October 2003, when New York Times scribe Nicholas Kristof revealed that she abandoned her covert role a full nine years before the Novak column.

"The C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given [Plame's] name [along with those of other spies] to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994," reported Kristof. "So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons."

The Times columnist also noted that Plame had begun making the transition to CIA "management" even before she was outted by Novak, explaining that "she was moving away from 'noc' � which means non-official cover ... to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having 'C.I.A.' stamped on her forehead."

Kristof concluded: "All in all, I think the Democrats are engaging in hyperbole when they describe the White House as having put [Plame's] life in danger and destroyed her career; her days skulking along the back alleys of cities like Beirut and Algiers were already mostly over."