Les Jones

News > Corn, Isikoff: Richard Armitage was Plame Leaker

James Taranto summarizes some of the Plame-related findings of "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and The Nation's David Corn and Isikoff's current Newsweek article on Armitage's role in Plamegate.

• The man who "leaked" Plame's identity and her involvement in her husband's Niger junket to columnist Bob Novak and other reporters was not Karl Rove, Scooter Libby or anyone else in the White House. It was Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state.
• Armitage's motives were not malicious. He is "a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters" and "apparently hadn't thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's identity."
• It was from a classified memo that Armitage learned Plame worked for the CIA. But there was no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald "found no evidence that Armitage knew of Plame's covert CIA status." (By all available evidence, Plame's covert status had expired by the time of her "outing" anyway.)
• In October 2003 Armitage confessed to his boss, Colin Powell, that he was the "leaker." The State Department decided to withhold this information from the White House, because "Powell and his aides feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak's source--possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been unenthusiastic about Bush's Iraq policy."
• Some of that is undoubtedly Taranto's spin (tell me all about it in comments), but it's looking more and more definite that Armitage was Novak's source. If so, that raises a couple of questions, like "what was Fitzgerald (who knew about Armitage) hoping to accomplish with his investigation other than promoting his career" and "why didn't Armitage go public early on and save the Bush administration years of headaches?"