Plamegate

posted by The Vidiot @ 12:37 PM Permalink

In the words of Monty Python: I'm not dead yet!

More information has come out with regards to the outing of the CIA agent. As mentioned in a previous post, the White House has deleted important related emails.

• Excerpt: Bush critics worry that the White House may have deleted Plame-related emails during a 12-hour head start in the CIA leak probe. The delay is worse than they think.

(Gee. Didn't see that coming.) And now, Libby has implicated Cheney!

• Excerpt: Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff told prosecutors that Mr. Cheney had informed him "in an off sort of curiosity sort of fashion" in mid-June 2003 about the identity of the CIA officer at the heart of the leak case, according to a formerly secret legal opinion, parts of which were made public on Friday.

And it's also possible that Libby hinted at Ari to leak the information.

• Excerpt: The passage resolves any notion that Libby explicitly told Ari to leak this information (Swopa, I hope you're reading this too). But the "weirdness" about it suggests that Libby may have hoped that Ari would leak it, or at least given some hints, which may be all that John Dickerson got. Note, too, that Libby didn't just tell Ari that Plame was CIA (as the indictment states), but that she was in Counterproliferation, which would have made it clear that Plame was covert. And the whole conversation attests to the fact that Libby was blabbing about classified information, something he didn't usually do. Ari will say, that is, that Libby's sharing of this information was not typical behavior.