The Plame Case of the Missing Crime The Plame Case of the Missing Crime

In an article in the Weekly Standard titled: The Case of the Missing Crime, Clarice Feldman does her usual thorough job of discrediting Joe and Valerie Wilson and Patrick Fitzgerald. True to her training as a lawyer and experience as a federal prosecutor, she lays out a thorough time line of who said what, when, and to whom, and then asks why? Why the persuit of Libby, and not Armitage or Joe Wilson?

While U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton has said he will not allow the Libby trial to become a trial about the war in Iraq, the prosecution most certainly appears to have been deeply influenced by the debate over the decision to go to war. Those who accused the administration of lying and deception were assumed from the outset to be "good leakers" and "whistle-blowers" deserving protection. Those, like Libby, who shared the president's views were targets to be pursued for having attempted to answer the serial lies of a prominent critic. That the original leak came from a repentant Armitage, who apparently testified that he was unaware Plame had ever been under cover, should have been a clue for the prosecution. The theory of the case in which a "thuggish" White House set out to punish Joe Wilson simply wasn't true. Instead, as noted by the astute observer Tom Maguire (who reported on the case in great detail at his website justoneminute.typepad.com), Fitzgerald seemed "to be investigating 'Did the White House conspire to out Ms. Plame?' rather than 'Who outed Ms. Plame?'"

I should note that Clarice is the resident Plame expert at Justoneminute.com. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable job of laying out a large number of the relevant facts and tying them together with a timeline as could probably be done in the 6,000 word limit she had for her article. Necessarily dense in detail, but remarkably thorough.