Monday, August 28, 2006

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage Outed Valerie Plame

See Newsweek Magazine article The Man Who Said Too Much by Michael Isikoff.

It wasn’t Karl Rove, nor Scooter Libby. Robert Novak’s source that Valerie Palme was the wife of Joseph Wilson IV and worked at the CIA was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s right hand man Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. He and Special Prosecutor have known this information since the very beginning of the investigation, thus Robert Novak was never pursued by the Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

As a reminder during a twenty-two year career in the Foreign Service, Joseph Wilson IV achieved the level of the being Ambassador to Gabon. See Wikipedia:
Joseph Charles Wilson IV (born November 6, 1949) was a United States foreign service diplomat between 1976 and 1998. He has achieved his recent notoriety from an op-ed essay[1] published on July 6, 2003, in The New York Times in which he revealed his February 2002 trip investigating whether Iraq purchased or attempted to purchase yellowcake from Niger in the late 1990s. In this op-ed piece, published four months after the war began, he accused the Bush Administration of "exaggerating the Iraqi threat" in order to justify war.
Shortly thereafter, columnist Robert Novak, while writing on the choice of Wilson for the Niger mission, disclosed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. In his July 14, 2003, column[2], Novak wrote "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report."

From the Newsweek article:
■ “Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that Wilson's wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA.”
■ “Novak wasn't the only person Armitage talked to about Plame. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has also said he was told of Plame's identity in June 2003… Armitage told Woodward about Plame three weeks before talking to Novak.”
■ “Armitage has consistently refused to discuss the case.”
■ “Armitage himself was aggressively investigated by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, but was never charged. Fitzgerald found no evidence that Armitage knew of Plame's covert CIA status when he talked to Novak and Woodward.”

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