She Should Know

Victoria Toensing, has written an excellent article about the Plame investigation, that I strongly recommend to all sides of this issue. Here are the first couple of paragraphs in the Human Events piece:

There now appears to be consensus that no one violated the 1982 Agent Identities Protection Act in publishing the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame.
It’s a hard law to violate. Its high threshold requires that the person whose identity is revealed must actually be covert (which requires at the least a foreign assignment within five years of the revelation), that the government must be taking “affirmative measures” to conceal the person’s identity, and that the revealer must know that the government is taking those measures.

So why didn’t Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel investigating the “leak,” close up shop long ago?

One possible answer is that someone lied about a material fact when testifying before the grand jury or obstructed justice in some other way. If that is the case, the prosecutor should indict.

However, recent reporting, attributable to “lawyers familiar with the investigation,” points to a different prosecutorial tactic: Fitzgerald may be taking a “creative” approach to finding a legal violation. In other words, he may be trying to find a law other than the Agent Identities Protection Act that he might be able to apply to the factual scenario in this case even though it was never intended to cover such conduct.

So, why should we listen to anything Victoria Toensing has to say about this issue? Well, she was one of the authors of the the actual 1982 Agent Identities Protection Act. In other words, if anyone should know the applicability of this law to the Plame case and if it was violated, don't you think she would?

Read the entire article. It is very eye-opening.

UPDATE: Speaking of eye-opening, Glenn Reynolds quotes Mickey Kaus on why the Left hates Judy Miller so much. This is all part of the "selective memory" problem on the left side of the blogsphere.