As soon as the news broke that the White House had inadvertently released the name of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan, you could almost hear Fox News staffers rubbing their hands in glee in anticipation of the partisan hay they could make. The only problem? All that time they spent minimizing the seriousness of the Valerie Plame leak. But never fear, Fox dug the Plame leak out of its Bush-Scandal Memory Hole and found a way to make it a GOP twofer.
Media Matters has a comprehensive roundup of Fox Newsies both trying to make the White House leak look worse than it was and the Plame leak less significant. For example, Steve Doocy said yesterday on Fox & Friends (first video below, via Media Matters):
Keep in mind that - big difference. Valerie Plame had a desk job, in suburban Washington, D.C., at the CIA. This guy is actually over there. So for them to put out a list - and I’ve got the memo on my iPhone right now. There’s his name plain as day with "Chief of Staff" right after it. Doesn’t anybody at the White House know what they’re doing right now? It looks like either they’re not paying attention to details or they simply don’t care. ...Where are the grownups?
In the same segment, Elisabeth Hasselbeck "just asked," "Do they not care about the safety of intelligence officers here?"
As Marc Ambinder noted in The Week, there’s a world of difference between the White House incident and Valerie Plame and it's not how Doocy described it:
The ramifications of the Plame leak seem to have been fairly grave for a number of vital ongoing intelligence operations.
The ramifications here, at least from the outset, are not as bad. Station chiefs of major CIA stations are generally known, at least by name, often by sight, to rival intelligence agencies almost from the get-go. Certainly, the station chief, in working with a number of different agencies in Afghanistan, would have to accept that his degree of freedom to control his cover is probably tiny at this point. When the CIA appoints chiefs of stations, the agency generally understands and accepts the risk that the identity, and perhaps the person’s cover history, might be exposed.
In other words, Doocy got it backwards. It was Plame who was undercover and the CIA station chief mostly was not.
Another crucial distinction Ambinder notes is that Plame’s cover was intentionally blown. The Afghan station chief’s was not. That makes the latter a blunder and the former a crime.
Last night, Ed Henry deflected – but failed to correct Hannity after he announced Plame “was not even a covert operative at that point.”
Instead, Henry moved straight to an anti-Obama talking point. He replied, “Look, this blows up the White House’s plans.” Henry went on to lay out how the Obama administration had hoped to use the trip to Afghanistan and a speech on foreign policy “to move forward on these big issues.” Now, Henry said, they’re “being dogged by breaking news tonight, which is the White House counsel, we’re told, is now investigating exactly how this CIA official was outed, what went wrong, what they can do to prevent it in the future.”
For extra Fox credit, Henry added, “They insist, you know, that there was no mal intent here but the bottom line is – you mentioned Valerie Plame. That was obviously a major investigation that went on for years. And it’s interesting that Valerie Plame, no fan of the Bush administration, went after the Obama administration today, sending out a tweet saying it was astonishing that this happened. So for Valerie Plame to say that shows you the pressure on this White House.”
Watch Ed Henry spin below, via Media Matters:
Right off the bat, we should take a look at the full interview done with Valerie Plame on this subject. Ed Henry is being knowingly deceptive when he says she “went after the Obama Administration” and was putting pressure on them. Plame noted that what happened was, frankly, a stupid mistake, but was specific when she pointed out that this was not something done to target anyone. Her feeling is that right wingers are trying to draw, in her words, “a false equivalency” to what Cheney and Rove did to her and her husband.
What happened with the press release this weekend was an error, and has been acknowledged as such. We should keep in mind that this was not a covert agent but rather a person known to foreign intelligence in the area as a CIA official. I’m not sure if he was known as the station chief, but he certainly was known as CIA.
What happened with Valerie Plame, as she herself has reminded everyone today, was a deliberate act of retaliation, planned and executed by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney as punishment against Joe Wilson for having publicly criticized the Bush misstatements about some of the reasons given to attack Iraq. The intent was to have several administration people leak Plame’s cover as a NOC agent in their discussions with the media, thus exposing her and reminding Wilson what life could be like without any protection. According to multiple parties, the first person to actually talk to anyone in the media, Richard Armitage, didn’t actually know Plame was a NOC. But the others, including Rove and Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, DID.
When the matter was investigated, Armitage immediately cooperated and publicly apologized once he realized what he’d done. Scooter Libby, on the other hand, blatantly lied and obfuscated in order to protect Cheney and Rove from exposure. When Patrick Fitzgerald realized Libby had stymied the whole investigation, he brought charges against Libby. The whole matter derailed into a prosecution of Libby for lying, and Libby wound up being convicted. But he’d served his purpose – he’d drawn the fire of the investigation onto himself and away from the bigger fish, and he’d shielded those fish from properly being fileted. Libby was sentenced to a jail term and a 250K fine. Before he served a day, Bush commuted his sentence. Libby seemed to disappear from public life after that point, although it was noted that his voting rights were restored a few years ago, in spite of his status as a convicted felon. Given how quiet things have been about Libby since then, I’d frankly venture a guess that he’s been a silent member of various right wing think tanks – functioning as a well-paid “consultant” – meaning that he doesn’t work as a practicing lawyer since he’s been disbarred, but he can effectively serve in the same capacity. He took a big hit for the guys above him and kept his mouth shut – it would make sense that they took care of him afterward. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that fine was effectively covered by friends in high places in the private sector…
For those keeping tally: GOP 2; Obama Admin 1.