What could cause me to switch parties

I don’t normally blog on Sunday morning out of a combination of wanting to spend time with my family and general laziness. This Washington Post story, however, which folows up on an NBC story, has rousted me out of my torpor:

At CIA Director George J. Tenet’s request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday. The operative’s identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush’s claim that Iraq had tried to buy “yellowcake” uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim. The intentional disclosure of a covert operative’s identity is a violation of federal law. The officer’s name was disclosed on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who said his sources were two senior administration officials. Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson’s account touched off a political fracas over Bush’s use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq. “Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak. (emphasis added)

For more, see Kevin Drum, Mark Kleiman, Brad DeLong, Josh Marshall, Atrios, and Tom Maguire (who also provides a comprehensive chronology of what happened back in July — check out this Slate piece as well). Also be sure to read Marshall’s two–part interview with Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Kleiman reads the Post story the same way I do:

[T]he source for this story (a “senior Administration official” but not a “top White House official,” which probably means either from the CIA or from the Justice Department, more likely the former) refused to identify the two leakers “for the record,” which clearly implies that he did identify them off the record. Since the story mentions Joseph Wilson’s use of Karl Rove’s name, it would be natural for the reporter to have hinted that Rove was not in fact one of the guilty parties, had that been the case. But there is no such hint. Of all the people in the White House, Rove is probably the one Bush can least afford to lose, and the one who gives Bush the least deniability.

Tom Maguire thinks that

[T]hey [The White House] need to get a senior Admin official in front of a friendly Congressional Chairman, admit that it was an innocent mistake, take the pain, and exit.

That won’t fly, for the simple reason that high-ranking members of the Bush administration apparently know that it wasn’t an “innocent mistake.” By telling the Post, it’s clear that some cabinet officials are not going to let this die quickly. To which I say, good. What was done here was thuggish, malevolent, illegal, and immoral. Whoever peddled this story to Novak and others, in outing Plame, violated the law and put the lives of Plame’s overseas contacts at risk. Compared to this, all of Clinton’s peccadilloes look like an mildly diverting scene from an Oscar Wilde production. If Rove or other high-ranking White House officials did what’s alleged, then they’ve earned the wrath of God. Or, since God is probably busy, the media firestorm that will undoubtedly erupt. Let me make this as plain as possible — I was an unpaid advisor for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, and I know and respect some high-ranking people in the administration. And none of that changes the following: if George W. Bush knew about or condoned this kind of White House activity, I wouldn’t just vote against him in 2004 — I’d want to see him impeached. Straight away. UPDATE: More reaction from James Joyner, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Chafetz, N.Z. Bear, and Roger Simon. They all counsel patience, which is of course wise. My rant is predicated on the assumption that someone at Rove’s level in the White House was responsible for the leak. Having had a few more hours to mull this over, however, I’m even more upset than I was when I wrote my original post. The best-case scenario is that the Post’s source is Tenet playing hardball in response to the original leak to Novak. Josh Marshall makes the logical case that Tenet was the source. Even if that is true, however, as this TNR profile on Tenet demonstrates, the man is a savvy bureaucratic actor. He wouldn’t have taken the risk of talking to the Post unless he knew the facts of the episode — and knew they would be damaging to the White House. There are two reasons why this makes me so upset. The first one is spelled out above — if true, operatives at the White House violated the law and threatened WMD intelligence assets just to stick it to someone. And those operatives should be strung up. The second reason is more insidious. As Roger Simon put it in a follow-up comment to his post:

But doesn’t it seem weird to you that someone would do something so patently illegal for so little gain? It’s such a self-destructive act it doesn’t make sense.

Roger is correct — it does seem weird. If it is nevertheless true, however — an important “if” — then a Pandora’s box gets opened by asking this question: if the White House was willing to commit an overtly illegal act in dealing with such a piddling matter, what lines have they crossed on not-so-piddling matters? In other words, if this turns out to be true, then suddenly do all of the crazy conspiracy theories acquire a thin veneer of surface plausibility? If that happens, both the administration and the country will be mired in scandal politics until November 2004. The administration would deserve it — the country would not.