Today’s Plame roundup

Developments in the Plame story today: 1) Josh Marshall reprints the relevant section of the daily White House press briefing covering this. Scott McClellan flatly denies that Karl Rove leaked the story to Novak, and that the president knows that Rove didn’t do it. This is how the Associated Press plays the story. If you read the transcript, however, there’s some confusion as to how McClellan knows this. He intimates a conversation with Rove, but doesn’t say he asked him directly:

QUESTION: But is the President getting his information from you? Or did the President and Karl Rove talk, and were there assurances given that Rove was not involved? McCLELLAN: I’ve already provided those assurances to you publicly. QUESTION: Yes, but I’m just wondering if there was a conversation between Karl Rove and the President, or if he just talked to you, and you’re here at this — McCLELLAN: He wasn’t involved. The President knows he wasn’t involved. QUESTION: How does he know that? McCLELLAN: The President knows.

2) Clifford May has a piece in NRO suggesting that Plame’s status at the CIA was common knowledge in DC:

It’s the top story in the Washington Post this morning as well as in many other media outlets. Who leaked the fact that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV worked for the CIA? What also might be worth asking: “Who didn’t know?”… On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. That wasn’t news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhanded manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.

This does raise the prospect that perhaps the leak to Novak — which at the time, was intended to impugn the CIA’s morivation to send Wilson to Niger in the first place — was unaware that s/he was “outing” Plame. This is, I believe, Tom Maguire’s theory of events. As Jacob Levy points out, May conveniently skirts the fact that this is still a crime. However, the level of malice involved would be reduced somewhat. [What about May’s allegation that Wilson wasn’t qualified to investigate the Niger claim and performed his task in a half-assed manner?–ed. Those are largely extraneous issues, but if you read Wilson’s interview with Marshall, it seems clear that he did a pretty thorough job of looking into the matter — he wasn’t just “drinking sweet mint tea.” Furthermore, even May acknowledged in July that, “Wilson’s conclusion was probably correct.”] 3) There is some evidence that Wilson might be overselling his side of the story. Howard Kurtz pointed something out today in his Media Notes column:

Wilson said yesterday that journalists for the three major broadcast networks told him they had been contacted by someone in the White House. He named only one, Andrea Mitchell, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, who interviewed Wilson and reported on July 22 that he said the administration was “leaking his wife’s covert job at the CIA to reporters.” Mitchell could not be reached for comment yesterday [UPDATE: according to Tom Maguire, Mitchell confirmed the story on Imus this morning — D.D. ANOTHER UPDATE: MSNBC has the following important clarification: “NBC News said Monday evening that reports that Mitchell was one of the reporters who was called were not completely accurate. Mitchell was contacted in connection with the story, it said, but only after Novak revealed the woman’s name in his column in July.” (emphasis added)] NBC’s Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert, and ABC’s bureau chief, Robin Sproul, said yesterday they could not discuss any matter involving confidential sources. But John Roberts, a CBS White House correspondent, said that to his knowledge, no administration official had contacted anyone at the network about Wilson. If anyone had called him, Roberts said, “I’d immediately have to wonder what the ulterior motive was. We’d probably end up doing a story about somebody breaching national security by leaking the name of a CIA operative.”

Meanwhile, Wilson appears to be backing away from his accusation that Rove was the source of the leak. From the Associated Press again:

Wilson had said in a late August speech in Seattle that he suspected Rove, but on Monday he backtracked somewhat from that assertion. “I did not mean at that time to imply that I thought that Karl Rove was the source or the authorizer, just that I thought that it came from the White House, and Karl Rove was the personification of the White House political operation,” Wilson said in a telephone interview. But then he added: “I have people, who I have confidence in, who have indicated to me that he (Rove), at a minimum, condoned it and certainly did nothing to put a stop to it for a week after it was out there. “Among the phone calls I received were those that said `White House sources are saying that it’s not about the 16 words, it’s about Wilson and his wife.’ And two people called me up and specifically mentioned Rove’s name,” he said.

4) Josh Marshall notes the subtle differences between the Monday Washington Post follow-up and the original Sunday WaPo story:

The descriptions of sources is now vaguer. Top White House officials have become White House officials. Senior administration officials are now administration officials. There are several possible explanations for the change.

It’s also worth noting that the New York Times, playing catch-up, also uses the vague “Bush administration officials” to describe the leakers. 5) Robert Novak just said the following on Crossfire (reprinted by Matt Drudge):

Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson’s report when he told [me] the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson’s involvement in the mission for her husband — he is a former Clinton administration official — they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives.

All of these facts suggest to me that it’s way too soon to assert with confidence that Karl Rove did anything untoward. Don’t get me wrong — someone did something wrong, otherwise the CIA would not have requested an investigation from Justice. Furthermore, the MSNBC story contains the following grafs:

CIA lawyers followed up the notification this month by answering 11 questions from the Justice Department, affirming that the woman’s identity was classified, that whoever released it was not authorized to do so and that the news media would not have been able to guess her identity without the leak, the senior officials said. The CIA response to the questions, which is itself classified, said there were grounds for a criminal investigation, the sources said.

The question is, who did it? Maybe it was a high-ranking White House official, maybe not. At this point, however, there’s no evidence that Rove had anything to do with this. There’s still a lot of smoke at this point — but I don’t see a fire just yet. Still developing….